Eurozone fiscal policy - still not getting it

The impact of fiscal austerity on the Eurozone as a whole has been immense. In my recent Vox piece, I did a back of the envelope calculation which said that GDP in 2013 might be around 4% lower as a result of cuts in government consumption and investment alone. This seemed to accord with some model based exercises of the impact of austerity as a whole, but others gave larger numbers.

We now have another estimate, which can be thought of as a rather more thorough attempt to do what I did in the Vox article. This paper by Sebastian Gechert, Andrew Hughes Hallett and Ansgar Rannenberg uses multipliers and applies them to the fiscal changes that have occurred in the Eurozone from 2011. Apart from the later start date, the first difference compared to my back of the envelope calculation is that they include all fiscal changes, and not just government consumption and investment. As a large part of the fiscal consolidation in the Eurozone has involved reducing fiscal transfers, this is important.

The second, and more interesting, difference is that rather than pluck a multiplier out of the air, as I did, they use a meta analysis of other studies. I have previously mentioned this meta analysis by Gechert: this paper is based on a follow up by Gechert and Rannenberg. [Correction from original post.] The studies on which these meta analyses are based are not ideal from my personal point of view (more on this later), but what this second paper shows is that fiscal multipliers are larger in depressed economies. Applying these ‘meta multipliers’ to the Eurozone fiscal consolidation implies that GDP was 7.7% lower by 2013 as a result. These numbers are more in the ballpark of the Rannenberg et al paper that I have discussed before.

All these estimates point to huge losses, which monetary policy has neither been willing or able to counteract. Yet the speed at which those in charge of the Eurozone begin to realise the mistake that they have made is painfully slow. Take this recent Vox piece by Marco Buti and Nicolas Carnot. Thankfully they ignore all the Eurozone’s tortuous and sometimes contradictory rules, and just look at two numbers: a measure of ‘economic conditions’ (like the output gap), and a measure of the fiscal gap, which is the difference between the actual primary balance and what it needs to be to get debt falling gradually.

They argue that policy needs to balance the need to reduce both gaps. Looking at these two numbers, they conclude that Germany is overachieving on fiscal adjustment and has a need to increase activity, but although France and Spain also need to increase demand they have a long way to go to eliminate the fiscal gap, so this should dominate. The conclusion is that Germany should go for fiscal stimulus, but “moderate consolidation appears warranted in both France and Spain”. Overall “the Eurozone should conduct a close-to-neutral fiscal stance”.

Let’s deal with that last conclusion first. The mistake there is simple. When monetary policy is stuck at the Zero Lower Bound, it is crazy to balance the output gap with what is your main instrument for correcting that gap, which is fiscal policy. Getting the fiscal gap right is important in the longer term, but in the short term it is the means by which you get the output gap to zero. As the studies mentioned at the beginning of this post show, the current recession is the result of trying to correct the fiscal gap at completely the wrong time. The right policy is to get the output gap to zero, so interest rates can rise above the ZLB, and then you deal with the deficit. Readers of this blog and the blogs of others must be sick and tired of seeing us make this same point over and over again, but the logic has yet to get through to where it matters.

The same principles apply to countries within the Eurozone, except with an additional complication of within Eurozone competitiveness. If a country is too competitive relative to the rest of the Eurozone, it needs to run a positive output gap for a time to generate the inflation that will correct that position, and vice versa. For that reason Germany needs a large positive output gap at the moment (compared to an estimated actual negative gap), and therefore a much more expansionary fiscal policy - not because it is overachieving on debt adjustment. France and Spain now look roughly OK in terms of competitiveness relative to the average (see chart below, and assuming that entry rates in 2000 were appropriate), so there we need fiscal expansion to close the output gap.

So at both the aggregate and individual country level, the inappropriate bias towards fiscal contraction that caused huge losses in the Eurozone in the past continues to operate. Which means, unfortunately, that the needless waste of resources caused by austerity continues to get larger by the day.

Relative Unit Labour Costs, 2010=100, from OECD Economic Outlook

The view from Germany

As an exemplar, take this article that appeared in Spiegel (HT MT). It defends Germany against criticism of its current account surplus, but its main worry is not harsh words from the US government, or Paul Krugman, or Martin Wolf, but from Marco Buti of the European Commission. But before saying something about that, or the article itself, we need to be clear about the basic facts. (I have talked about the myths elsewhere.)

From 2000 to 2007, the periphery of the Eurozone (EZ) enjoyed a boom, while Germany did not. As a result, inflation in the periphery (and much else) of the EZ exceeded inflation in Germany by a significant and persistent amount. By 2007, this meant that Germany had become too competitive in relation to the rest of the EZ. This situation is not sustainable. The large German surplus is a symptom of that situation.

Under flexible exchange rates, the German currency would have been able to appreciate against the other EZ countries, eliminating the competitive advantage. In a currency union, the only feasible outcome is for German inflation to run ahead of the rest of the EZ by a significant and persistent amount for a number of years. If the ECB was willing and able to target 2% inflation, then that would mean future German inflation significantly and persistently above 2%. That would require excess demand in Germany, to balance deficient demand in the rest of the EZ. There is really no way around this consequence of a 2% inflation target - it is just arithmetic.

The problem arises because the ECB is unwilling or unable to target 2% inflation. That in theory allows Germany to attempt to force the EZ as a whole to make the required internal adjustment without inflation in Germany exceeding 2%. It can do this by a restrictive fiscal policy. This is exactly what it has done. The figure below shows the underlying primary financial balance in Germany and the whole EZ (including Germany). (Source: Oct 2013 OECD Economic Outlook.) The projected German surpluses are expected to bring down the debt to GDP ratio from 51% of GDP in 2012 to 48.5% of GDP in 2014.

Other EZ countries are defenseless against this deflation, because of imposed austerity or the EZ Fiscal Compact. As a result, the path we seem to be on involves German inflation at around 2% and average EZ inflation well below 2%. This may be in Germany’s narrow national interest, but for the EZ as a whole it is much more costly, partly because of the difficulties of reducing inflation when it is close to zero. Deflation in the EZ as a whole is also costly for those outside the EZ when everyone’s interest rates are near zero (see Francesco Saraceno here).

Much of the Spiegel article is about the pointlessness of blaming Germany for its success in exporting. This of course completely misses the point, but if outside criticism focuses on Germany’s current account rather than its inflation rate it is perhaps not a surprising reaction. The German current account surplus is a symptom of the underlying problem, which is a tight fiscal and monetary policy in the EZ. Whether the tight monetary policy (bringing EZ inflation below 1%) is an unforced or forced error (because interest rates are near zero) is not crucial here, except to the extent that German pressure is behind any reluctance until recently to cut interest rates. 

At one point, however, the article does note that criticism of Germany “holds that the Germans live and consume below their means, which is detrimental to foreign companies because there is less demand for their products in Germany.” But its response is to say that this is the fault of “countries like Greece, Italy and Spain, [who] have only themselves to blame for their troubles because they spent years living beyond their means and at the expense of their own competitiveness.” In other words, why should Germany suffer above 2% inflation because the rest of the EZ allowed themselves to become uncompetitive.

Mapping macroeconomics into a morality play is almost always a mistake. So let’s just stick to the rules of how the EZ is supposed to work. The ECB is supposed to have a (‘just below’) 2% inflation target. If it was able to meet that target, Germany would have to suffer 3%+ inflation for a number of years. Now you might respond that the ECB is within its mandate if it targets 1% inflation to allow Germany to only have 2% inflation, because below 2% inflation is allowed. I think that would be stretching the mandate rather a lot (see Andrew Watt here), but even so, if that were true, why didn’t the ECB target 1% inflation from 2000 to 2007 to avoid inflation outside Germany exceeding 2%?

A more reasonable interpretation would be that Germany is either putting pressure on the ECB so that its policies are favourable to the German national interest, or that it is taking advantage of the inability of the ECB to target inflation in a liquidity trap to force inflation below target through a restrictive fiscal policy. It is either trying to circumvent the rules, or take advantage while the referee's whistle is broken. [1]

Which brings us to one referee, which is the European Commission. I have been quite critical of the Commission in the past, and particularly of European Commissioner Olli Rehn (e.g. here). In March I also wrote a post criticising a paper co-written by Marco Buti, Director-General for Economic and Financial Affairs at the European Commission. That paper included the following quote: “In Germany, the fiscal stance is now broadly neutral, hence consistent with the call for a differentiated fiscal stance according to the budgetary space.” I was therefore slightly surprised to see Buti cast as chief German tormenter in the Spiegel article. To quote (my italics): “The chief economist of the European Commission, a native of Italy, has a tendency to blame many euro-zone ills on the nature and effects of German economic policy.” I find it tricky to reconcile Marco Buti’s March paper with this Spiegel description, but perhaps events in the intervening months (and the Commission’s own analysis) have strengthened views which could not have been expressed openly in public. (There are other constraints on the Commission, as John McHale notes here.) Whatever, I hope the Spiegel article is right, and those working for the Commission are applying all the pressure they can to change the view from Germany.

[1] It would be interesting to compare this deflationary bias in the EZ, reflecting a combination of the Fiscal Compact and the Zero Lower Bound, with Keynes’s worries about the Bretton Woods system, which helped create the IMF. Barry Eichengreen draws an analogy between current policies and the 1930s here.