Michael Stutchbury in the Oz offers a case for the Bligh government’s asset sales, and that of QR in particular. Mostly, he wants to argue that the sales will put an end to the oppression of the bosses by the workers[1], or as he puts it, would allow business to “clean up its anti-management culture”. But he also tries a half-hearted defence of the official case for privatisation, that selling assets will finance non-commercial investments.
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Category: Economic policy
Niches or clones
Chris Bertram’s CT post on the Browne reforms[1] in UK Higher Education has prompted me to write a post I’d half-planned a while ago, after seeing this familiar (to Australian eyes) claim.
Too many universities simply state a desire to “achieve excellence in teaching and research” and appear unable to carve out a market niche, Professor Beer said.
The idea that a pseudo-market system (centralised control but with sharper price incentives) will generate diversity is one of many illusions that were exposed during the Australian reform era of the 1990s. Faced with pressure to find a market niche and select a “flagship” program, 37 Australian universities (out of 37) decided that business education and a multitude of specifically labelled vocational degrees were the right niche and that an MBA would be a good flagship. This is scarcely surprising: given the incentives, business degrees were the obvious profit centre. It’s only as the reform program has faded from memory that we are seeing serious attempts at diversity like the “Melbourne model”
However, similar choices didn’t produce a homogenous outcome. Rather, the historical hierarchy (century-old sandstones at the top, former teachers colleges at the bottom) which had been somewhat muted when funding flowed a little more freely, re-emerged stronger than ever. At the top, there was enough surplus to maintain, more or less, the full range of disciplines as well as the long-established professional schools (law, pharmacy and so on). The further down the scale you went the less of the arts, humanities and sciences survived. This apparently came as a surprise to the Australian equivalents of Professor Beer.
Even more bizarre was the shock expressed by some market advocates when they discovered that, with a customer base consisting of 18-year olds (who understood their own preferences), and parents (who mostly knew very little about units), the market produced very little demand for anything that was hard and didn’t purport to offer training for a well-paid job. Some of them seriously appeared to think that the market would kill off critical theory in favor of good old-fashioned classical education. In fact, provided the pill was sugar-coated with film studies and pop culture, critical theory didn’t do too badly, at least relative to old-style humanities. I myself am affiliated with the QUT Centre for Creative Industries, which derives much more from crit theory than from lit crit.
Australia has a long history of importing policies that have already failed in the UK. It’s a source of mild schadenfreude to see the trade going in the opposite direction for once.
fn1. As always, I use “reform” to mean “change in structure” with no implication of approval or disapproval. Given the history of C20, most reforms consist, in large measure, of undoing some previous reform.
The other shoe
The bailout of the US financial sector through the Troubled Assets Recovery Program (TARP) looks to have been fairly successful on its own terms – the banks have become profitable again and the final estimated loss to the government is relatively small. That doesn’t change the fact that the government took on huge risks for negative returns, without any reason to expect that the future behavior of the banks will change.
But all of that was based on assumptions of an orderly resolution of the mortgage crisis. Those assumptions now look very dubious, as the legal consequences of the practices of the financial sector during the bubble, ranging from sloppiness to outright fraud, manifest themselves.
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Water is heavy
I just did an interview with ABC Radio Lismore about the latest proposal to divert water from the Clarence River to the Murray Darling Basin. Apart from the environmental effects (disastrous according to the studies I’ve seen) proponents of ideas like this seem to be unaware of a crucial fact. Water is heavy. A megalitre of water (worth maybe $200 as bulk supply to irrigators) weighs 1000 tonnes. Pumping that much mass over even a low mountain range is prohibitively expensive. You can overcome that with tunnels if the gradients are steep enough, but the Great Dividing Range is pretty broad in Northern NSW.
And, don’t get me started on the really crazy projects like Colin’s Canal.
Open letter on stimulus
Over Fifty Australian Economists Agree Fiscal Stimulus Prevented A Major Recession
Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz has stated publicly that the Australian Fiscal Stimulus was a well designed package that saved the Australian economy from a major recession that has hit almost all the other OECD economies. He argued that the Australian package was a model for other economies facing similar problems.
The attached letter was signed by over fifty academic economists. Several other academics and economists supported this view about the Fiscal Stimulus Package that prevented the Australian economy from a deep recession and prevented a massive increase in unemployment.
The Australian economy has come out of the Global Financial Crisis in surprisingly good shape thanks to this Stimulus Package.
The Australian unemployment rate is amongst the lowest of any of the OECD economies.
Unlike the US and Europe, we are not facing the possibility of a double dip recession.
The current level of government debt (the lowest in the OECD economies) is due to tax revenues falling during a slow-down in the economy, whilst social security payments increase. Most of the increase in the debt would have happened independently of the increased government expenditures associated with the Stimulus Package.
The Stimulus Package has led to an increase in infrastructure investment that would help the long-term development of the Australian Economy.
Votes for clunkers
Julia Gillard has announced an Australian version of the cash for clunkers program of the Obama Administration. Reader Ben Elliston writes
read an article some months ago by Jeffrey Sachs evaluating a
similar policy from the Obama administration:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-clunker-of-a-climate-policyIt turns out that the Gillard proposal is even worse than Obama’s.
Sachs calculated the greenhouse gas abatement value of Obama’s scheme
at US$140 per metric tonne. Gillard’s policy will reduce emissions by
1 million tonnes at a cost of $394 million dollars ($394/tonne).
My only observation is that Ben’s estimate is taken directly from the government’s press release, which is almost certainly overoptimistic. For comparison, at about $25/tonne, brown-coal electricity generation becomes uneconomic compared to gas and black coal. At $100/tonne, just about all the alternatives (including wind, nuclear, CCS, and solar) look pretty good. Cash for clunkers is, as Sachs concludes, a clunker of a policy.
And just in case anyone has forgotten, Abbott’s anti-policies are even more focused on this kind of nonsense/
Should we retire later?
I’m working on a longish piece on how to pay for the global financial crisis, and it seems like a good idea to deal with some side issues separately. One of the standard post-crisis responses of governments, i has been to increase the age at which people become eligible for public old age pensions. This change is likely to flow through to other policies, for example by shaping the presumptions around the tax treatment of private retirement income.
I want to step away from these financial positions and ask the question: does it make sense, in general, for people to retire at older ages than in the past? For those who want the “shorter” version, my answer, on balance, is “Yes, at least in Australia”.
Resource rent tax statement
I’ve been busy for the last few days, working on a statement by a group of economists in support of the principle of a resource rent tax to replace existing royalties. The statement calls for informed debate about the proposal and takes no position on particular design issues, such as the choice between the existing system used for the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (40 per cent on returns above about 11 per cent) and the government’s proposed Resource Super Profits Tax (40 per cent on returns above the bond rate, with a corresponding offset for returns below the bond rate).
My own view is that the RSPT design would be more efficient, but the losers under this design (those who can confidently expect high profits) have been very vocal, while the potential gainers (smaller miners undertaking riskier projects) have not given the government any support. Add to that the fact that the PRRT design is long-established (making scare campaigns a little bit harder) and simpler and there is a strong political case for a compromise along these lines. The most important thing is that the government cannot and should not back down on the basic principle of a resource rent tax.
Here’s the Press Release and Letter.
Australia Talks
I’ve been flat out with final revisions to my book manuscript and various other things. So I didn’t get time to say I would be on Australia Talks this evening talking about the resource rent tax. It went fairly well, I thought. You can judge for yourselves when the podcast becomes available
Not quite sure when I will surface from my current deluge of work. Light posting until then.
After the Budget
* Budget lockup low point: Only instant coffee, had to get my caffeine hit from Diet Coke. High point: Asked for autograph by Treasury officials. Also, a fun dinner with Robert Gottliebsen, Alan Kohler, Natasha Stott-Despoja, the Crikey crew and others. Not quite as lively as some accounts suggested, but a good time was had by all.
* One thing I missed: Got through some of the confusion on the aid budget but wasn’t able to work out if the money for Copenhagen commitments was additional new money (as promised) or old money taken from elsewhere in the aid budget. Unsurprisingly, it was old money
* A bigger thing I missed: What Possum’s Pollytics correctly calls the most important chart in the budget, a graph showing a regression of the size of economic stimulus against economic growth relative to IMF forecasts. The relationship is highly significant, and the coefficient is approximately 1. That is, each dollar of stimulus resulted in (roughly) a dollar of extra output. No doubt this will be subject to reanalysis, but it’s a striking result.
* Tony Abbott’s reply: predictably weak. Freezing public service recruitment is silly symbolism, not a serious way of cutting spending.
John Quiggin 