Category: Economic policy

PPPs take a long time to die

John Quiggin27 Comments

In the immediate aftermath of the GFC, I argued that the Public Private Partnerships model then in vogue was broken beyond repair, and that, even after the crisis we would be unlikely to see many more, though we might see deals wrapped up to look like PPPs, but with the public bearing most of the risk.

The recent failure of BrisConnections, the owners of the Airport Link Tunnel in Brisbane was no surprise. The AirportLink deal was one of the last pre-crisis PPPs, when investors were still optimistic enough to buy shares based on absurdly overstated traffic flows. In fact, they bought “partly paid” shares, a startling piece of financial engineering under which shares, trading at virtually zero, carried with them the obligation to come up with a payment of $2/share later on.

Because of the eagerness of private investors, the Queensland government bore little risk in the project. Former Treasurer Andrew Fraser’s description of the project as “a zinger of a deal for the public” displayed his customary tact, but was accurate enough considering the deal in isolation. The problem is that, after this and similar failures, it is highly unlikely that the pre-2008 PPP model can be revived in Australia.

For roads at least, there’s a simple alternative – road pricing based on congestion. I and other economists have been banging this drum for years, but politicians are terrified of even mentioning the idea. At one level, I can understand this – it’s tricky and likely to be controversial – but Queensland governments of both parties have adopted politically suicidal policies, largely motivated by the perception that they will free funds for capital investment.

First, Anna Bligh, along with Andrew Fraser reduced Labor to a seven-member rump with her pursuit of economically disastrous asset sales, exactly the opposite of what she had promised. Now, Campbell Newman has dissipated a huge volume of goodwill with savage cuts to public services, again a wholesale breach of promise, and is now pursuing privatisation. Compared to these electorally suicidal policies, road pricing ought to be a doddle.

Trifecta

John Quiggin101 Comments

If there were still magazine stands, I’d be all over them today. Three pieces of mine have (coincidentally) come out on in the last day or so, in fairly disparate publications

* In Aeon (a new British “digital magazine of ideas and culture, publishing an original essay every weekday”), I have a followup to my first essay there, which argued the case for a Keynesian utopia, with a drastic reduction in market working hours. In my follow-up, I look at the environmental sustainability of the idea. The tagline for the essay “For the first time in history we could end poverty while protecting the global environment. But do we have the will? ”

* Continuing on the utopian theme, Jacobin magazine has published The Light on the Hill, a reply to Seth Ackerman’s piece on market socialism

* And, at The National Interest, a piece with the self-explanatory title, Will Banks Finally Be Brought to Heel?

While I’m plugging my own work, I thought some readers might be interested in this paper on financial liberalisation and asset bubbles, written in the leadup to the global financial crisis. There’s not much I would change now, and it’s still a pretty good summary of how I think about the financial bubble that created the crisis. The linked working paper version is from 2004, and it eventually appeared in the Journal of Economic Issues, the main journal of the institutionalists who carry on the tradition started by Veblen and Commons in early C20. Not surprisingly, given this obscure outlet, it hasn’t had a lot of attention.

Krugman on 2013 vs 1958 macro

John Quiggin44 Comments

At the recent American Economic Association meeting in San Diego, Brad DeLong chaired a panel on ” Stimulus or Stymied?: The Macroeconomics of Recessions“, and has posted a transcript. Paul Krugman was there and picked up my claim that macroeconomics has, on balance, gone backwards since 1958. I’ve extracted his section here. Lots of useful stuff, but I’d stress this:

the whole basis on which we constructed monetary policy during the Great Moderation, which is that stabilizing inflation and stabilizing output are the same thing, is all wrong: you can have a sustained period of low but not negative inflation consistent with an economy operating far below its potential productive capacity. That is what I believe is happening now. If so, we are failing dismally in responding to this economic crisis. This is in contrast to what some central bankers are saying—that we have done well because inflation has stayed relatively stable.

To push this a bit further, I’d argue that there will be no real recovery as long as central banks continue to treat the inflation-targeting polices of the (spurious) Great Moderation as the pre-crisis normal to which we should strive to return

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How effective is fiscal policy: Guest post from Roger Farmer (crosspost at CT)

John Quiggin14 Comments

Roger Farmer, professor of economics at UCLA, has sent a response to my post on the fiscal multiplier, which is over the fold. I’ll make some substantive points in comments, but I’d like to start by saying that this is a good example of a discussion to which blogs are ideally suited. Contributions from people like Roger who have something important to say, but not the time or inclination for a regular blog, make it even better.

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The state of macroeconomics: it all went wrong in 1958

John Quiggin35 Comments

Much of the recent discussion in the “state of macroeconomics” has concerned the question

* Is macroeconomics making progress?
* If not, when did it stop?

I’m not going to survey the whole debate, but I will point to a good contribution from Robert Gordon (linked by JW Mason in comments to a previous post). Gordon argues that 1978-era New Keynesian macro is better than the DSGE approach dominant today. That implies 30 years of retrogression.

My own view is even more pessimistic. On balance, I think macroeconomics has gone backwards since the discovery of the Phillips curve in 1958 [1][2]. The subsequent 50+ years has been a history of mistakes, overcorrection and partial countercorrections. To be sure, quite a lot has been learned, but as far as policy is concerned, even more has been forgotten. The result is that lots of economists are now making claims that would have been considered absurd, even by pre-Keynesian economists like Irving Fisher.

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The big issues in macroeconomics: the fiscal multiplier

John Quiggin39 Comments

The biggest theoretical issue in macroeconomics is “what causes unemployment”. As discussed in the last post, the classical answer, that unemployment is caused by problems in labor markets, is obviously wrong as an explanation of the simultaneous emergence of sustained high unemployment in many different countries. Unemployment is a macroeconomic problem.

The central macroeconomic policy issue, then, is “what, if anything, can macroeconomic policy do to move the economy back to full employment”. If you accept that, under current conditions of zero interest rates, there’s not much positive that can be done with monetary policy[1], and you stay within the bounds of mainstream policy debate, this question can be restated as “how effective is expansionary fiscal policy” or, in Keynesian terms, “how large is the fiscal multiplier in a depression”.

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The big issues in macroeconomics: unemployment

John Quiggin30 Comments

Following up my previous post, I want to look at the main areas of disagreement in macroeconomics. As well as trying to cover the issues, I’ll be making the point that the (mainstream) economics profession is so radically divided on these issues that any idea of a consensus, or even of disagreement within a broadly accepted analytical framework, is nonsense. The fact that, despite these radical disagreements, many specialists in macroeconomics don’t see a problem is, itself, part of the problem.

I’ll start with the central issue of macroeconomics, unemployment. It’s the central issue because macroeconomics begins with Keynes’ claim that a market economy can stay for substantial periods, in a situation of high unemployment and excess supply in all markets. If this claim is false, as argued by both classical and New Classical economists, then there is no need for a separate field of macroeconomics – everything can and should be derived from (standard neoclassical) microeconomics.

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A belated victory for good sense

John Quiggin33 Comments

Wayne Swan has finally announced the abandonment of the promise to achieve a budget surplus this financial year. Some observations

* Everyone with any understanding of economics knows this was the right thing to do. The idea of trying to maintain a balanced annual budget regardless of economic conditions is recognised as nonsense even by anti-Keynesians. In the absence of active fiscal policy, the standard recommendation is to maintain settings consistent with medium-term balance.

* Both parties have made an awful hash of this in political terms. Labor was silly to make the promise of a return to surplus on a specific date, and sillier to reaffirm it in ever stronger terms until very recently. Abbott and Hockey made a mess of their response. They could have used Swan’s announcement to dump their own surplus fetishism saying something like “since the government refuses to reveal the true fiscal position, we can’t promise to fix it in one year”

* With any luck, some of the appalling fiddles of the last few months, most notably the recent reallocation of aid funding to domestic funding on refugees can be reversed

* We still need a long term discussion about revenue and expenditure in the light of the global failure of market liberalism. I plan to address this in another post

Update Hockey has indeed backed off the surplus, showing more good sense than Abbott. I’m nearly alone in this view, but I think he is under-rated. Not a towering intellect, but still among the stronger performers on the LNP front bench.

A surplus of stupidity

John Quiggin62 Comments

When commentators as disparate as me, Warwick McKibbin, Bernie Fraser, ACOSS the Australian Industry Group and the Business Council of Australia are all in agreement, it might be time for the government, and the opposition to start paying attention. At this point, I doubt that there is a single credible economist who thinks that the government’s promise to return the budget to surplus this financial year is a good idea. Yet the Treasurer remains absolutely committed, and the Opposition is ready to denounce him if we miss the target by even a single dollar.

To restate the case, it’s clear that growth is slowing, and, as usual in these circumstances, monetary policy is becoming less effective. In cases like this, fiscal policy ought to be moderately stimulatory, or at least left neutral, so that the automatic stabilizers (declining revenue and increasing welfare payments) are left to cushion the impact of a slowdown. Instead, thanks to this absurd pledge, the government is committed to matching every reduction in economic activity (and therefore in the budget balance) with its own cuts or tax surcharges.

Obviously, the reasoning here is political not economic. The government suffered badly from the gratuitous “no carbon tax” promise[1] made before the 2010 election. To dump the equally gratuitous “early return to surplus” promise would involve a whole world of pain. And of course Tony Abbott cares nothing at all about good policy, unless it’s defined as policy that will make him PM. So, we have the politicians united on one side of the debate, and everyone who has any idea of economic reality on the other.

fn1. Feel free to parse this in comments, but the fact remains that the Rudd government was elected with a strong commitment to carbon pricing, which Labor then dumped in a loss of nerve before the 2010 and was forced back to (something like) its original position by the election outcome. In this context, the question of whether a specific promise was made and broken is of secondary intersest.