The record US trade deficit of $66 billion naturally raises the question “How long can this go on?”, and not in a rhetorical sense. To be more precise, the question is “How long before the US trade deficit starts declining” and my best estimate is “No more than two years”.

The reasoning is simple. Given two more years of growth in the deficit, the annual current account deficit will be around 1 trillion dollars (about 8 per cent of GDP) and accumulated net debt will be pushing 40 per cent of GDP[1]. At this point, the effects of compound interest start to bite, as interest on the accumulated debt adds to the income deficit. If trade deficits continue to grow, or even remain stable, the current account deficit explodes. This can’t continue.

If a trend can’t continue, it won’t. Therefore the US trade deficit must begin to decline, and soon. Flow-on effects to Australia are likely.

To be continued …
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My piece in today’s Fin is about the productivity blip – I posted an extract a couple of days ago, and now you can read the whole thing, over the fold.
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Among the many long-running policy debates in which I’ve been involved, the most drawn-out (except maybe for the one about private infrastructure and PPPs) has concerned micro-economic reform and productivity growth. For the last decade or so, the Productivity Commission and others have been claiming that reform has generated a surge in productivity growth, notably multifactor productivity growth (the term ‘multifactor’ refers to the fact that capital as well as labour inputs are taken into account) estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

One reason the debate is so drawn out is that the ABS presents estimates for ‘productivity cycles’, which are supposed to smooth out year-to-year fluctuations. Until very recently (in fact, until two days ago), the most recent cycle for which estimates were available ended in 1998-99, and this showed strong MFP growth. Arguments that this was a cyclical recovery or the result of increased work intensity were waved away.
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It looks as if the IR legislation will be passed through the Parliament while we are all changing the channel to get away from the barrage of ads supporting it, so I suppose I’d better comment now, before taking the time to wade through the 600 pages of simplification the government is giving us. I’m mainly concerned with the likely impact on inequality

Taking the central elements of the legislation separately, it’s possible to make a case in regard to any one of them that the effect on inequality will be modest, or even favourable. It can be pointed out, for example, that many minimum wage earners are in high-income households, so a lower minimum wage won’t be so bad. And making it easier to sack people ought to promote more hiring as well as more firing, which should be good for those who are now unemployed.

These arguments are plausible, but not clear-cut. On the other hand, when we look at the macro evidence, we get very clear evidence pointing the other way. Wherever reforms like this have been introduced, notably the UK and NZ, inequality has increased drastically on almost all dimensions (capital vs labour, variance in wages, wage premiums of all kind, unequal allocation of work). In the US, where these institutions have been entrenched for a long time, inequality is higher than in any other developed country and getting rapidly worse.

It may not be clear which piece of the reform package is doing the work, but the aggregate outcome can be predicted with safety.

One of the big issues in the debate over the euro is whether Europe is an optimal currency area, that is, whether prices in Europe move sufficiently closely together to make a common monetary policy a reasonable idea. Looking at the issue when the move to the euro was agreed most observers would have said that Europe wasn’t an optimal currency area. A plausible counterargument is that monetary union will produce the kind of economic integration required. A quick scan of the web didn’t turn up much[1], so I thought I’d do a quick and rough check of my own, so I World Economic Outlook Database, which gives, among lots of other useful things, estimates of purchasing-power-parity adjusted exchange rates for all the countries in the data set. Since the calculations are based on the EU-centric international comparisons project, comparisons of relative price levels between EU countries should be pretty good.

So I looked at the log variance of the $US PPP exchange rate for the euro-12 countries from 1995 to 2005 and here’s what I got

The log variance is a measure of the extent to which real price levels differ and, as the chart shows it has declined smoothly since the beginnings of the move to the euro.

Another interesting feature of the data is the average PPP exchange rate is around $US1.16 to the euro, very close to the rate that actually prevails.

fn1. I found one study by Robert Hill of UNSW, but it only went up to 2000 and covered the whole EU not just the eurozone. Hill found some convergence in price levels, but not as strong as this, but a surprising divergence in relative prices. It would be interesting to check on this.

Ben Bernanke has been appointed to replace Alan Greenspan, who’s been Chairman of the US Federal Reserve for just about as long as I can remember (the Volcker squeeze was in the early 80s, so he hasn’t been there forever, but it often seems that way).

Bernanke was the obvious candidate, but there was always the possibility that Bush would decide to mend fences with the base by appointing some obscure[1] supply-sider a la Harriet Miers.

Bernanke’s appointment suggests a general bias towards an expansionary monetary policy for the US, and therefore continued low short-term interest rates for Australia. He was prominent in saying that the Fed would not tolerate deflation, and could print money if necessary. More recently, he’s taken a very relaxed view of the US current account deficit, seeing it as the inevitable counterpart to a ‘global savings glut’. I agree with him on the first point but not on the second; there’s a significant risk that the wheels will fall off the entire policy, leading to a rapid depreciation of the dollar and an uncontrolled increase in interest rates, both of which would flow through to Australia.

Market movements were consistent with this analysis (stock prices went up, the dollar fell and the 10-year bond rate rose), but weren’t very big, suggesting that no-one is expecting really big changes.

fn1. This is a redundancy, as there are no prominent supply-siders in the US economics profession. That is, not in the sense of supply-side popularised by Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffers, although Mundell shares the supply-side liking for a gold standard. Almost all economists are supply-siders in the sense that they think attention should be paid to the supply side of the economy as well as the demand side.

The issue of PPPs (public-private partnerships) has been bubbling along for almost a decade, but it has suddenly exploded, partly because of the fiasco with the Cross-City Tunnel in Sydney and partly because of a more general reaction against the string of bad deals that has been handed to the public in the process. I had a piece in the Fin a few weeks ago which elicited a very hostile response from Mark Birrell (former Kennett minister and now head of an industry lobby group). He quoted the British Auditor-general in favour of the British version (PFI), but as a subsequent letter-writer pointed out, some senior figures within the National Audit Office, notably Jeremy Colman, have been highly critical of the accounting for these projects, as have most academics who’ve looked at them.

Since then, there’s been a string of articles and media segments. The Australian, amazingly, has suddenly come out violently against PPPs. I just watched one on the 7:30 report with the redoubtable Tony Harris (whose recent piece has been reprinted at Troppo and also John Goldberg, a long-time critic of the traffic projections and tax arrangements in these deals. There’s some history from Chris Sheil over at LP. My column is over the fold.
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Discussion of game theory inevitably brings up the question of whether game theory relies on an assumption of rational behavior, and, if so, whether this is a weakness or a strength. Rather than respond, I thought I’d dig up this old post from my long-abandoned (but still planned-to-be-revived-one-day) Word for Wednesday series.

Shorter JQ: the word ‘rational’ has no meaning that cannot better be conveyed by some alternative term. Avoid it.
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The latest Nobel Prize award to Aumann and Schelling has generated a bit of discussion about the value or otherwise of game theory. Generally speaking, economists are enthusiastic about game theory and other social scientists less so. Although I admire the work of Aumann and (even more) Schelling, as economists go, I’m a game-theory sceptic, for a fundamental reason I’ll try to explain.
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