That’s the title of my latest piece in Foreign Policy, about the seemingly inevitable collapse of the eurozone
Category: Economic policy
Is working harder and longer really worth it?
That’s the title of my latest post at The Drum (over the fold). It’s the latest round in my long dispute with the Productivity Commission on this issue, which flared up most recently here.
This is not an issue on which I’ve been impressed with the performance of either the PC or other economists who’ve weighed in to this debate (mostly associated with the business sector). As I point out below, my analysis is mainstream textbook orthodoxy, and led me to predict the productivity “slowdown” at a time when the PC and the others were proclaiming a miracle. But my arguments get even less attention now than they did fifteen years ago, when the PC was at least willing to reply.
High-cost basin plan water is bad for all
That’s the title of my latest piece, at ABC Environment. It’s over the fold
Greece’s Uncertain Fate
That’s the title of my latest piece in The National Interest.Teaser follows
Although much remains uncertain about future developments in Greece and beyond, one thing can be predicted with certainty: no Greek government will voluntarily abandon the euro. The only parties favoring such a move are the (old-style Stalinist) Communist Party of Greece and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, neither of which has any chance of being part of a government. It is almost equally certain that no Greek government will take any further steps to implement the austerity measures previously agreed with the “Troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund.
New elections to be held on June 17 are most likely to produce substantial gains for the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) at the expense of both the traditional governing party of the Left, PASOK, and the rejectionists of the Communist Party. Syriza advocates rejection of the current austerity package but is equally opposed to withdrawal from the euro. Given large enough gains, Syriza could potentially put together a government with support, or at least tolerance, from PASOK and the conservative but anti-austerity Independent Greek Party.
But the election outcome may be indecisive, perhaps leading to a government of national unity. Such a government would have little power to do anything decisive one way or the other.
The least likely outcome is a swing back to the traditional parties, with PASOK and its conservative counterpart the New Democracy Party gaining enough seats to form a coalition government. Even such a coalition would be unlikely to have the political will to enforce further austerity measures. On the other hand, it would certainly not abandon the euro.
Productivity and the Productivity Commission (updated)
For well over a decade, I’ve been debating the claim made by the Productivity Commission that Australia experienced a productivity surge in the 1990s. My claim has been that the apparent high rate of productivity growth in the mid-1990s was the result of measurement error, most importantly the failure to take account of the increase in the pace and intensity of work that was apparent to everyone (except PC economists) at that time. This view led me to conclude that the supposed productivity gains would dissipate as more normal labor market conditions returned, which was exactly what happened.
In most of these debates, one of my chief antagonists was Dean Parham, who worked for the PC at the time, and is now a Guest Researcher there. Today I heard that Parham had written a new paper on the weak productivity growth of the 2000s. So, I was keen to see what response he would have to my latest work and to my arguments about work intensity. The answer, quite literally is “Nothing”. I have, it appears become an un-person at the PC. Parham doesn’t cite any of my work and, more importantly, fails to mention work intensity at all.
Update The original version of the post contained a somewhat snarky suggestion that Parham had been negligent in ignoring my work. He has written to me to say that this is incorrect. The reason he doesn’t mention it is because, in his view, nothing I have written on this topic, at least since 2004, merits a response.
Further update Dean Parham writes that
the reason I did not mention your work or the work intensity thesis in my paper is that I did not consider it central to the focus of the paper (industry contributions) or even to the contextual motivation of the paper.
Since the contextual motivation of the paper is (as the title suggests) the slump in productivity, I can’t see that this differs from my summary. If Parham thinks my work merits a response, he’s welcome to provide that response here or in any other venue that suits him.
I’ve got some urgent commitments over the next few days, so I won’t be able to return to this topic until later. But in the meantime, here are some of the things I’ve written about this in the last few years. Agree or disagree, I think I’ve put forward a serious case that deserves an answer.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Australian-Bulletin-Labour/147466277.html
https://johnquiggin.com/2011/08/20/no-hard-and-fast-rule-for-/
https://johnquiggin.com/2012/03/13/enough-of-these-zombie-ideas-lets-be-bold/
http://apo.org.au/commentary/surge-we-didnt-have
European Elections and the Debt Debacle
That;s the title of my latest piece in The National Interest. Here’s the three-para teaser
European Elections and the Debt Debacle
The victory of socialist François Hollande in the French presidential election has been interpreted, correctly, as a repudiation of the austerity policies imposed on the euro zone by his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, in collaboration with German chancellor Angela Merkel, who endorsed Sarkozy in the election.
Hollande’s win was part of a backlash across Europe, with pro-austerity parties from Britain to Greece taking electoral drubbings. Even in Germany, Merkel’s coalition parties were crushed in a state election in Schleswig-Holstein.
It’s safe to predict that Hollande and Merkel will soon come into conflict over austerity. But Hollande’s real opponents in the struggle over European economic policy are not Merkel and the German government but the European Central Bank and its chairman Mario Draghi.
Overblown rhetoric on education (crosspost from Crikey)
On the whole, this Budget is free of smoke and mirrors trick. Most of the savings that have been announced are real cuts in the deficit rather than accounting gimmicks. There is, however, one big exception. It’s hard to square ‘Labor values’ with a budget that does virtually nothing for education. Rather than face the reality, the government has resorted to some disgraceful spin.
Is Australia prepared for a crisis?
I spent yesterday in the Budget lockup for Crikey. There’s little real need for a lockup these days. The original justification was to stop people taking advantage of inside information on things like higher tax on cigarettes, but these taxes are now indexed, and changes are mostly either backdated or applied from well after Budget night. Then, for a while, the Budget was the central statement of economic policy. But nowadays, policies are put out all through the year, and most of the Budget measures are leaked in advance. Still, it’s a traditional piece of theatre and no-one seems to mind.
The first piece I wrote, over the fold, was about the implications of the European crisis
The case for narrow banking
Here’s my first post under the new approach to blogging I’m trying. It’s the intro to an article I just published in The National Interest. They ran it under the headline “The Next Global Collapse” which is a bit more dramatic than the article itself. The deal with TNI is that I can published the first three paras here, to tease your interest. Thinking about how best to work this, it struck me that it would be really great if readers here would follow the link, comment on the article at TNI, then repost their comments here. Perhaps this might just be duplication, but it might also lead to quite different conversations. So, please give it a try
Four years after the near-meltdown of the global financial system, the world is no closer to an adequate system of financial regulation than it was in 2008. Attempts to regulate the market for derivatives have been stymied by a mixture of determined resistance from the industry and the technical difficulties of defining and regulating such complex and opaque financial instruments. The “shadow-banking” system, associated with investment banks, hedge funds and other speculative financial institutions, is as large and dangerous as ever.
Right now, the only thing preventing a new bubble and bust is the memory of the last one. And with the return of massive profits and bonuses to Wall Street, that memory is fading fast. Already, observers are noticing a renewed appetite for risk, fueled in part by the low returns available on relatively safe investments such as U.S. Treasuries.
As in most unwinnable wars, the time has come when the best option is, in the immortal words of Republican senator George Aiken (speaking of Vietnam) to declare victory and get out. But what does getting out mean, as far as the shadow-banking system is concerned?
Swan and plunging revenue
Treasurer Wayne Swan has switched from a “hard Keynesian” to a structural justification of expenditure cuts. Rather than advocating a rapid return to surplus as consistent with macroeconomic balance and full employment, Swan now says cuts are needed because of structural factors like declining capital gains tax revenue, notably omitted the Howard income tax cuts adopted and implemented almost completely by Labor. claiming, as quoted by the Age and other sources.
Tax revenue, which plunged from the 24.2 per cent of GDP once enjoyed by the Howard government to 20 per cent, is set to recover only slowly to around 22.8 per cent by 2016.
Looking that the 2011-12 Budget papers show nothing of the kind. They are for receipts, not revenue, but they show a decline from 24.9 per cent in 2007-08, the last Howard Budget to a low of 21.9 in 2010-11 (I checked and the final figure was 21.7). The 2012-13 MYEFO has (General Government) receipts recovering to 23.9 per cent of GDP by 2012-13 on current policy. Revenue is higher at 24.5 per cent.
Before I talk about the merits and otherwise of Swan’s strategy, I’d like to get the numbers right. Does anyone have any info?
Update An inquiry to the Treasury produced an amazingly rapid response, pointing me to page 363 of the MYEFO, which is the source of the data. I think it’s fair to say that Swan is engaged in cherry-picking the past and relying on rubbery numbers for the future. The numbers represent tax revenue rather than total receipts. The number for the Howard government is not that of its last budget, but is for 2005-06. That was before some big tax cuts, and also before the establishment of the Future Fund, the earnings from which are not counted as revenue, although the debt interest that could have been saved is an expense. The rubbery projections involve claims that the revenue/GDP ratio will remain almost static from 2012-13 onwards, when bracket creep would typically be expected to produce growth, in the absence of policy change.
I’d suggest a more accurate summary of the data is that, on current policy, receipts are projected to be 23.9 per cent of GDP in 2012-13, down from 25.1 per cent in the last year of the Howard government (Labor has, unwisely, pledged to hold itself below this level). The gap is entirely explicable in terms the unaffordable income tax cuts promised by Howard in 2007 and implemented (with modest changes) by Labor.
It would be easy enough to fill this gap by taking a harder line on tax expenditures and tax avoidance, without cutting the services which, according to Gillard and Swan, we are supposed to trust Labor to deliver.
John Quiggin 