Category: Economics – General

The unpleasant arithmetic of compound interest

John Quiggin134 Comments

For the last decade or so, most of the English speaking countries have been running large and generally increasing trade deficits, and therefore running up increasing foreign debt. At the same time, until recently, both real and nominal world interest rates have been falling, which has made debt more affordable. This has produced a sense of security which is about to be reality-checked.

Short-term interest rates have been rising for the last couple of years, and now long-term rates are rising as well. The US 10-year bond rate is now 5.1 per cent, and has been rising fairly fast in recent weeks. The effect is to add a rising interest bill to a large and growing trade deficit. Brad Setser does the math for the US and it isn’t pretty.

If the average rate [on private and government debt] should rise to 6% — roughly the interest rate the US paid back in 2000 — the 2008 US interest bill would reach $420b. That is more than three times the 2005 interest bill.

Unless the trade deficit starts turning around fairly sharply, this would imply a current account deficit close to 10 per cent of GDP, which no country has ever sustained (please point out exceptions in comments).

The story for Australia is broadly similar, though the picture is complicated by the effects of commodity prices, which still seem to be generally rising. As long as that continues, our trade deficit should decline. But, high commodity prices have rarely been sustained for more than a few years at a stretch.

A sensible privatisation

John Quiggin12 Comments

I was somewhat alarmed to read in today’s Australian that “THE Beattie Government will today put up for sale the state’s two monopoly power retailers – Ergon and Energex – in an attempt to get the best price for the assets before they have to compete with private-sector companies.” While Ergon and Energex are indeed power retailers, their much more important role is running the electricity distribution network, an area where there is no capacity for competition.

The Courier-Mail does a better job, saying that the retail arms will be sold off, though it also fails to say what will be done with distribution. The estimated price of $1 billion is reasonable (maybe a bit optimistic, but I haven’t looked in detail) for the retail businesses, but far below the value of the distribution network.

To the extent that the current electricity model, including retail competition makes sense at all, selling off the retail arms of public distribution monopolies is a good idea. Retail and distribution don’t fit together at all well in this model. In fact, it would make some sense for electricity generators (most of which are publicly owned in Queensland) to buy or establish their own retail outlets. This would enable an efficient matching of risk.

Triangular trade

John Quiggin34 Comments

The term “triangular trade” is commonly used in international economics in response to concerns about bilateral deficits*. The general idea is that, even though a bilateral relationship may involve large imbalances, global flows of goods and services must balance in the long run.

In some respects, the pattern of trade between Australia, China and the United States fits the triangular trade story neatly. Australia exports lots of raw materials to China, which in turn exports a wide range of manufactures to the US, which exports high-tech goods and services to Australia. Much the same story is true, with other Asian countries such as Japan in place of China.

In the ideal version of the story, Australia would run a surplus with China, China with the US, and the US with Australia, and these (along with other bilateral balances) would wash out to leave all three countries in balance. The point of the “triangular trade” idea is that it’s a mistake to worry about bilateral balances, when trade benefits everyone.

But the Australia-China_US triangle fails to match this story in two crucial respects. First, instead of trade balance, Australia and the US have large and growing deficits, while China has a large and growing aggregate surplus. Second, the trade triangle is entangled with a triangular strategic relationship, in which Australia has to deal with the great power rivalry between the US and China.

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Diewert on Quiggin, Castles and Henderson

John Quiggin24 Comments

A while back, I had an interesting debate with Ian Castles about the significance or otherwise of the choice between market and purchashing-power parity (PPP) exchange rates in the IPCC projections of global warming. You can read a number of contributions from Castles and David Henderson at the Lavoisier Institute website and their main article is published in Energy & Environment”, vol. 14, nos. 2 & 3: 159-85. They argue that the use of market exchange rates understates the income of poor countries and therefore overstates the growth in income and energy use that will occur as they catch up with rich ones.

My criticism is directed at the second part of this claim. I say that if the demand for energy is modelled using market exchange rates, the choice of income aggregate doesn’t matter much. If the income estimate is biased downwards, so will be the estimate of the rate at which energy use grows with income. I make this point in my submission to the Stern Review in the UK.

These debates are inevitably complicated, but someone with the right skills can make them a lot clearer. I can think of no one better than Erwin Diewert, who has been the leading researcher* in the theory of index numbers for the last thirty years (and a big name in other fields). So I asked Erwin for comments and was both surprised and pleased to receive not just comments but a whole paper, not quite by return mail, but after only a few days.

I think it’s fair to summarise by saying that Diewert agrees with my main point, but also agrees with Castles and Henderson that the IPCC should change its modelling approach.

I agree with everything in the comment, but there a couple of points of emphasis I would place differently, as noted in my response . In particular, I stress the importance of consistency. Using PPP numbers for income, then plugging in income elasticities derived from studies using market exchange rates, is a recipe for disaster.

* I should also mention Sidney Afriat who is famous for being both brilliant and esoteric. Afriat has made fundamental contributions to the field.

Bell Labs going to France ?

John Quiggin8 Comments

This NYT story reports that Alcatel is negotiating to buy Lucent, the communications equipment maker spun off by AT&T a few years back. It’s not mentioned until the end of the article, and then only in passing, that the deal includes “the research and development unit Bell Laboratories, an intellectual powerhouse”.

That’s putting it mildly, at least in historical terms. Eleven researchers have shared six Nobel Prizes for work done while they were at Bell Labs, among many other awards. As well as the transistor, the photovoltaic cell , the LED, CCD and much more, Bell Labs created both Unix and C. It even had its own economics journal (the Bell Journal, which later became the Rand Journal). It was truly a unique institution.

Of course, all this was cut back drastically with deregulation and the breakup of the old AT&T monopoly, and even more so after the Lucent spinoff. Still, the passing of Bell Labs out of US ownership is worth recording. It remains to be seen whether Alcatel will follow the logic of the market and kill Bell Labs altogether, or make a quixotic attempt at reviving some of the glories of the past.

The interest rate bears …

John Quiggin45 Comments

… of whom I am one, are starting to growl again.

The cenral tenet of interest rate bearishness is that if interest rates are low enough to generate negative savings, as is the case in the US and Australia, they are too low to be sustained. The counterargument, put most forcefully by Ben Bernanke is that someone must be willing to lend at these low interest rates, and this lending must reflect a “global savings glut”. Bears respond that the supposed glut does not reflect savings by households or business, but is really a liquidity glut created by expansionary monetary policy around the world, which must eventually come to an end, or be dissipated in inflation.
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Something you’re not likely to see too often

John Quiggin36 Comments

A favorable citation of my arguments at Tech Central Station. Normally, I’d be pretty concerned about this, but it’s from Tim Worstall, the sole exception, AFAIK, to the otherwise uniform hackishness of that site[1].

Tim quotes my discussion of the Baumol effect to argue that the fact that the US spends so much more on health care than other countries is not necessarily a bad thing. At the aggregate level he’s right. We should expect the share of income spent on services like health and education to rise as income increases, driven by productivity growth in the goods-producing sector. In the case of medicine, the regular discovery of new and costly treatments adds to the problem (there’s an argument that this technological innovation is an endogenous result of the way health care is financed but I’ll leave that for another day).

Worstall is also right to imply that systems of public provision have, at least in some cases, led to pressure to hold expenditure below the socially optimal level. This was most obviously true of the National Health Service in Britain, though expenditure and service provision have increased greatly since the election of the Blair government, and are set to rise further. The same pressures are evident here in Australia.

That said, when you look at the US system in detail, it’s clearly not a matter of paying more to get more. While the health care available to the top 20 per cent of Americans (those with unrestricted Blue Cross style insurance) is probably the best in the world, the average American (insured by an HMO or a fee-for-service insurer with restrictions) doesn’t get any better care than in other developed countries and the uninsured are much worse off.

The real problems are the financing system (Worstall gets off a neat crack at the expense of JK Galbraith here, but the real problems go back to the 1930s, as discussed by Robert Moss in When All Else Fails) and the very high salaries of US doctors compared to those in other countries, reflecting both higher inequality in the US and the huge cost of becoming a doctor through the US higher education system.

One result is that, despite relying primarily on private, employer-provided insurance, the US government actually spends more, relative to GDP, on health than most others.

Finally, there’s the balance between medical care and public health, broadly defined. It’s well known that the US has a lower life expectancy than other countries that spend much less on medical care. This isn’t however, primarily due to inadequate access to lifesaving treatments (the poor miss out on lots of routine health and dental care, but they can usually get emergency treatment). Rather, it’s the result of unhealthy living conditions broadly defined to include guns, car crashes, the consequences of obesity and so on. These things aren’t easily fixed, but there’s more resistance to doing anything about them in the US than in most other places.

fn1. Why he keeps writing for them, I don’t know. Tim would do much better as the opposition writer in residence at a left or liberal site, a slot that is very hard to fill in my experience. He makes good points, is willing to admit that he’s wrong on occasion, and is gracious when he catches someone else in error, as he has done with me. Still, that’s his business.

Most “economists” aren’t

John Quiggin39 Comments

I’ve always thought that an economist is someone who understands opportunity cost. If there is one thing a first-year undergraduate economics course should teach, it’s an understanding of this concept. So it’s alarming to discover that most members of a sample drawn from participants in the profession’s most important conference are not, at least by my definition, economists.

Via Harry Clarke, I found this paper by Ferraro and Taylor (guest registration or subscription required). Ferraro and Taylor presented their volunteer subjects with this question.

Please circle the best answer to the following question:

‘You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton?

(a) $0
(b) $10
(c) $40
(d) $50.

Take some time to think before looking over the fold
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