Handicapping the Oz-NZ GDP growth race

John Quiggin15 Comments

There has been even more media excitement about the fact that New Zealand is currently experiencing more rapid economic growth than Australia. This is largely due to the fact that the two economies are in different phases of the medium term macroeconomic cycle.

However, there is another important factor that needs to be taken into account in making comparisons of this kind. Given access to the same technology, and with similar levels of education, poor countries will grow faster than rich ones, and will eventually converge to similar level of income. There’s a huge literature on this, to which I contributed a little bit back in the 1990s. The key finding is that, on average and under the conditions just stated, we should expect to see a poorer country make up around 2 per cent of the income gap with a richer country each year. That is, convergence will typically take around 50 years (there’s some tricky Zeno-style paradoxes here, which I don’t have room to discuss)

How does this affect comparisons between Australia and New Zealand. The IMF estimates here give income per person of 45138 for Australian and 33626 for New Zealand. So Australia’s income is about 35 per cent above the New Zealand level. The two countries were roughly on a par until the 1970s.

The standard convergence estimate is that NZ should make up about 2 per cent of that gap (or 0.7 per cent of GDP) each year. If the gap is larger, NZ could reasonably be said to be outperforming Australia for the year in question, relative to the standard 50 year timeframe for convergence. If the gap is smaller, NZ is doing worse than par.

How should we tax banks?

John Quiggin43 Comments

The first real Budget leak of the season has sprung, with indications that the government will introduce a tax on bank deposits, aimed at financing a deposit insurance fund. This was proposed by Labor in 2013, and attacked by Tony Abbott at the time. Judging by Andrew Leigh’s comments that “I don’t think we’re going to take any lessons on bipartisanship from Joe Hockey”, they haven’t forgotten.

The best course for Labor would be to support the measure, but to impose ACCC supervision to stop the banks passing the charge onto consumers. That should be the wedge for permanent ACCC oversight of fees and charges.

None of this, however, gets to the real issue. Banks are immensely profitable, and their profitability rests on the fact that they can never really fail. It’s nearly always cheaper for the regulators to bail a bank out (for example, via a takeover) than to actually shut it down and pay out the depositors.

The appropriate tax base for a profit-enhancing subsidy is profits, currently running at $29 billion per year. Bank profits should be subject to a special tax, reflecting their special status. This would raise substantially more revenue than a deposit insurance levy.

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Voting with their feet, and following the business cycle

John Quiggin14 Comments

Among the regular themes in the Australian business press is the claim that we are being outperformed, in economic terms, by New Zealand. I collected a bunch of such claims here, and they were even more prevalent (but hard to find now, being pre-Internet) in the late 1980s. I’m seeing the same theme recurring today (too many repetitions to link).

This is a recurring rather than a continuous theme: there are long periods during which Oz-NZ comparisons are absent from the press. So, if you took the Australian press at face value, it would be reasonable to suppose that Australia was becoming relatively poorer than NZ, not continuously, but in a series of downward steps.

In fact to a close approximation, the reverse is the case. But because market economies are cyclical, there are inevitably brief periods when the NZ economy is on an upswing and Australia in a slowdown or recession. It is only at such times that the business press notices New Zealand’s existence.

A point often made at such times is that net migration from NZ to Australia has slowed to a trickle, usually with the implication that this marks the end of the long term movement. In reality, the cyclical nature of net migration has been a marked feature of movement patterns, ever since the beginning of mass migration westward across the Tasman. The starting point was 1973 Closer Economic Relations Trans-Tasman Travel agreement, which coincided with the beginning of New Zealand’s relative decline. The authority here is Jacques Poot, and this 2009 paper sums up the story.

Interestingly, the flow has continued, unabated though still cyclical, despite the Howard government’s move to exclude Kiwis from welfare payments (arising, IIRC, from a dispute over concerns that NZ’s more liberal immigration policy would provide a ‘backdoor’ path to Australia).

The inevitability of red tape

John Quiggin23 Comments

I have a piece in The Guardian pointing out that the Abbott government’s Red Tape Reduction program is basically cover for a couple of big measures benefit the mining and gambling industries.

A bigger question raised by the piece: why does bureaucracy and red tape seem to grow without limits? Anyone who has ever worked as an academic, faced with a proliferation of pro-vice-chancellors, executive deans and multiple layers of hierarchy has certainly asked this question, and there’s nothing unusual about academics. The uselessness of administrators is the central theme of the comic strip Dilbert, popular in offices around the world.

The obvious explanations are
(a) stupidity; and
(b) administrative bloat benefits administrators and they are the ones who make the decisions

I don’t think either of these works adequately. Stupidity is certainly common, but the phenomenon is too pervasive to be explained in this way. As regards administrative self-interest, the problem is that senior executives could potentially gain a lot by cutting mid-level bureaucracy, and many have tried (remember ‘flatter organizations’ and ‘lean and mean’).

My own hypothesis is that every big mistake (for example, an undetected embezzlement or a mishandled episode of harassment) produces a permanent bureaucratic response designed to prevent a recurrence. This is very costly to reverse (who wants to deal with the first big embezzlement just after they downsized the accounting department) even if it would, in some sense, be less costly to put up with occasional failures. Moreover, for both good and bad reasons, I think we are, as a society, becoming less tolerant of institutional failures across a wide range of activities (systematic wrongdoing by financial institutions is a major counterexample but, I think, exceptional). So, we have more checks and balances, and more bureaucrats to enforce them.

Sandpit

John Quiggin61 Comments

A new sandpit for long side discussions, idees fixes and so on. Unless directly responding to the OP, all discussions of nuclear power, MMT and conspiracy theories should be directed to sandpits (or, if none is open, message boards).

Bad for the client, bad for the bottom line

John Quiggin21 Comments

My report on the NSW governments proposal to sell (they prefer to say “lease”, but it’s a sale) assets and then undertake a large-scale infrastructure program notionally funded by the proceeds cited the former Secretaries of the NSW and Victorian Treasuries the point that selling income-generating assets does not create a ‘bucket of money’ that can be used to fund non-income-generating infrastructure. I made the claim that regardless of their attitude to privatisation, economists (at least when writing honestly on the subject) would agree with this.

My point was proved, twice over, a couple of days ago. The main point was proved when global bank UBS released a research note headed headlined “Bad for the budget, good for the state“. Of course, UBS supports privatisation, but the adverse effect on the budget was obvious.

However, it turns out that a different part of UBS is advising the Baird government on privatisation. A quick call from the Premier’s office produced a revised version of the note with the offending phrase removed. This proved, via the contrapositive, the parenthetical aside in my claim.

The episode raises the question: what reliance can be placed on published reports from firms like UBS cited in support of government policy? Of course, the same question is equally applicable to reports like my own, which more commonly oppose government policy? A few thoughts over the fold.
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Plan B

John Quiggin62 Comments

Now that the Senate has rejected Pyne’s university deregulation plan, the obvious question is, what is Plan B? The first, negative answer: there is no acceptable plan that will deliver what the advocates of deregulation wanted, namely a highly stratified system, catering to a smaller minority of the population than at present, and topped by high-status institutions comparable to Yale and Harvard. That’s the US model and, as a system for educating young people, as opposed to generating research and reproducing a tiny elite, it’s been a miserable failure.

The correct way to think about this is to begin with the core objective of the process: to provide young Australians with post-school education that fits them for work in a modern economy and life in a modern society. That leads to two main principles

* A single system encompassing both universities and post-school technical education with easy flow between the two
* Uncapped access with an objective of (near) universal participation in some form of post-school education
* As with school education, the aim should not be stratification by quality, but the provision of a high-quality education for all, with resource allocation based on educational needs, not institutional history or individual wealth

I’ll leave aside, for the moment, the problems of the TAFE sector, though these are, I think, more urgent and difficult than those of the universities.

The big problem with what I’m proposing is that it will require more money for undergraduate education. That’s because the existing system relies on a mixture of student payments (through HECS), government funding and a cross-subsidy from fee-paying overseas students. There’s no substantial scope to get more money from overseas students, so the more domestic students the more thinly that cross-subsidy is spread. Similarly, although more government funding is merited, maintaining existing funding on a per-student basis while expanding numbers is probably too much to hope for. However, a clear focus on the core goal of universal post-school education would help a lot, though it necessarily poses some tough choices.

Broadly speaking, the goal I’m thinking about is to maintain existing teaching resources per student, while expanding access to cover a steadily increasing proportion of the population.

Some ideas are listed below (over the fold)

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