Capitalism and Freedom

The perils of European debt crisis: divergence, retreat or decline?

2012-01-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

Recent debacle at the summit of Bruselles in the midst of the political intervention of the EU leaders to facilitate the institutional agreement between the European countries towards the formation of the European fiscal union has caused not only a long-standing dissolution of the “core countries” of the Eurozone and the UK but, more importantly, a non-solvable puzzle on the end scenario of the European debt crisis that pervaded both the eurozone and the countries outside it ever since the beginning of the 2008/2009 financial crisis. The anatomy of the European debt crisis is a multifaceted process that is heavily interrelated with the economic principles of the process of European integration and the unintended consequences that erupted in the recent debt crisis.

The introduction of Maastricht criteria that stipulated fiscal prudence by obliging EU member states to adhere to the level of public debt below 60 percent of the GDP and low fiscal deficit boosted the expectations of stable macroeconomic environment, partly sustained by the European Central Bank which, since its inception in 1999, successfully maintained price stability. Despite an enviable achievement in the stabilization of inflation expectations, the EU Treaty did not stipulate stringent fiscal rules in case of the breach of treaty obligations on behalf of EU member states, neither has European Growth and Stability Pact (EGSP) provided selective mechanisms that would hinge on the EU member state in case Maastricht criteria were not fulfilled. On the other hand, the gradual enlargement of the European union did not finalize in the economic union characterized by the realization of four basic freedoms.

In 1977, Portugal and Spain were acceded into the European Union. Four years late, Greece was admitted as the 12th member of the European community. Over time, the EU grew from an integrated area of 15 Western European countries into a conglomerate of nations that did not impinge of the full-fledged liberalization of the internal market in 1988 but, moreover, has evolved into the spiral that accelerated the community toward the political union. In the mean time, member states of the Eurozone have continuously breached the rules laid out by Maastricht treaty. In bearing the fiscal consequences of the reunification, Germany repeatedly breached the Maastricht criteria both in public debt and fiscal deficit which postponed the introduction of the Euro, following a large shock from gigantic fiscal transfers from high-income West Germany into low-income East German regions. In a similar manner, until 2005, France did not manage to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio under the 60 percent threshold stipulated by the Maastricht criteria.

Nevertheless, peripheral countries such as Spain and Portugal entered the Eurozone at an overvalued exchange rate relative to German mark before the introduction of the common currency. In the following years, these countries, notably Spain, accumulated significant current account surpluses resulted from the inflows of direct investment from the core countries such as Germany and France. These surpluses were, of course, artificial in the sense that the downward convergence of interest rates in the peripheral countries stimulated the over-leveraging of the financial sector which triggered a balloon in the housing sector.

For years, Italy and Greece have repeatedly breached the Maastricht treaty in the fiscal sense. Prior to adjoining the European Monetary Union, Greece repeatedly experienced volatile inflation rates and default on its external obligations and subsequent Drachma depreciation. Italy’s macroeconomic stabilization hinged on the discretion of government spending which, after excessive rises under various transition governments, cumulated in one of the highest debt ratios within the EMU. How could EMU countries, despite a stringent set of rules delineated by the Treaty of Maastricht, pursued discretionary fiscal policies and jeopardized the macroeconomic stability of the national economies and the Eurozone?

Prior to the onset of the financial crisis by the end of 2007, little was known on the perils of excessively leveraged balance sheets which investment banks used to seek high rates of return on high-yield and relatively risky peripheral regions. Until 2007, the exposure of major German investment to over-leveraged financial sector in countries such as Spain and Greece generated sizeable spillover effect. Before the onset of the financial crisis, Spain enjoyed sizeable current account deficit resulted from excessively high and robust overall investment. In 2007, Spain’s investment-to-GDP ratio (31 percent) was roughly comparable to developing Asia. In such highly volatile environment where economic growth departed from its long-run fundamentals, even small-scale macroeconomic shocks can result in a substantial loss of economic activity, notwithstanding the spillovers in the banking system and labor market.

The asymmetry in political structures and underlying macroeconomic fundamentals across member countries casts significant doubt in the long-term stability of the Eurozone as an area with common monetary policy. The necessary condition for the inception of common monetary policy does not hinge on the political initiatives that pervaded the process of European integration but on the careful consideration whether adjoining countries adhere to the macroeconomic criteria as denoted by the Maastricht Treaty. The failure to adhere to the contours of fiscal prudence and budgetary discipline by the major EU member states, with few notable exceptions such as the Netherlands, Austria and Finland, lies at heart of the underlying reasons why significant asymmetry and non-coordination in fiscal policy resulted in the adoption of dispersed economic policies whereas the adverse outcomes were not foreseen neither by the politicians neither by policy advisers and academics.

To a large extent, as the recent debt crisis has succinctly demonstrated, the ultimate goal of the European monetary integration was the build-up of political union. But whereas European politicians were preoccupied with all-embracing design of the EU as unitary political union, they forgot to acknowledge that political union would require the full convergence of economic policies including the integration of the labor market which hardly any political initiative within the EU deemed feasible.

The non-coordination of fiscal policymakers was highly evident in the division of member states on the core countries and EU periphery. Considering the peripherical countries, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece repeatedly proved ill-disciplined in managing the levels of public debt and the magnitude of the budgetary imbalance. Portugal is often the case in point. Prior to the introduction of the Euro, Portugal experienced unprecedented economic boom. Between 1995 and 2001, economic growth averaged 4 percent per annum and the unemployment rate reduced from 7 percent to 4 percent by the end of 2001.

At the same time, nominal wages grew rapidly without the necessary productivity growth compensating for the increase unit labor cost. Alongside the overheating of economic activity, driven by construction boom, current account deficits increased significantly, lowering domestic savings rate. After the country experienced a mild recession in 2003 when domestic output decreased by 1 percent on the annual basis, the slowing of artificial economic growth driven by the Euro boom, turned from temporary into permanent. In the period 2002-2010, growth of domestic output averaged at the level of no more than 1 percent per annum with stagnating productivity and significant pressure on nominal wages. Since the size of the labor cost is the major deterrent on growth, the cure for Portuguese ailing economy is the structural adjustment in the public sector such as the reduction of public debt by generating substantial primary fiscal surpluses and the lowering of government spending. Similarly, the experience of Greece, Spain and Italy suggests the evolution of the same pattern evolving over time although Italy has been known as low-growing economy during the boom time.

However, fiscal policymakers in peripheral countries repeatedly produced ill-conceived fiscal mismanagement of public finances. In 2008, the level of budgetary deficit in Greece exceeded 13 percent of the GDP whereas the country has not adhered to Maastricht criteria ever since the introduction of the Euro. After the depreciation, the net debt as percent of GDP in Greece reached 85 percent of GDP and increased to 110 percent of GDP by the end of 2008. As IMF’s recent forecasts suggest, by 2012, Greece’s public net debt could reach 175 percent of GDP.

The failure to adhere to the common set of principles as delegated by the Maastricht treaty and EU Stability and Growth Pact in the peripheral countries stemmed largely from the mismanagement of public finances and structural rigidity of the public sector with resulting increases in the burden of the labor cost. In addition, the adoption of extraordinary measures embedded in the public sector such as very low effective retirement age and substantial bonuses for civil servants exacerbated the burden of the public debt with unforeseen net financial liabilities of governments which have not mitigated the persistent burden of public debt that grew substantially over time in the EU periphery.

A natural question is whether the exclusion of peripheral countries from the Eurozone might be feasible and whether Greece’s default on external obligations might help overcome country’s mountainous strain on public debt. First, the re-adoption of domestic currencies is hardly a solution to overcome the intricacies of debt crisis. If Greece re-introduced drachma, external obligations would be strained by a painful and enduring bank run since investors would withdraw the deposits from the portfolio and invest it into safer holding with less volatility and uncertainty ahead. Another argument in favor of Greece exiting the Eurozone is that a devaluation of drachma would boost inflationary expectations and consequently reduce the burden of the public debt but given junk score on government bonds, a rather immediate bank run would follow the devaluation of drachma rather than macroeconomic stabilization.

In addition, when Greece’s domestic output is growing far below the long-term potential, inflationary expectations is not a feasible tool to revive the economy from deflationary trap with 16 percent unemployment Moreover, the only feasible and meaningful short-term strategy to boost growth is the reduction of the size of the public sector including the privatization of inefficient state-owned enterprises to generate substantial fiscal surpluses since this is the only plausible measure to tackle the increasing burden of the public debt. As the history of financial crises suggests, the eruptions of banking crises occurred mostly when governments rested on currency devaluations as the ultimate tool to reduce the burden of external debt. In addition, if Greece defaulted on its external obligations, CDS spreads could indicate a snowball effect where Spain, Portugal and possibly Italy could follow the same track.

The question is whether non-coordination between European fiscal policies helped facilitate over-leveraged financial sectors which asked for the bailout by central governments in the wake of the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Over-leveraged financial sectors were attributed to the determinants of various extent. Some argued that over-leveraging is the outcome of innovative financial engineering where fancy mathematicians and physicists applied VaR models to calculate the probability of losses in the portfolio distribution of returns whereas the financial derivative schemes developed by advanced and complex mathematical models were so complicated that nobody, sometimes even mathematicians themselves, could understand sensibly.

On the other hand, the monetary policy perspective of over-leveraged financial sectors has been rather overlooked in policy discussions since periodically low interest rates encourage excessive risk-taking which further facilitated the construction of portfolios with excessively volatile returns that increasingly relied on VaR assumptions whilst fundamentally ignoring the instability of returns from over-leveraged investments. But a more intriguing question pertaining to the banking perspective of financial crises is whether more prudent financial regulation as envisaged from recent stress tests by European Banking Authority can be achieved by raising capital adequacy standards. Unfortunately, the history of Basel accords demonstrates that the banking sector has been prone to search alternative channels to avoid raising capital adequacy ratios through innovative accounting tricks whereas neither Basel I and II envisaged the adverse outcomes from excessive risk-taking. As stress tests indicated, capital adequacy ratios should be increased substantially but, moreover, the regulatory framework should not only build on increasing criteria on Tier I capital and common equity but also on the safeguard despositary insurance of contingent liabilities to mitigate liquidity risk that led to the systemic crisis.

The solution to revive the Eurozone economy and revive it from a decade of flawed political imperatives should not exclude multiple options. The focal point of the Eurozone’s recovery from debt crisis should be to help peripheral countries establishment fiscal prudence, discipline and soundness of the public finances. In fact, the recovery from the debt crisis will endure for more than a decade. The structural adjustment does not rest on the ability of the EU to provide financial assistance to peripheral countries but on the principled and coordinated action to reform inefficient public sectors which are at the heart of the debt spiral since years of generous entitlements to civil servants have tremendously raised the net present value of public debt to the point that peripheral countries are on the brink of default on its external obligations. Without generating substantial fiscal surpluses, there is no feasibility and no realistic scenario under which public debt level would be brought under the control in the near-term perspective. Hence, recent discussions of the consequences of debt crisis in Europe have simply overlooked the importance of growth-enhancing measures as the real cure for growing debt-to-GDP ratio where the measures do not apply to peripheral countries only.

First, in the wake of fiscal insolvency of public pension systems, effective retirement age should be raised substantially for men and women alike. The studies have shown that under the increase in effective retirement age to 65 years, long-term fiscal obligations would reduce and consequently an important step towards long-term macroeconomic stability would be achieved. Nearly every European country is facing low-fertility trap followed from increased affluence and generous early-retirement policies from 1970s onward. Consequently, European government have amounted a mountain of net financial liabilities that exceeded the size of GDP by several times, respectively. Decreasing the size of net liabilities to contemporary and future generations of retirees, requires a robust increase in effective retirement age. Higher retirement age threshold would substantially increase working-age population by encouraging labor market participation among the elderly. Current levels of effective retirement age are unsustainable in the long-run since a growing burden of pension obligations can seriously threaten the stability of the public finance and increase the probability of fiscal insolvency.

Second, European countries suffer from low productivity growth. In some countries, such as Italy productivity growth has remained stagnant over the course of recent two decades while elsewhere productivity growth is to slow to compensate for the increase in nominal wage rates. The evidence, in fact, overwhelmingly suggested that high tax rates are the prime obstacle to greater labor market participation, particularly among the elderly who face high implicit tax rates on work. In particular, to facilitate the channels of productivity growth, marginal tax rates should be decreased substantially. At current levels, marginal tax rates restrain labor supply significantly. In the Netherlands, the top marginal income tax rates reached 52 percent in 2011 which is a serious hinder on the working activity. In this respect, bold tax reforms should be complemented with more flexible labor markets which remain saddled with employment regulations and distort labor supply incentives. Less regulated labor market to supplement greater labor force participation, especially among women, elderly and the youth is vital to enhance productivity growth since living standards by the end of the day are determined by productivity improvements.

Ultimately and most importantly, peripheral countries should be given a free choice whether to withdraw from the EMU since recent financial crisis has shown that Eurozone is a suboptimal currency area which emerged from non-cooperative fiscal policies among its member states that caused adverse outcomes and asymmetric adjustment where macroeconomic stabilization outcomes are mutually exclusive among member states. Asymmetry adjustment that currently threatens the existence and stability of Eurozone lies at the heart of Eurozone’s debt crisis. As a general matter, economic policies have failed to recognize that structural measures in the labor market and fiscal policy regime could facilitate growth enhancement and provide the necessary impetus to stabilization of crisis-impeded monetary union. Recent suggestions by France and Germany for EU member states to form a fiscal union have led to sustained resistance from the UK which dissolved from the fiscal pact.

The ultimate grain of truth in the fiscal union is that a monetary union necessarily requires the coordination of fiscal policies to prevent adverse and asymmetric policy outcomes within the union. The fateful conclusion from recent EU debt crisis is that without the integration of the labor market on the EU level, the monetary integration cannot exist in coherence with asymmetric fiscal policies. In the future, stricter adherence to budgetary discipline will be necessary through budgetary authority. In this respect, countries that fail to adhere to Maastricht criteria and deviate from the fiscal discipline either marginally or substantially should be condemned and pay for their actions of fiscal imprudence by withdrawing from the monetary union.

What went wrong with supply-side economics?

2011-07-08T05:52:00.001-07:00

The economic crisis of 2008/2009 had confronted the mainstream economic theory with an unpalatable task of revisiting the notions and perils of the ideas which dominated the course of economic theory in the last few decades. In 2003, delivering a speech to the American Economic Association, Robert Lucas famously noted that the central problem of depression prevention had been solved by mainstream macroeconomic theory which was built by combining the rational expectation hypothesis with New Keynesian macroeconomics. Although one should not obscure the achivements of new classical macroeconomics and new Keynesian macroeconomics, the criticism of contemporary macroeconomic theory is not uniform. It stems from the unrecognized role of systemic shocks in the financial sector and the spillovers from Wall Street to the Main Street. In contemplating the the linkages of over-leveraging and biased financial deregulation, it should not come as a surprise that early warnings of the financial crisis, mainly leveraged borrowing in the U.S subprime mortgage market, were earmarked in the mainstream economic theory.

In fact, in 1970, George Akerlof's influential paper on the issue of adverse selection in the market for lemons, was a landmark achievment in the economic theory since it demonstrated the falacies of perfectly competitive market mechanism when the information on quality of various commodities is distributed unevenly. In addition, a series of papers in 1970s by Joseph Stiglitz on screening theory and asymetric information, has dealt exactly with the central origins of the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Subprime loans and highly-complex derivate schemes which enabled the exponential growth of overleveraging of the banking sector were most likely to be used by the least sophisticated and accordingly the most risky borrowers. The only difference is that in normal circumstance, banks would recognize adverse selection by rationing credit to risky borrowers but the continuous obsession with home-ownership and the reluctance of the Federal Reserve to "remove the bowl of punch when the party started" - to use the analogy of Preston Martin, former Vice President of the FED - added to the turbulence of overleverage that turned into the most disastrous financial meltdown after the Great Depression.

The fact is that contemporary macroeconomics had little to offer to predict the subsequent financial meltdown although Robert Shiller of Yale University has repeatedly warned against unstable stock market fundamentals, particular notorious price-earnings ratios after the dot-com bubble came to burst. However, the central element of the critic of mainstream economic theory should revisit the notorious paradigm of supply-side economics whose intelectual melange of fervent belief in tax cuts and a dangerous preoccupation with deregulation as the cure of the malaise which led to stagflation in early 1970s, have proved how dangerous the conclusions could become.

First, the rise of the supply-side economics in the political economy began in early 1980s. But the intelectual influence of the supply-side economics should not be confined to the theoretical paradigm itself. The field of the political economy of taxation manifested itself as the intelectual triumph of supply-side economics. The original idea of the Laffer curve, the relationship between tax rate and tax revenues, was not disputable after all. In fact, if tax rates reached predatory levels, decreases in total tax burden would yield considerable gains, not only in total tax revenue but also in terms of higher level of productivity. However, when average and marginal tax rates were at moderate levels, it would be foolish to believe immense revenue gains would ensue by reducing the rates of taxation to bottom-levels, arguing for significant gains in terms of employment growth, productivity boost and total tax revenues. Even though cross-country empirical evidence does suggest an increase in tax revenues amid the decline in average tax rate, the pattern is confined to the episodes where average and marginal tax rates were very high, exceeding 70 percent threshold. Once tax rates were reduced, there is no evidence of higher revenue gains.

The major peril of supply-side economics is the claim that tax reduction would boost the aggregate supply and stimulate productivity growth. On the other hand, the valuable contribution of supply-side economics is the notion that additional tax increases do not generate much higher revenue. One should not feel reluctant to recall the 1964 Kennedy-Johnson tax cut which decreased marginal tax rates substantially. Although supply-side economics has repeatedly blasted the intelectual heritage of Keynesian macroeconomics, the 1964 tax reform was itself a Keynesian prescription for the U.S recession in the years prior to Vietnam war. Back in early 1960s, Paul Samuelson wrote that "Congress could legislate, for example, a cut of three or four percentage points in the tax applicable to every income class, to take effect immediately under our withholding system in March or April, and to continue to the end of the year." (link). Therefore, Samuelson's mindful observation that additional spending would not automatically counteract the recession unless complemented by tax reductions, probably would not come due in the framework of supply-side economics. Moreover, what distinguished the supply-side economics from the framework of sound economic analysis taught in microeconomic and macroeconomic textbooks, was adverse propensity to enforce tax cuts for the rich while leaving the middle class and low-income households no pie from tax reductions. The striking features of income inequality in the U.S. suggest that from 1970s, median household income stagnated (link) while top 5 percent of households have received disproportionately windfall gains from tax reductions up the point where more than 85 percent of total income was earned by top 5 percent of households (link). Moreover, one should distinguish between patterns of good and bad inequality as Gary Becker recently suggested (link). It is envitable that income inequality has some great value in the society when market outcomes lead to better overall health, less stress and higher standard of living and the evidence is yet inconclusive whether the narrowing of income inequality would return health improvements for the poor - since poor health outcomes of low-income households are mainly attributed to deteriorating dietary habits and dangerous lifestyle.

While bad inequality, especially rents from non-market outcomes, have precipitated the decline in good inequality in the last two decades, there is an overwhelming evidence that stagnation of median household income (despite moderate productivity improvements) caused a somehow lower quality of the U.S. labor force and a widening gap in educational achievments of American children. The drawbacks of widening inequality were largely ignored by supply-side economics or justified on the hands-off approach to the issues of the poor. It should not be forgotten that negative income tax, which favored low-income families, was suggested by Milton Friedman, whom supply-siders have taken for the intelectual father without a detailed knowledge of his precious contribution to economics.

Second, supply-side economics has been perhaps known for favoring the deregulation as the cure for social ills and staggering income growth. Despite substantial euphoria caused by the pioneers of deregulation of banking and financial sector, the regulatory framework eventually jeopardized sound regulation that could prevent hazardous outcomes as shown in the seminal work of George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz. In fact, deregulation of the banking sector, hailed by supply-side economics as the triumph of its own ideology, laid the basis for rigorous financial innovation by special investment vehicles (SIV) and shadow banking institutions.

In fact, deregulation of the banking and financial sector was not the central issue per se. The main systemic flaw was rather the adoption of unsound regulation that did not predict the perils of over-leveraged banking sector and especially the system-wide spillovers during the financial crisis. Moreover, the loosening of the monetary policy and the series of fiscal stimulus have notified two main drawbacks in the macroeconomic outlook. The first is the invariant postponement of taxation fuelled by the mountain of government debt. And the second is the hidden explosive potential for inflation following the flood of money supply in the balance sheet of the banking sector.

Generally speaking, the intelectual adventure of supply-side economics has overlooked the possibility of pitfalls brought up by rigorous tax cuts to the wealthy and deregulation of banking and financial sector. It would not come due to label mainstream economic theory as a cataclysm which the financial crisis proved accordingly. It would be either insensible to tarnish the useful contribution of supply-side economics. In fact, tax cuts do generate systemic incentives, particularly in the response of the labor supply to tax reductions. However, the elusive quest for higher growth and job creation after reducing tax rates for the wealthy, is an important lesson we should learned from the unfortunate turn of supply-side economics in favoring deregulation without acknowledging the possibility of systemic banking collapse and the consequences carried over by society at large.

Demographic patterns and structural change in North Africa and the Middle East

2011-04-27T07:36:00.000-07:00

The political turmoil in Tunisia and Egypt that precipitated the abrupt end of decades of political dictatorships that governed the vast majority of countires in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. The political revolution, influenced by democratic upheaval in Tunisia and Egypt, facilitated the attempts to overhaul the autocratic regimes in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Libya.

One of the most interesting and highlighting puzzles to resolves is which features contributed to the rise of democratic revolutions sweeping across the entire region. In fact, MENA region is world's largest exporter of oil, enjoying the largest oil reserves in the world. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Algeria, Libya and Kuwait constitute more than 42 percent of world oil reserves. In recent decades, MENA region experienced a growing degree of macroeconomic stability with low and stable inflation rate and steady economic growth. Large oil inflows, driven by the growing oil consumption in emerging markets such as China and India, boosted local currency appreciation and current account surpluses. The rates of growth in recent decade were remarkable, reflecting the growth of domestic demand as well as robust investment as the engine of growth. Countries in the MENA region also enjoyed favorable demographic conditions with low old-age dependency ratio and high share of working-age population, resulting in a demographic dividend which brought robust economic growth.

The indices of political change in the MENA countries prior to the outburst of the political protests in Tunisia and Egypt were nearly impossible to predict since a variety of macroeconomic, demographic and structural indicators facilitate the course of political change in developing countries, shifting from authoritarian political leadership towards a democratic political institutions with free press, free election and a vibrant civil society. Prior to the onset of the protests against authoratic governments in the MENA countries, the latter experienced benign levels of economic freedom. In the MENA region, the majority of countries experienced rampant corruption, heavily regulated labor markets, financial underdevelopment and inefficient legal systems. Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia enjoyed the highest degree of economic freedom in the region while Yemen, Syria and Algeria were already suffering from institutional paralysis and bad governance which brought these countries on the brink of failed states. If political change could be predicted on the basis of the level of overall economic freedom, Yemen, Syria, Algeria and Libya would experience the highest likelihood of political protests that would eventually lead to the political change.

Prior to the independence from France, MENA countries have been plagued by authoritarian governments given the extensive reserves of oil and natural gas. The absence of market institutions based on the rule of law under good governance and independent judicial systems eventually intensifed the rise of hybrid political regimes prone to corruption and poor governance. Even though corrupt military rule and political dicatorship precipitated the rise of the protests against authoratic rule, the pattern of structural change could be easily seen from the changing demographic landscape across the MENA region.

For most of the 20th century, countries in the MENA regions experienced rising income per capita levels. In fact, the growth of per capita incomes in North Africa surpassed the regional average given the fact that North African countries enjoyed high relative levels of income per capita at the beginning of the 20th century compared to Sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, in 1913, Tunisia enjoyed higher per capita income than Mauritius. The change in the demographic structure of the population began after 1950s. In all countries of the MENA region, the fertility rate decreased substantially. In Syria, the fertility rate almost halved between 1950-1955 and 2005-2010, from 7.30 to 3.29. The same trend in the fertility rate swept across the entire region. In Libya, the fertility rate between 2005 and 2010 fell below 3 children per women while Tunisia's fertility rate dropped below 2 children per women in the same period. The astounding drop in fertility rates strongly reflected the growth in per capita incomes which boosted domestic consumption of durable and non-durable goods. In addition, oil-exporting countries such as Libya and Bahrain have experienced a substantial increase in export earnings. Large inflow of oil earnings, in fact, unleashed the income effect, brining higher spending on education and infrastructure. The distribution of literacy rates across countries (link) shows that literacy rates in MENA regions are remarkably high. In fact, Bahrain and Turkey boast of 88 percent literacy rate. Libya remained the North African leader in literacy rate (86.8 percent), ahead of Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria which, given the fragmentation and dichotomy of the population, enjoy literacy rates below 80 percent of the total population.

Countries from the MENA region differ substantially in the demographic projections of old-age dependency ratio. The estimates by the UN suggest that by 2030, the dependency ratio in North Africa and the Middle East is expected to experience a persistent rise. In fact, under constant fertility rates, the share of the population 65+ is expected to increase by 25 percentage points in Bahrain, 24 percentage points in Libya, 23 percentage points in Tunisia, 20 percentage points in Algeria, 15 percentage points in Syria and Saudi Arabia and 14 percentage points in Egypt. In Turkey, favorable fertility assumptions predict 7 percentage point increase in old-age dependency ratio until 2030. The empirics behind the clear explanation of fertility dyanmics across the MENA region reveals a persistent shift towards rapidly aging population across the entire region. The expedience of high fertility rates boosts the demographic dividend alongside the growth in income per capita until the break-even point when the pressure of aging population raises public pension expenditure and the introduction of social security schemes. These schemes, in fact, do not pose a systemic threat to the long-term solvency of public pension system as long as high fertility rates boost stationary population growth. The remarkable decrease in the fertility rates in the MENA is partly beared by the increasing amount spent on education. For instance, Tunisia's education spending amounted to 7.2 percent of the GDP. The ratio is higher than in many advanced countries in the world. In 2007, Italy spent 4.3 percent of GDP on education, the same ratio as Algeria in the year later. The increasing amount of education expenditure, in both absolute and relative sense, reflects robust literacy rates for middle-income countries of the MENA region. In fact, the increasing amount of education expenditures per inhabitant boosted the information awareness by driving up reading, mathematical and computer literacy. Higher literacy rates, compounded by free access to various Internet applications, could substantiate hypothetically greater awareness of the public demanding political liberties, freedom of assembly and free press.

The demographic transition in the Middle East and North Africa is remarkably uneven, reflecting the variation in income per capita across the region. One of the key drivers of the demographic adjustment is the chagning immigration landscape. Traditionally, North African countries have boosted one of the highest outward migration rates, particulary into Italy and France where Muslims account for about 9 percent of the population, the highest share in Western Europe. In addition, with 2.01 children per women, France enjoys one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. A brief overview of the ethnic fertility rates in France shows that French women of the Muslim origin boost significantly higher fertility rates compared to immigrants from Western countries. For instance, the fertility rates for women of Algerian and Morroccan descent exceed the fertility rates of Spanish and Italian immigrants by almost three times. In the next decade, income per capita across the Arab world is expected to increase robustly. Higher incomes would mean a shift towards the increasing amount of expenditures on durable goods. The change in the consumption pattern would be accompanied by a robust decline in the relative amount of income spent on food and other non-durables. Hence, the assumed fertility rates would converge to the Despite the prolonged decline in fertility rates across the Arab world, the demographic transition could precipitate the subsequent decline in robust economic growth rates which exacerbate the rapid rise in per capita incomes in the MENA region.

The peculiar feature of the majority of countries within the MENA region with the ecxeption of Turkey is the presence of natural resource barriers. The abundance of natural resources, such as oil, phosphate and natural gas, is a major constraint on the quality of public sector governance replaced by the seizure of the state by powerful political elites such as the military regime during the Mubarak rule in Egypt prior to the 2011 revolution. Unless accompanied by democratic institutions and systemic constraints on the executive power, the political revolution can eventually result in the organic evolution of the failed state with a strong persistence of the old elites pushing for the status quo to protect the privileges preserved under the old system. The Arab awakening signalled the beginning of the demographic transition with decreasing fertility rates and slowly growing old-age dependency ratios. Hence, diminishing returns to demographic dividend and the gradual relative decline of the share of the working-age population both indicate a tendency towards greater democratic governance.

Charter cities

2011-02-16T03:18:00.000-08:00

The idea of charter cities, originally promoted by Stanford economist Paul Romer, sparked a lively academic debate in the field of economic development. The idea of charter city rests on the premise of creating special reform zones within countries. The reform zone would not be governed by the prevailing system of formal and informal rules within countries. The concept of charter city would serve as an intellectual laboratory of ideas in which governments would be let to quickly adopt innovative system of rules. The purpose of charter cities is the empowerment of incentives in world's less developed countries to develop human capital skills, hence, to increase the level of productivity and real wages that could foster the increase in the standard of living. By and large, the core idea of building a charter city means building a city of about 1000 sq. kilometers in the unoccupied land of the host country and adopting an innovative system of formal and informal rules provided by the source country. The example of charter city include selling Guantanamo to Canada and turning the little piece of Cuban land into Caribbean Hong Kong by adopting a formal system of rules and governance based on limited government, strong rule of law and free market; and turning the new territory into manufacturing hub that could serve as a source of income for workers across Caribbean islands such as Haiti. The charter city would not only provide the opportunity for testing intellectual ideas and innovations but also migrational opportunities for individuals from world's most impoverished countries such as Haiti. The coordination of the charter city is managed by a triangle. First, the host country would provide the piece of land. Second, the source country would provide the infrastructure, human capital and ideas. And third, the guarantor country would provide the assurance that the charter would be respected by both countries.

The concept of the charter city has gained significant attention by development experts in discussing developmental malaise in world's least developed countries in Africa. The empirical evidence on Africa's underdevelopment is striking. It suggests a blinking interplay of corruption, institutional fragility and state failure. According to African Development Indicators, about 75 percent of firms in Cote d'Ivoire identify corruption as the major constraint in doing business. In Ethiopia, less than 2 percent of females enroll tertiary education. Moreover, the average Ethiopian female can expect only 7 years of total schooling. In Liberia, about 11 percent of married women partake a contraceptive use by any method. Hence, one third of young Liberian women, aged 15-19. In addition, 60 percent of Liberians live below $2 per day. In Mozambique and Sierra Leone, only 45 percent of young women are literate. A female at birth in Sub-Saharan Africa can expect to experience no more than 8 years of total schooling throughout her life.

The perennial question in the establishment of charter cities is whether the idea can serve as a source of good rules, promoting good governance through low-cost contract enforcement. Institutional fragility of states across world's least developed countries is largely the economic outcome stemming from wrong development diagnostics, mismatched policy choices and a rigid structure of formal and informal institutional arrangements which resulted in a myriad of bad rules and corrupt political leadership across the specturm of world's poorest countries. The general conclusion from the lessons of development policy is that in the last century, development policy failed to facilitate meaningful prescriptions for a permanent rise of GDP per capita. In particular, the misdiagnosis of essential development dilemma is not a consequence of technical failure in delivering concrete solutions to applied issues of economic development but a consequence of mismatched theoretical foundations which supplied wrong assumptions. Theoretical models of economic growth and development in late 1950s and early 1960s rested on the assumption on output per worker as an increasing and diminishing function of the capital per worker. Although the validity of the neoclassical growth theory remains undisputed, development policy and international aid donors failed to recognize that increasing the amount of aid does not lead to better development outcomes. In fact, the majority of Sub-Saharan countries experienced the relative decline of GDP per capita in the 20th century. In 1913, the GDP per capita of Ghana (in 1990 international dollars) represented 42 percent of the average GDP per capita of European periphery. In 2008, Ghana's GDP per capita represented merely 8 percent of the average GDP per capita of European periphery. By the available statistics, Algeria was the second wealthiest country in Africa, only after South Africa. In 1913, Ghana was the fourth richest society in Africa, only after South Africa, Algeria and Egypt. In 2008, Ghana's GDP per capita was ranked 20th in Africa, in the same range as Angola, Lesotho and Nigeria.

The question surrounding the emergence of the charter city is whether it can serve as a treatment to the contagious sclerosis of fragile institutional structure in failed states, marred by poor governance and the lack of law and order, causing the failure to enforce private contracts as to ensure the rule of law and provide the institutional impetus for sound governance and better formal and informal rules. A notable criticism of the institutional fragility in world's less developed countries pertains to the capture of the state by the political elites. The political elites in world's poorest regions have provided sufficient conditions for the capture of government and judicial system by incorporating a system of powerful informal arrangements through bloated corruption which consequently impaired investment and ultimately resulted in the expropriation of private property rights. The institutional chaos in the most failed states of the world culminated into behavioral adaption to bad rules. The sequence of harmful economic policies eventually seized upon poor development outcomes such as high rates of poverty, stagnating income per capita, low life expectancy and poor health and education indicators.

The foremost task of the charter city should facilitate the institutional decency to enforce private contracts without transaction cost barriers and ensure a robust system of the rule of law since better rules nonetheless depend on how informal institutions such as culture, habits and behavior embrace the virtues of free markets, limited government and the rule of law. Aside from the essential infrastructural arrangements, the provision of institutional conditions for living under a different set of rules does not necessarily imply sufficient prerequisites for the productivity growth that could, in the long run, transform the charter city from low-wage pool of unskilled labor into high-wage urban agglomeration. What is needed for a charter city to flourish is the acceptance of informal institutions of the liberal society such as the freedom of contract and the freedom from corruption. One should not hesitate that economic and personal liberties in world's poorest countries are plagued by predatory rent-seeking political behavior as well as contended against the principles of adherence to formal rules. Without a sensory adherence to these principles, it would be impossible to envisage the charter city as a solution to world poverty and underdevelopment.

For a charter city to provide a clear and cohesive framework of rules, it is essential to provide the credibility and predictability of rules. In early 1950s, Hong Kong was a small island chartered by the British who established a system of credibility over centuries. Hong Kong was the only place where Chinese workers were allowed to migrate from the mainland China. The credibility of the rules, emphasizing limited government over extensive government intervention, free markets over regulated command-and-control economy and the rule of law over political discretion and interest-group politics, proved vital in Hong Kong’s steady economic growth in the 20^th century. In 1950, Hong Kong’s income per capita was around GBP 2,500. By 1997, the average income per capita rose to GBP 20,000.

The idea of building charter cities to boost income per capita by innovative framework of governance is a valuable alternative to the mainstream development policy. First, setting a charter city in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America would encourage seasonal and permanent migration flows from areas with low population density both on domestic and international scale. David McKenzie and John Gibson examined the impact of New Zealand’s Recognized Seasonal Employer program (link), aimed at encouraging seasonal migration from Pacific islands Tonga and Vanuatu to New Zealand, benefitting employers at home. The empirical evidence and policy conclusions suggest that seasonal migration is offering a triple win since a migrant, the sending country and the receiving country benefit from participating in seasonal migration program:

“Nevertheless, there are several caveats to these conclusions. The first is that development is a long-term process, and some of the effects of the RSE may only materialize over many years of community involvement. These could include positive effects such as greater asset-building, investments and skill development if workers return for many seasons, as well as potential longer-term negative effects of continual absence of family members on family and community relations. Secondly, while the gains to households from this seasonal migration are large, they still pale in comparison to the gains from permanent international migration (McKenzie et al, 2010). A key policy issue is therefore the extent to which seasonal migration can or cannot eventually open up avenues for permanent migration. Finally, as with all evaluations, there is the question of how far the policy details and findings can be extrapolated to other settings and that it was developed drawing on lessons from experiences around the world should provide some external validity. As temporary migration programs are increasingly emphasized in policy discussions, there is likely to be plenty of scope for governments and researchers to work together in the future in assessing how well these lessons translate.”

Second, charter cities would nevertheless spur the diffusion of knowledge into the countries of poor regions in the world. In its most distinctive form, charter cities would be similar to the role of small states in the global economy. For instance, consider Mauritius. Back in 1968, when the island gained the political independence from the United Kingdom, the economic prospects of the country were undermined by rapid population growth, rachitic productivity and overdependence on sugar as the only export industry. In addition, trade policy imposed high tariffs and import quotas to protect sugar manufacturers. Since it was impossible to dismantle the barriers to trade, the government of Mauritius responded by creating a virtual special export zone. Any foreign and domestic company could enter and exit the export zone by retaining the profits earned. Companies within the export zone operated under different rules with no trade restrictions such as tariffs, import quotas, voluntary export restraints etc. Hence, the only entry requirement for locating in the special zone was that companies manufacture only for exports as not to compete with domestic markets. The special export zone proved to be a success story. Productivity and employment rates increased sharply, boosting income per capita and standard of living. In 2010, Mauritius’s GDP per capita ($15,500) is the second highest in the region, only behind Gabon ($14,600). The experience of Mauritius with the special export zone and its consequent impact on the economic prosperity of the island, suggests that institutional competition ultimately rewards the institutional structure with better economic outcomes. The entire concept of the charter city is based on encouraging the institutional competition between charter cities and politico-economic systems in poorer countries where charter cities would be most likely to settle. Low initial level of income per capita in charter cities would encourage low-wage employment with unskilled labor. The experience of countries such as Mauritius, Singapore and Hong Kong suggests that favorable institutional features at the beginning stage of development result in better economic policies, ultimately leading to stable economic growth, higher standard of living and better education and health indicators. In Mauritius, the judicial independence from political influence has been enhanced by delegating the highest court of appeal to the British Privy Council, a royal judicial committee (link), full powers of judicial authority.

Many smaller countries in the 20^th century, known for good development outcomes, have adopted roughly similar institutional impetus for economic growth and development. In Africa, countries with the highest level of economic freedom and the lowest perception of corruption, such as Mauritius, Botswana and Namibia, enjoy the highest level of GDP per capita in the African continent. In spite of the abundance of natural resources, Botswana adopted market-friendly economic policies in the second half of the 20^th century, conducive to private enterprise and investment. According to World Bank, it takes 152 hours to pay taxes in Botswana compared to Sub-Saharan average of 315 days. In addition, a claimant in Botswana can expect to recover 63.7 cents per $1 from an insolvent firm compared to 8.4 cents per 1$ in Angola, 16 cents per 1$ in Niger and 0 cents per 1$ in Madagascar.

And third, charter cities would vastly improve the infrastructure of the residents, choosing freely to enter and exit the city. Households in countries such as Guinea still lack the access to electricity, forcing students to do the homework under streetlights and use the car park lights to review school notes (link). Despite being one of the largest receivers of aid per capita, Guinea still suffers from the lack of widespread access to electricity. One could hardly believe that the efforts pledged by international aid donors to reduce poverty and improve the standard of living across the African continent, were not sufficient. What created the black hole, such as the above in Guinea, is the institutional structure plagued by persistent corruption, political cronyism and bad governance, creating bad rules and wrong incentives. Charter cities would ingeniously cure the widespread persistence of misrule and political misconduct since the system of rules would be defined by the founding charter of the city. Good prospects of charter cities would require free entry and exit from the city as well as transparent and honest oversight of the respect for rules by independent judicial authority, managed by a guarantor country such as the United Kingdom, U.S. or Canada. In the proposed form, a typical charter city would become a manufacturing hub. In particular, it would enable access to low labor costs and significant economies of scale to technology entrepreneurs from rich countries as well as transparent contract enforcement, law and order and the security of private property rights. On the other hand, cities would enable millions of people from poor countries to migrate to chartered cities and seek employment opportunities in an environment, safe from corruption, political restraint, violence and bad governance. Hence, charter cities would provide a necessary input to the intellectual competition of ideas in economics, law and political philosophy and elsewhere to be implemented in chartered cities.

The concept enables social scientists and development experts a real-world experiment of ideas. Hence, charter cities could provide a safe haven for prosecuted individuals in poor countries, suffering from judicial errors, physical and military violence or illicit property expropriation. The UN estimates that, over the next few decades, 3 billion people will move to cities. The inflow exerts a growing pressure on urban agglomerations. The lack of basic infrastructure and the continuity of predatory misrule could cause a rapid growth of slums in larger cities which, by and large, are the main source of infectious diseases, HIV prevalence and youth crime since the absence of access to clean water, electricity and education are the major impediment to the improvement of development outcomes in poor countries. A charter city could flourish to become an impulsive alternative to the current state of overdependence on foreign aid. However, it should be unambiguously clear that adherence to good rules and governance requires a bold and decisive change in the set of informal behavior; in which corruption, crime and nepotism are doomed to the fullest possible extent by the full enforcement of private contracts and the rule of law.

Foreign aid and development economics

2011-01-29T11:58:00.000-08:00

The aim of main research agenda of development economics in the last century was to provide an evolving approach to curing the persistence of poverty and underdevelopment in world's least developed and developing countries. High economic growth in developing countries in the last decades has changed many developing nations into middle-income countries. For instance, real economic growth rate in China and India from 1960 onwards averaged 6.67 percent and 3.49 percent, respectively. In 2010, China and India were already classified as lower middle-income countries, belonging to the same income group as El Salvador, Armenia and Philippines. In the recent year, China's GDP per capita was higher than GDP per capita of many high-growing developing nations such as Ukraine, Nambia, Armenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and roughly at the same level as Algeria. Over the last decade, the economic growth in developing countries accelerated, driven by an increase in global commodity prices, robust investment rates, expansionary monetary policy and a growing domestic consumption. The economic growth in a majority of African states stagnated, consequently leading to a decrease in the overall standard of living. Between 1960 and 2009, average real GDP growth was negative in countries such as Congo, Democratic Republic (-2.26 percent), Liberia (-1.51 percent), Niger (-1.02 percent), Zambia (-0.52 percent) and Zimbabwe (-0.02 percent) with many other African countries with little or no growth in the second half of the 20th century. The stagnation of income per capita in countries such as Sierra Leone is largely the result of civil war and severe political instability, creating domestic violence and the persistence of poverty, malnutrition and AIDS/HIV prevalence. From the second half of the 20th century onwards, international aid donors have contributed significant amounts of foreign developmental assistance in various forms such as medical care and vaccination against polio, AIDS/HIV, measles and malaria, direct cash transfers and physical infrastructure. Despite significant official and unofficial developmental assitance from international aid donors, dispersion of real income per capita, measuring the level of cross-country convergence or divergence of income per capita, the gap in economic development widened in the course of the last century. In 2010, the percentage of countries with the level of real GDP per capita $1,500 or below equaled almost 20 percent (link).

The rise of development economics in the 20th century was a natural response to growing disparities in income per capita between rich and poor countries. In the framework of neoclassical theory, development economics emerged from a neoclassical growth theory, pioneered by the famous Solow-Swan model. In the simplest possible form, the growth of output per capita depends on the capital per worker and the initial level of output under stable rate of national saving and capital depreciation. Assuming diminishing returns to scale and constant rate of population growth, the increase in capital per worker would increase the output per worker that would, hence, approach its steady-state equilibrium. Theoretical notions of the Solow-Swan model were tested against the empirical data on economic growth. The key assumption of the neoclassical growth model is that poor countries would tend to catch-up rich countries, assuming higher output growth in poor countries. The convergence of income per capita would imply a neg relationship between the initial level of output per capita and output growth over time. Thus, countries with lower levels of output per capita in the initial period would experience faster rates of output growth. Consequently, the output per capita and the standard of living would approach to the level in rich countries. The empirical tests of the Solow-Swan model failed to confirm the theoretical hypothesis since economic growth rates in 20th century in developed countries were higher compared to developing countries. The divergence of income per capita led to the subsequent modifications of the Solow-Swan model. In fact, the main criticism of the model points out that the model itself failed to capture the role of technological progress in determining the level of output per worker. The mysterious growth episode in Japan and other East Asian nations posed a difficult question. How can a country with low initial level of output per worker at the end of the WW2, exceed the productivity level in rich countries? The obvious answer is that Solow-Swan growth model failed to capture the role of technology shocks which violate the assumption of diminishing capital returns, what could explain why initially poor countries subsequently converged to the level of productivity in rich countries and then exceeded the level. The phenomenon, known as growth residual, has subsequently reduced the predictive power of the Solow-Swan model since a considerable share of economic growth was not ascribed to capital and labor inputs but rather to the persistent role of technological change.

Policy implications from Solow-Swan model imply that the essential requirement to boost economic growth in a country with low initial level of output per capita is to increase the amount of capital per worker, namely by boosting public and private investment in infrastructure. From 1950s onwards, World Bank had repeatedly boosted the growth of infrastructure by facilitating developmental assistance into world's least developed countries. According to the neoclassical growth theory, higher capital-labor ratio would provide additional investment stimulus, thereby increasing the employment-to-population ratio. Proponents of the foreign aid provided the rationale for higher foreign aid spending by the analogy of post-WW2 Europe when Marshall Plan provided $13 billion, or roughly $100 billion in today's prices, to Western European economies to recover the physical infrastructure which had been destroyed during WW2. Marshall Plan intervention was rather short, quick and finite. The efficacy of foreign aid in Africa is questionable since little or no growth occured in many African states such as Burundi, Benin, Zimbabwe and Congo. Official forecasts from the United Nations from 1950s onwards, based on the famous Harrod-Domar growth model (link), often assumed a rapid increase in the level of GDP per capita in response to the increase in investment rates. The forecasts, based on the theoretical assumption of diminishing capital returns, predicted a persistent convergence of GDP per capita to the level sustained in richer countries. The fact that the launch of extensive investment in infrastructure resulted in further economic stagnation of many African states, has questioned both the validity and quality of prescriptions laid by the mainstream development economics.

The philosophy of the mainstream development economics was sharply criticized in the light of the fact that foreign aid failed to alleviate poverty and made the growth of African economies slower. The efforts by the World Bank have been diverted from correct diagnosis of the developmental issues in African states to repeated initiatives such as the commitment of the international community to increase the share of foreign aid to least-developed countries to at least 1 percent of the GDP. The criticism of the mainstream development economics was already formulated in 1958 when Mont Pelerin Society organized the 9th meeting and development economics seminar where professor Herbert Frankel of the Nuttfield College put forth the criticism of foreign aid and the failure of development economics:

"The lesson that flows from it is that it does pay to go to these remote areas and find out what the problem is, instead of assuming that one knows the problem before one begins. Until recent years, people have simply assumed in many of these territories in Africa, that there were no real, positive signs of enterprise among the indigenous population, which was supposed to be so uninstructed or inert that it was not able to fend for itself, experiment for itself, or improve itself. It was not realised that a reason why there was this apparent lack of initiative in the population was that there were serious customary or legal obstacles to the exercise of ordinary enterprise, even on a small scale."

Given the lack of the comprehensive diagnosis of the causes of underdevelopment in African countries, the mainstream development economics failed to capture the appropriate assumptions in the theoretical models of economic development, upon which developmental assistance was justified. A more reasonable theoretical solution to the economic stagnation and social conflict in Africa has been put forth by the human capital theory. In its broadest and most general form, the theory stated that the economic stagnation of African countries is a consequence of the lack of skills and investment in education that could provide the necessary input to increase the economic growth and, subsequently, alleviate the issues of AIDS/HIV, malaria, child malnutrition and domestic violence. There is no doubt that the growth of education initiatives in Africa has sent many children to school. In addition, many universities in Western Europe and the United States have expanded the initiative and offered students from African states preferential admission criteria in various forms such as graduate fellowships, student grants and lower required standardized test scores, to boost admission rates of African nationals at U.S. universities. The efforts of developed countries to bring educational initiatives to Africa encouraged school participation as well as international opportunities of African citizens to study abroad, even at world's most prestigious and highly-ranked universities. Notwithstanding the importance of education in creating the stock of human capital for the wealth of nations, educational initiatives should address the essential obstacles that creates the failure of African expatriates to return to home countries, hence, bring skills, knowledge and various other forms of human capital, which are essential to the process of long-run growth, the issues of labor market distortions in African countries. These distortions crucially impede the ability of young African graduates to matching jobs in regional labor market.

What the mainstream development economics failed to take into account is the institutional paralysis which prevails in a majority of African countries, plagued by the destructive tribal institutions based on widespread corruption, bribes and domestic violence as means of achieving political power. The prevalence of hybrid institutions, marred by the complete absence of the rule of law and judicial institutions that could facilitate efficient contract enforcement and the protection of private property rights, is not only a severe obstacle to higher economic growth but also the apparent mechanism that captures the set of explanatory features that could possibly account for what caused the misdiagnosis of the African development dilemma. Back in 2002, African Union estimated that each year, corruption costs African economies more than $148 billion or 25 percent of Africa's GDP. The significance of corruption in state structures in Africa manifests itself in poor quality and provision of public services, the absence of judicial independence from political regimes, cumbersome contract enforcement and unprotected private property rights. Such distortions impede the level of trust and provide evolving incentives to subvert the institutional independence into political cronyism, in which corruption substitutes the tax system through bribes and extortion as methods of lowering transaction costs in overcoming the malfunctioning of the judicial system. In 1978, Erwin Blumenthal of the central bank of the Federal Republic of Germany, warned the international community that "Zaire's political system is so corrupt that there's no prospect for Zaire's creditors to get their money back." (link)

The advancement of country's economic prospects requires not only transparent, sound and efficient regulations but, more importantly, highly efficient civil service. In 2010, Transparency International published Corruption Perception Index (link) by measuring the persistence of corruption in public sectors across the world. The findings showed that the vast majority of poor African countries were plagued by extensive and extortionate corruption and ranked in the bottom 20 percent of the distribution. Comparing the level bureaucracy against GDP per capita reveals the amplified evidence of the negative correlation between the efficiency of civil service and the GDP per capita. The ease of doing business in Africa in countries such as Botswana, Ghana, Mauritius and South Africa is remarkably easier with predictable, stable and efficient regulation, compared to countries such as Burundi, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire etc. where highly burdensome administrative procedures in doing business hamper capital formation and restrain productive investment in health-care, education and private-sector infrastructure that could provide the impetus to economic growth.

The relationship between the amount of foreign aid, received by the least-developed countries, and the scope of corruption as a rough approximation of the institutional quality in the least-developed states, could provide the answer to the question whether international donors consider the scope and significance of corruption in allocating the amount of foreign aid. The experience from the last century of development policy, suggest that international donors actually allocated more foreign aid to the countries, suffering from severe state failure, widespread corruption, government failure and the complete absence of judicial independence that could provide a system of checks and balances and the necessary restraint on the violiation of private property rights, extortion and violence by the political elites. In 1999, Alberto Alesina and Beatrice Weder (see "Do Corrupt Governments Receive Less Foreign Aid," American Economic Review, 92(4), pp. 1126-1137) found that, contrary to arguments of aid supporters, foreign aid is not used to reward good governments since more corrupt governments received more foreign aid and official development assistance from international donors. The most striking evidence, presented by Alesina and Weder, suggests that U.S donors seem to neglect the persistence of corruption in allocating foreign aid to poor countries while, on the other hand, Scandinavian donors deem the persistence of corruption as highly important, hence, rewarding governments with lower extent of corruption.

In the following graph, I estimated the impact of corruption on official development assitance in the sample of 41 least-developed countries in 2008. In the model, I set the official development assitance to be determined by the scope of corruption in least-developed countries. The official development assitance is expressed as a share of representative country's gross national income (GNI) for it provides a better measure of aid dependence than foreign aid per capita since the size of population is controlled by the main assumptions of the model. The data on official development assistance were download from World Bank's World Development Indicators (link). The data on the extent of corruption in least-developed countries were provided by Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perception Index (link). The extent of corruption varies from 1 to 10, where lower values indicate more persistent corruption. I estimated whether countries with more corrupt governments receive a higher share of foreign aid from international donors. On the basis of 41 least-developed countries, sample estimates suggest that a 1 point improvment in corruption perception index tends to decrease, on average, the share of foreign aid in gross national income, on average, by 2.37 percentage points. Sample estimate of the slope coefficient is statistically significant at 5 percent level. Even though, the variation in corruption perception index accounts for 5.51 percent of the variation in official development assitance, the influence of the extent of corruption on the share of foreign aid in gross national income is not spurious but systematic and persistent.

Corruption and official development assistance

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2010. Transparency International, Corruption Perception Index, 2008.

The estimate suggests that international donors indeed reward more corrupt governments by increasing the share of official development assitance. In 2002, African Union estimated that corruption was costing the African continent $150 billion per year. The estimates of the total cost of corruption provide an ample evidence that, over the last century, international donors consistently allocated foreign aid to more corrupt governments, creating aid-dependent economies, prone to bloated bureaucracies and extractive institutions which subsequently led to the stagnation of income per capita in the last decades. An ample criticism of foreign aid initiative was put forth by Dambisa Moyo (link) in the WSJ two years ago: "The most obvious criticism of aid is its links to rampant corruption. Aid flows destined to help the average African end up supporting bloated bureaucracies in the form of the poor-country governments and donor-funded non-governmental organizations."

The consequence of rootedness of corruption and extractive political institutions in African tribal cultures can be, in a considerable part, drawn upon the colonial heritage that spread throughout the African continent from 19th century onwards. The colonial experience across the African continent (link) served not only as a conquest of newly discovered areas but, moreover, also as an experiment of developing political and economic institutions on the basis of European influence. The colonial heritage in Africa was mainly derived from the European occupation of African lands. Hereto, the presence of European colonisers in Africa provided a long-lasting foundation of the institutional lessons from which the African states went forth.

Given the heterogenity of the European perspectives on institutional development, the colonial period in Africa left a long-lasting impact on the economic and political development in Africa. Africa's richest countries, namely Botswana, South Africa and Mauritius, were influenced tremendously by the colonial heritage. In Botswana and South Africa, the colonial influence of English and Dutch on further economic development was mainly derived from setting strong institutional foundations of economic development such as the rule of law, judicial independence and limited government compared to other African states. Apart from the setting of formal institutions, fostering contract enforcement and the integrity of the political institutions, English and Dutch colonizers provided the establishment of cultural setting not prone to fraud, extortion and extractive institutions. Favorable institutional conditions furthered the advertance of trust and institutional efficiency, which are deemed essential in fostering the development of financial markets. Even the German presence in Namibia from 1884 to 1915 during Deutsch-Südwestafrika (link) fostered, to a certain extent, independent judiciary, relatively sound institutions and cohesive framework of the rule of law. As a result, Nambia retained the status of one of the least corrupt countries in Africa, known for relatively high degree of economic freedom in a regional comparison with other African states.

While the influence of German, English and Dutch colonizers was largely beneficial to African countries from the perspective of economic growth and development over the last century, the presence of French, Italian and Belgian colonizers arises serious concerns over the prospects of economic development across the African continent. The myraid of violence, in countries such as Congo Dem. Rep. and Somalia, which ultimately led to civil wars and the settlement of extractive institutions, largely reflects the innate ability of the colonial policies to provide the necessary conditions for the institutional integrity, the rule of law and stringent property rights that could underline the basis of economic development by restraining the power and domination of political elites and their ability to expropriate private property rights in pursuit of extractive monopoly rents from natural resources. That easily explains why countries such as Congo, Zambia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, in spite of vast reserves of natural resources, were seized by the state capture of political elites. The colonial presence largely determined the size and scope of aid dependency in African states. The most plausible and persuasive explanation of the impact of European colonial policies in African countries was presented by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and David Robinson (see "Disease and Development" Journal of European Economic Association, 1(2/3), pp. 397-405):

"European colonists were much more likely to develop institutions of private property, encouraging economic and social development, in places where they settled. In contrast, in places where they did not settle, they were more likely to opt for extractive institutions, designed to extract resources without investing in institutional development. In these places, institutions were highly centralized, with political power concentrated in the hands of small elites and with almost no checks on this elite. The property rights and more general rights of the majority of the population were not protected."

The political and economic circumstances of the European institutional legacy in African states imparted aid dependency on those countries where the combination of tribal institutions, hostile to free enterprise and judicial restraint of political dictatorships, and unequivocally detrimental colonial policies dominated the development of political and economic institutions, setting the rules of the game. Therefore, the inability of many African societies to establish sensible and effective institutions resulted in the political capture of the state by the elites. The monopoly power of the political elites, enforcing anti-growth public policies, led to consistently poor economic outcomes, plagued by high rates of poverty and infectious diseases such as polio, malaria and measles.

The challenge of development economics is not to design aid schemes, which inevitably lead to aid dependency, marred by persistent corruption and political fraud, but to ascertain correct diagnosis of why foreign aid repeatedly resulted in the poor economic outcomes and the consequent stagnation of income per capita in many African states in 20th century. The failure of African societies to establish a rigorous system of incentives, which could significantly improve economic outcomes, is not a response to market failures (which deemed highly of early development economics) but a result of severe government failure to establish effective institutions of the rule of law, contract enforcement and stringent property rights. These institutions are the broadest foundations of economic development and the only viable alternative to political nepotism and the power of elites which, as poor development outcomes in Africa show, ultimately impose extractive institutions, causing the persistence of poverty and underdevelopment.

Artificial states

2011-01-12T07:06:00.000-08:00

The question of the artificial states has recently been brought up by the referendum in Southern Sudan on whether the southern part of the country should declare political independence from the northern part of the country. An article in New York Times (link) succintly discussed few notable fact-checked evidence of the increasing ethnic, political and economic North-South division within the country. As a single country, Sudan performed terribly in development outcomes. According to CIA World Factbook (link), the country suffers from high rates of extreme poverty and illiteracy. For instance, the official share of population below poverty line is estimated at 40 percent - almost twice the average of North African states. In addition to poor development outcomes, the country is plagued by significant political and ethnic fragmentation into largely Muslim, Arab-speaking north and predominantly Christain, English-speaking south. The political independence of South Sudan is the only contemporary evidence of the re-establishment of land borders alongside the ethnic division.

In the recent paper entitled Artificial States, Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski presented two formal measures of artificial states. Aside from the measure of ethnic division, the authors constructed the measure of straightness of border lines. The hypothesis suggests that squiggly geographic border lines separate the states alongside the ethnic division. On the contrary, straight border lines suggest increase the probability of the emergence of artificial states plagued by ethnic and linguistic fractioning. The authors presented the empirical evidence, suggesting that fractional land borders are highly correlated with the GDP per capita. In addition, the share of ethnically partitioned population within the country is systematically decreasing the GDP per capita in cross-country comparison. The intuitive ideas behind the empirical evidence suggest that at the end of colonial period, colonizers that set straight borderlines between the emerging countries incured significant economic cost to newly formed African countries in terms of lost GDP. The evidence from Alesina-Easterly-Matuszeski study suggest that a 1 percentage point increase in the fraction of country's population belonging to groups partitioned by the border would decrease the GDP per capita by 1.3 percent. On the other hand, countries with squiggly geographic borderlines enjoy significantly higher GDP per capita.

The post-colonial period in Sudan was characterized by two civil wars which outbroke in 1972 and 1983. In 1956, Sudan gained the political independence from Great Britain. Contemporary borderlines were predominantly determined by the colonial authorities in African states prior to the wave of independence of many African nations. The emergence of the artificial states is rather a consequence of poor colonial policies than of high bargaining cost of ethnic groups within the country in setting country borderlines. Hence, the economic effects of colonial legacy can persist over time. Consider the evidence from Cameroon. The country was originally colonized by Germany. During the World War I, Northern Cameroon was occupied by Germany while the rest of the country was colonized by the French. Between 1916 and 1960, the country was a unique experiment of how the establishment of the institutional setting of European countries affects domestic development outcomes. A recent study by Alexander Lee and Kenneth Schultz (link) suggests that in the areas formerly occupied by the British enjoy higher levels of wealth and improved access to clean water while the rest of the rural country, after having been colonized by the French, suffers from significantly hindered access to clean water and worse provision of public goods. Even though the colonial patterns do not apply to urban areas, lessons from Cameroon suggest that the impact of post-independence public policies and colonial legacy on the level of wealth is of the same importance even when linguistic and ethnic fragmentation persists over time.

In spite of considerable degree of inefficiency, the persistence of inefficient and ethnically fragmented states is continuously marked by poor economic and development outcomes, often accompanied by civil-war conflicts such as military violence and genocide by the Sudanese army in Darfur. An interesting theory has been recently put forth by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Ticchi and Andrea Vindigni (link) who suggest that rich political elites seize state capture and democratic politics by expanding the size of bureaucracy. Hence, to gain political support, the coalition of elites chooses an inefficient structure and organization of the state.

The phenomenon of artificial states is not abridged to least-developed countries and developing world. Even in the group of advanced countries, several countries emerged despite a considerable degree of linguistic, ethnic and cultural fractioning within country borders. The evidence from Switzerland suggests that a continuous transition to a peaceful and stable democracy is possible. Amid highly fragmented linguistic and cultural characteristics such as four official languages and the persistence of GDP per capita divergence between high-income German cantons and low-income French cantons, Switzerland is characterized by envious political stability and economic performance. The genuine feature of federal political system is a consistent fiscal decentralization such as jurisdictional competition between units within the federalized structure in various areas such as taxation, regulation, health care etc. Hence, a decentralized fiscal structure and division of powers require a limited federal government and a high degree of autonomy within the federation. Thus, despite a multilingual population, the Swiss model of federalism is marked by political stability, peace and prosperity.

The phenomenon of artificial states in advanced countries is not confined to Switzerland itself. What distinguishes the Swiss model of federalism from centralist political systems in its neighboring countries is a high degree of political autonomy in Swiss cantons. Competition between jurisdictions within the federation nonetheless generates different economic outcomes. However, the outcomes generated by jurisdictional competition preclude adverse effects caused by either state capture of democratic politics or redistributive taxation between jurisdictions. In Switzerland, cantons with favorable public policies such as low tax rates on labor and capital, sound regulation and competitive provision of health care, have enjoyed persistently higher levels of wealth compared to cantons in the rest of the country. Of course, the coexistence of diverse ethnic and lingual groups within the single state requires common values, integrated into formal institutions.

Contrary to common perception, the artificial state may not be characterized exclusively by ethnic and linguistic fragmentation. To a large extent, Germany and Belgium could be classifed as artificial states. In Belgium, Flemmish-speaking north of the country consistently outperformed French-speaking south on various indicators and outcomes, including income per capita, international test scores and employment-to-population ratio. The political and linguistic division of Belgium into high-income Flemmish part and less developed French part reflects the essential dilemma of artificial states - should a single country with fragmented and heterogenous population be abandonded and whether ethnicity borders should represent country borderlines. In fact, linguistic fragmentation of Belgium to the extent that Flemmish and French part of the country adopted different administrative and education systems, led to persistent inability of two majorities to form a government. In 2007, The Economist opined that Belgium should cease to exist. The unification of Germany (Wiedervereinigung) integrated two parts of the country with vastly different institutional setting into a single political unity. However, Eastern and Western Germany were known for completely different political and economic system. The unification has incured many adverse effects. A significant difference in wage and price levels between East Germany and West Germany caused continuous migration of East German labor into West Germany, thus decreasing the productivity growth in East Germany. Consequently, the unification of the country led to the adoption of West Germany level of prices and wages in Eastern part of the new country. The artificial increase in price-wage level increased the unemployment rate in Eastern Germany to double-digit level, not least triggered brain-drain and capital flight. Hence, the unification of Germany as an artificial state resulted in persistent income per capita divergence between high-income West Germany and low-income East Germany. The unification of Germany into a single country should indeed never happen. In fact, adverse effects of the unification on East German productivity and wages would not lead to continuous increase in unemployment rate. If East Germany maintained a high degree of political autonomy, the transition to market economy would not be restrained by the adoption of West German price-wage level that could not be sustained by low productivity level in East Germany. To avoid the pitfalls of the artificial states, West and East Germany would be better off, had the countries never been reunified.

Recent national referendum in South Sudan on whether the southern part of the country should declare political independence from Sudan again pondered over the persistence of artificial states. The empirical evidence on poor development outcomes in several African countries suggests that borderlines, disregarding the ethnic distribution of the population within the country, are highly correlated with low income per capita. The unique solution of the artificial states is the adoption of political federalism. Under fiscal decentralization and limited government, federalism enables peaceful and prosperous existence of fragmented ethnic and linguistic structure in a single state. For instance, former Yugoslavia, known for highly fragmented ethnic, linguistic and economic disparities, ceased to exist not because federalism would not be a genuine political system but, ultimately, because of severe economic mismanagement, powerful and centralized government that disdained the principles of political autonomy and market economy, causing severe hyperinflation and the collapse of the federation that eventually resulted in a decade of civil wars and military violence. The evidence from Yugoslavia suggests that between 1950 and 1990, drastic economic divergence occured. The lesson suggests that the essential condition for the efficiency of federalism as a political system is high political autonomy and fiscal decentralization, both of which enable the competition between public policies.

Amid linguistic fragmentation, the competition between jurisidictions rewards competitive public policies by higher income per capita which ultimately boost the inception of public policies in less developed parts of the federation. Hence, without jurisdictional competition and political autonomy, ethnic and linguistic fragmention of the country may ultimately result in political instability which, in addition, generates poor economic outcomes.

Student performance and economic growth

2011-01-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

The 2009 PISA test study (link) of students' proficiency in reading, mathematics and science is a highly successful method of evaluating student performance across countries. In fact, the creation of human capital is the main endogenous feature of the long-run economic growth since the quality of schooling and education system are essential to the creation of human capital. The difference in GDP per capita across countries is both intuitive, theoretical and empirical challenge to search for the causes of the gap between the economic performance of nations.

PISA test scores are aimed mainly at the evaluation of student knowledge at primary and secondary level in the fields of reading, mathematics and science. The assessment of knowledge in a particular field is subdivided into six different proficiency levels, ranging from 1 to 6. For instance, students at the 1st reading proficiency level are characterized by innate recognition of simple ideas reinforced in the text while students at the 6th reading proficiency level are characterized by a full capability of making multiple inferences, comparisons and contrasts and integrating the ideas presented in the text into a coherent conceptual framework of abstract ideas, sound evaluation and reflection. While 98.6 percent of OECD students can perform reading tasks at level 1, only 1.1 percent of students across OECD countries can perform reading tasks at the highest proficiency level. In addition, 28.4 percent of students in OECD countries exceeded the 4th (mid-range) reading proficiency level.

The reading scale has been further divided in reading continuous and non-continuous texts. However, the evidence suggest no systematic difference in reading scores between the two fields. Countries with the highest performance, measured as mean score, in reading rank are Korea (89.8 percent), Finland (89.3 percent) and Canada (87.3 percent). Countries with the largest student populations such as United States, United Kingdom and France were ranked in the upper-middle range while percent, and Israel (79 percent), Luxembourg (78.6 percent) and Austria (78.3 percent) are the lowest-ranking high-income countries on the reading scale in the 2009 PISA assessment. In the field of mathematics, 8 percent of students in OECD countries perform below level 1, 31.4 percent of students can perform mathematical tasks at 4th (mid-range) proficiency level while 3.1 percent of students perform at the highest proficiency level. In the country distribution, the percentage of students in the 6th proficiency level is the highest in Korea and Switzerland (8 percent), Japan, Belgium and New Zealand (5 percent). In a regional distribution, more than 25 percent of students in Shanghai perform at the highest level of mathematical proficiency. The proportion of students in the 6th proficiency level is very high in Singapore, Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong - 15.6 percent, 11.3 percent and 10.8 percent respectively. In addition, performance disparity in mathematics varied significantly across countries. Less than 1 percent of students in Mexico, Chile, Greece and Ireland reached 6th proficiency level A brief overview of the main empirical findings suggests a rather rigorous disparities in country ranking and performance.

The assessment of student performance in science is similar to the distribution of mean scores in the field of mathematics. About 5 percent of students perform below 1st proficiency level. In addition, only 29.4 percent of the students in OECD countries is proficient at 4th (mid-range) proficiency level in science while an average 1.1 percent of students in OECD countries can perform at the highest level of scientific literacy. In addition, the percentage of students below the lowest level of scientific proficiency is highly negatively correlated with country ranking since the proportion of students below the 1st level is the lowest in Finland (8.3 percent), Korea (6.3 percent), Estonia (8.3 percent) and Canada (9.6). Higher country ranking would thus indicate a lower proportion of students below the 1st proficiency level. All of the aforementioned countries ranked in the highest 10 percent of the distribution. If Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao and Taipei were independent countries, their respective ranking in the field of scientific literacy would be in the top 10 percent of the distribution.

The empirical data on the distribution of mean scores in reading, mathematics and science are highly relevant to the measurement of human capital since the impact of mean scores on economic growth would differ to the certain extent from other measures of human capital. Recent attempts to capture the effect of human capital on economic growth were aimed at the definition of human capital as total years of primary, secondary and tertiary schooling. For instance, Robert Barro and Jong Wha Lee have collected disaggregated data on the total years of schooling for 146 countries between 1950 and 2005 at five-year intervals (link). The empirical evidence from the country panel suggests a strong linkage between schooling and long-run economic growth and institutional country features (link). In addition, Barro and Lee estimated the implicit return from an additional year of schooling ranging from 5 percent to 12 percent.

Gary Becker (link) and Richard Posner (link) recently discussed the 2009 PISA findings and the impact of cultural, genetic and demographic disparities on mean test scores in the United States. United States ranked in the middle of the mean score distribution. The rank of the United States (17th out of 79 countries) is above average in reading and average rank in mathematics (31st out of 79 countries) and science (23rd out of 79 countries). As Becker and Posner indicate, the relative performance of the United States should be evaluated with the consideration of cultural and demographic differences since the mean score of White and Asian students is significantly higher than the mean score of African American and Hispanic students. Disparities in mean scores between different demographic groups are typical in largely heterogenous populations. In Belgium, the regional disparity in mean scores between French and Flemish communities is even more striking. While the mean score in mathematics in 2006 in Flemish community had beenabove the OECD average, the mean score in mathematics of students in French community had been 18.56 points below the OECD average while the mean score of students in Flemish community had been 30 points above the OECD average. In 2009, such a relative difference would place French community in the rank of Italy, Portugal and Spain. On the other hand, student performance in Flemish-speaking community would reach the rank of Canada, Switzerland and Japan.

In the U.S, the demographic disparities in mean scores in reading, mathematics and science do not reflect the quality of the American education system. While the overall quality of the public and private American high school education system raised considerable concerns in previous performance of U.S. students in international mathematics and science ranking, the ranking of U.S. universities in science, mathematics and social sciences is the highest in the world. The output U.S. universities resulted in the highest number of Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics as well as into cutting-edge accomplishments in R&D and technology. The emphasis on creativity and innovative thinking embodied in the American education system has enabled the United States to emerge as a world leader in technology, R&D, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The openness of the U.S. education system to international students, ideas and creative thinking could account for the remarkable achievements and academic quality of top American universities. On the other hand, poor teacher quality in American high school system is detrimental to the reading and quantitative literacy of American high school graduates, as a consequence of what Becker calls "teaching-to-the-test" syndrom where many public school teachers teach students topics not relevant to the command of knowledge but to the tests since test scores presumably determine teacher pay. Eric Hanushek of Hoover Institution recently found (link) that replacing bottom 5-8 percent of high school teachers with average teachers could near the United States on top of the international mathematics and science ranking. In addition, the measure is worth $100 trillion according to Hanushek (2010).

In the international perspective, student performance has been viewed as a significant determinant of the difference in cross-country economic performance. Recent paper by Atherton, Appleton and Bleaney (2010) found that higher mean test scores in mathematics, reading and science significantly improve per capita GDP. The authors showed that holding per capita income constant, average years of schooling is less important than mean test scores in predicting the economic growth. The 2009 PISA study highlighted the relationship between international test scores and economic growth. The evidence suggests almost non-existent correlation between reading performance and GDP per capita and cumulative education expenditure. The evidence simply suggests that socioeconomic variables matter more for reading performance than simple and often inconclusive aggregate indicators. In analysing the impact of various social and economic variables on reading performance, the results suggest a high correlation between parents' education and children's reading performance. For instance, 1 percentage point increase in the percentage of the population aged 35-44 with tertiary education returns 1.36 point increase in average reading performance where parents' education accounts for 44 percent of the variation in children's reading performance. The impact is shown in the following graph.

Parents' education and student reading performance

Source: OECD, PISA 2009.

A brief look also reveals another striking implication: cross-country reading performance is strongly affected by social and cultural status of the child's parents. A simple estimate of the relationship between reading performance and socio-economic status suggests that 1 percentage point increase in the share of students with very low social, cultural and economic status tends to decrease the average reading score by 1.13 points. Hence, social, economic and cultural status explains about 46 percent of the variation in student reading performance.

A considerable improvement of primary and secondary education system is vitally essential to the long-run economic growth. International test scores are an important method of evaluating international disparities in student performance and the subsequent impact on economic growth. Modern knowledge-driven economy requires not only intelligence, attentiveness but also comprehensive, integrated and developed social skills. Low reading, mathematics and science performance is generally attributed to student's low social, cultural and economic status. Genetic, cultural and socioeconomic variables, rather than education expenditure and GDP per capita, tend to play a major role in early childhood development as a basis of future student performance.

The economic and social future of countries requires considerable investment in children and student. Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago brilliantly argued in Heckman equation (link) why the most gainful benefit of early childhood development is increased social productivity, greater motivation and developmental stimulation that every child needs. Our society should be not neglect an indisputable fact that early childhood development is a major determinant of student performance which sets the conditions for future advantage in school, college, career and life in general. Without these essential measures, student performance would suffer heavily from the spread of crime, teenage violence and high dropout rates.

The evidence from the 2009 PISA study suggests that higher quality of the education system is a necessary condition for higher test scores in reading, mathematics and science. As the evidence suggests, that the quality of human capital is strongly associated with higher standard of living. Without a prudent step towards improving developmental stimulation of students, considerably low student performance may seriously harm the prospects of future generations.

Can the Eurozone survive?

2010-12-26T07:25:00.000-08:00

The ongoing difficulties in overcoming the persistence of debt-to-GDP ratio in EU countries highlight the question whether the European Monetary Union can survive the set of shocks which prevailed since the 2008/2009 economic and financial crisis. Recently, European Commission has prested the 2010 review of public finances in EMU (link), suggesting that macroeconomic outlook for Eurozone economies has deteriorated in the light of a growing debt-to-GDP ratio.

The launch of government bailouts in various European countries has added considerable amount to the stock of public debt across the Eurozone. Since 2008/2009, general government balance in Eurozone countries has continually resulted in persistent government deficits which further added to the stock of debt. Since public debt is by definition the sum of previous deficits, the European macroeconomic outlook suffers significantly from downgraded stability of public debt.

The anatomy of sluggish economic recovery in Eurozone consists of different set of economic policies. Countries at the European periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain) seem to be hit most by the sluggish economic recovery. From the viewpoint of macreconomic stability, the economic policymakers in these countries have pursued the most discretionary economic policies to mitigate the effects of decline in GDP on employment, earnings and tax revenues. In addition, highly expansionary monetary policy by the European Central Bank provided a bulk of quantitative easing, resulting flooding liquidity to supplement the interbank lending and, hence, to contain the effect of overleveraged financial sector on macroeconomic stability. In Ireland, income per capita in 2010 notably decline back to 2004 level (link). As I previously emphasized in one of my previous posts (link), the depth of the economic crisis in Ireland is largely attributed to the overleveraged banking sector, vulnerable to the interbank interest rate increases. Since the sovereign CDS spread on Ireland exceeded 500 basis points in late September this year, the Irish public finance outlook deteriorated significantly in the light of the innate ability of the Irish government to bailout Anglo-Irish Bank. Recently, the IMF estimated (link) that by 2012, Irish debt-to-GDP ratio would reach 67 percent, up from 12 percent in 2005.

A prudent reduction in debt-to-GDP would be accomplished only under restrictive fiscal policy based on the reduction in government spending and a permanent fiscal rule on budget surplus at a given target level. If Irish government set the surplus target at 3 percent of GDP in the next ten years, debt-to-GDP ratio could be considerably reduced within the range of Maastricht fiscal criteria.

The macroeconomic outlook in peripheral countries suffers from high fiscal expenditures and rigid labor market institutions. By 2012, Portugal's debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to reach nearly 85 percent of GDP. In addition to soaring public debt, the Mediterranean part of the EMU suffers heavily from high unemployment rate. Eurostat recently reported that, by October 2010, the unemployment rate in Spain reached an astonishing 20.7 percent. Double-digit unemployment rate in Spain, Greece (12.2 percent) and Portugal (11 percent) hamper the economic recovery since, in the past, these countries exercised expansionary fiscal policy and the policy of automatic stabilizers to mitigate the effects of high unemployment on aggregate consumption decline. In the aftermath of financial crisis, these countries experienced recessionary output gap in which economic contraction is marred by unchanged inflationary pressures.

Since EMU countries withheld domestic currencies and adhered the adoption of the Euro, the macroeconomic adjustment to the recovery is possible only by a prudent fiscal policy. High unemployment rates and a persistent divergence of economic policies in EMU countries could substantially increase discretionary fiscal policies that would eventually result in the serious possibility of country default. The economic crisis in Greece resulted in 11 percent cumulative GDP decline between 2010 and 2012. In the same period, government net debt is expected to reach the 120 percent of GDP thresold. A divergence between Member States towards highly discretionary fiscal policy would probably alleviate the persistence of high unemployment but at the expense of bold increase in the rate of inflation as well as in the persistence of debt-to-GDP ratio and large government imbalances. Hence, the survival of the Eurozone would depend on the ability of EU Member States to adjust government balance by reducing fiscal expenditure and adopt the fiscal rule to pursue fiscal surplus in the coming years as to reduce the stock of public debt.

Even though a common fiscal policy could accomplish the goals of stabilization policy, the mitigation of fiscal asymmetries would be easily accomplished by labor market integration. A currency union between different countries implies integrated and assimilated labor markets under relatively homogenous preferences. It would be nearly impossible to envision the European Monetary Union without these key macroeconomic features.

Bush tax cuts and economic growth

2010-11-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

In 2001 and 2003, former U.S president George W. Bush signed Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act (EGTRAA) and Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRAA). EGTRAA reduced personal income tax rates, increased child tax credit, decreased estate tax and introduced a various range of tax-favored retirement savings plans. In 2003 when EGTRAA was enacted, the Congress cut the top capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 15 percent while the individual dividend tax rate was reduced from 35 percent to 15 percent.

Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011. Hence, a bold increase in marginal tax rates is expected. David Leonhardt recently asked whether the Bush tax cuts were good for economic growth amid the fact that under Bush administration, the U.S economic growth was the lowest since the World War II. Eight years of Bush administration were known for the largest expansion of federal government spending compared to the six preceding presidents. In eight years, President Bush increased discretionary federal outlays by 104 percent compared to 11 percent increase under President Clinton.

Under Bush tax cuts, the reduction in personal income tax rates was imposed across all income brackets. Tax Policy Center estimated that extending Bush tax cuts in 2011 would increase the after-tax income across all income quintiles but it differed substantially. For instance, the increase in after-tax income in the lowest quintile would represent 12.19 percent of the increase in after-tax income of the highest quintile. The average federal tax rate would decrease by 2.5 percentage points. The reduction in average federal tax rate would be the most significant for top 1 percent and 0.1 percent cash income percentile, -3.8 percentage points and -4.4 percentage points respectively. Assuming the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the average federal tax rate, which includes indvidual income tax rate, corporate income tax rate, social security, Medicare and estate tax, would be substantially lower compared to Obama Administration's FY2011 Budget Proposal. The increase in the average federal tax rate would be roughly proportional across the cash income distribution. The federal tax rate would increase by 1 percentage point for the lowest quintile and 3.1 percentage point for the top quintile. The federal tax rate would for earners in top 1 percent of cash income distribution would increase by 4.2 percentage point. The chart shows the distribution of average effective tax rates and current law and current policy of Bush tax cuts not assumed to expire in 2011. The current proposal would increase the effective tax rate across all income quintiles. The highest increase (3.3 percentage points) would hit the earners in top 20 percent of income distribution.

Effective Tax Rates: A Comparison

Source: Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center Microsimulation Model

The expiration of the Bush tax cuts would substantially increase the effective tax burden across the cash income distribution. Recently, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that letting the Bush tax cuts expire would create a net gain of $22 billion in economic activity. Hence, allowing high-income tax cuts expire would, on impact, result in a net gain of $42 billion in economic activity which is about five times the economic stimulus from extending high-income tax cuts.

The years of the Bush administration were earmarked by the escalation of federal government spending both in absolute and relative terms. The growth in federal government spending was driven mostly by discretionary defense spending while non-discretionary federal outlays increased as well. Since 2001, the federal government spending in the Bush administration increased by 28.8 percent with a 35.7 percent growth in non-defense discretionary spending. The growth of the federal government under Bush administration was the highest since the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. The Independent Institute compared the growth of federal government spending from Lyndon B. Johnson onwards.

Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would probably not impose a negative effect on small businesses since less than 2 percent of tax returns in the top 2 income brackets are filed by taxpayers reporting small business. William Gale contends that the Bush tax cuts significantly raised the government debt. The economic consequences of the 9/11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were detrimental. William Nordhaus estimated that the total cost of war in Iraq between 2003 and 2012 could exceed $1 trillion in 2002 dollars considering unfavorable and protracted cost scenario. To a large extent, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have added substantially to the increase in government spending. However, even after excluding defense outlays from the spending structure, the increase in non-defense discretionary spending exceeded the growth of the federal government spending by 5.6 percentage points. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of federal subsidy programs increased from 1,425 to 1,804 - a 26 percent increase compared to 21 percent increase during Clinton years.

The Bush tax cuts failed to result in a Laffer curve effect mostly because they were implemented alongside a bold and significant increase in federal government spending. Had a substantial reduction in government spending been enforced, the tax cuts would not place should an enormous weight in the growth of federal debt. Higher federal debt would inevitably ponder the structural fiscal imbalance. Since debt interest payments would increase, a combination of tax cuts and spending growth would stimulate investment demand, creating an upward pressure on interest rates, especially during the economic recovery when the difference between potential output and real output is expected to diminish.

Critics of the Bush tax cuts often claim that cuts amassed a growing fiscal deficit. However, in 2007, the fiscal deficit stood at 1.2 percent of the U.S GDP while in 2009, the deficit increased to 9.9 percent of the GDP as a result of $787 billion fiscal stimulus from Obama Administration. Since tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003 respectively, something else is to blame for the deficit.

U.S Federal Debt: Long-Term Forecast

Source: Office of Budget and Management; author's own estimate

The main premise of the economic policy of the Bush administration had been a significant increase in federal government spending. Spending policies were mostly aimed at covering the growing cost of the Iraqi war. In addition, domestic non-defense outlays on social security and domestic priorities grew significantly, creating an upward pressue on federal debt. The growth of entitlments such as Social Security and Medicare poses a serious long-term risk regarding the sustainability of federal government spending. In the upper chart built a simple forecasting framework to estimate the long-run level of U.S federal government debt as a percent of the GDP. Surprisingly, time trend accounts for 85 percent of the variability of the share of federal debt in the GDP. A more robust framework would include the lagged dependent variable and several regressors in the set of explanatory variables to increase the share of variance explained by independent effects of regressors. The results indicate that by 2020, the federal debt could easily reach the 90 percent thresold.

The growing stock of entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare are central to understanding the looming pressure on federal budget to tackle the challenges of ageing population and demand for health care. The tax cuts imposed by the Bush administration reduced average federal tax rates across quintiles in cash income distribution. However, tax cuts were no supplemented by the reduction in federal government spending. Consequently, the growth of federal government spending increased future interest debt payments and failed to take into account the long-term pressure of Medicare and Social Security on federal budget set. Extending the Bush tax cuts would be superior to letting them expire. But lowering tax burden should nevertheless be comprehended by the reduction in federal government spending.

Public pension crisis in OECD countries

2010-10-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

The central aim of my bachelor's thesis is to demonstrate the unsustainability of public pension system in OECD countries in the longer run through the lens of a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis.

The origins of contemporary public pension schemes date back to 19th century when Bismarckian Germany in 1881 first adopted a universal old-age public pension system based on pay-as-you-go (PAYG) funding principle. The principle itself captures full advantages of high (stationary) population growth rate. In the simplest form, PAYG pension scheme is based on the notion of generational solidarity upon which current generations pay mandatory social security contribution into the public scheme. Aggregate contributions are then paid out to current retirees. The cycle is then expanded through generations. However, PAYG funding scheme is sustainable as long as the population growth is high and above the marginal productivity of the capital. Back in 19th century, public pension schemes were adopted under unrealistic assumptions about future population prospects. In 19th century, advanced countries experienced high population growth rate, high fertility rate and an extremely low share of dependent old population that was receiving universal old-age support from PAYG pension schemes. These set of assumptions was crucial to the stability of government-provided old-age support embodied in the public pension schemes.

The sustainability of PAYG pension system requires the equivalence of population growth rate and real interest rate. In the early 20th century, the advanced world shifted towards aging population, declining fertility rates and lower labor market entry rate. In broad terms, a growing old-age dependency ratio led to the pure disequilbrium effects. In a theoretical framework, I re-examined the neoclassical framework of lifecycle hypotheses embodied in Samuelson and Cass-Yaari models of life-cycle utility maximization. The lifecycle hypothesis is based upon the assumption of the three-period model where individuals maximize the consumption in the course of a lifetime. In the first period, individuals do not discount the future consumption since, in this period, individuals acquire the human capital. In the second period individuals enter the working age and discount the future consumption. Hence, in the third period, individuals retire consume the output produced in the working-age period. Since future discounting is compounded, the lifetime consumption increases geometrically. In purely analytical terms, the individuals maximize the utility of consumption through time preference rate.

Considering the abovementioned equivalence between population growth rate and real interest rate, the stability of the equilibria requires the period discount rate to equal the population growth rate. If population growth rate decreases, the stability of the equilibria requires that individuals decrease the future discount rate by the same rate to keep the PAYG pension system within the theoretical limit. The rigorous theoretical formulation of the neoclassical model of lifetime consumption, which essentially captures the necessary conditions for equilibrium stability of public pension schemes, had been put forth by Paul A. Samuelson in his seminal contribution to the theoretical foundations of stationary "PAYG" public pension scheme .

In the course of the last decades, OECD countries have experienced a significant drop in fertility rates, population growth and, under the political climate of social democracy, a widespread adoption of early retirement schemes and generous social security benefits. In addition, labor market exit age dropped significantly, initiating a trend towards the unprecendent growth of generational indebtedness.

The OECD estimated that between 2000 and 2050, old-age dependency ratio is forecast to increase to the largest extent in Japan (193 percent), Spain (136 percent), Portugal and Greece (135 percent). The astonishing increase in the estimated old-age dependency ratio directly reflects the declining fertility rate in OECD countries from 1960s onwards. I estimated the ratio of fertility rate between 1960-1970 and 2000-2006 for OECD countries at around 2, which means that average fertility rate between 1960-1970 was twice the fertility rate between 2000-2006. The highest fertility ratios were found in Spain (2.23), Italy (1.96), Ireland (2.00) while the lowest ratios were found in Denmark (1.37), Netherlands (1.72) and the United States (1.46).

High and stable effective retirement age is the main assumption underlying the stationary stability of PAYG pension system. In the 20th and 21st century, OECD countries have experienced an unprecendent decline in effective retirement age. Blöndal and Scarpetta (2002) estimated the decline in labor market exit age for OECD countries between 1960 and 1995. The female labor market exit age had declined significantly in Ireland (10.7 years), Spain (9.1 years) and Norway (8.8 years). Male labor market exit age exerted persistent decline in all developed OECD countries except for Iceland. The exit age declined significantly in the Netherlands (7.3 years) and Spain (6.5 years).

In a large part, declining labor market exit age has confluenced the rapid growth of unemployment and disability benefits and early retirement incentives from the second half of the 20th century onwards. As the OECD correctly contemplated, in a number of countries, disability pensions and unemployment benefits can be used as de facto early retirement schemes. In a large part, widespread growth of early retirement schemes and implicit incentives for moral hazard in retiring too early via unemployment and disability schemes is held responsible by generous welfare states in the aftermath of the World War II.

When I examined various features affecting early retirement choices, I came across an interesting finding. I regressed labor market exit age and marginal tax rate in a cross section of 23 OECD countries in 2007. I estimated the relationship between exit age and marginal tax rate using a classical OLS linear regression model. The estimate suggests that, holding all other factors constant, if marginal tax rate increases by 1 percentage point, average labor market exit age decreases by 1.88 months. Surprisingly, 51.74 percent of sample variation is explained by marginal tax rate alone. The sample constant is statistically significant, suggesting that if the hypothetical marginal tax rate were zero, the average labor market exit age in randomly chosen country from OECD sample would be 69.65 years. The sample constant is consistent with a prior theoretical expectations since it concurs with the "substitution effect" hypothesis that higher marginal tax rate leads to lower labor supply and fewer working hours.

The cost of early retirement in OECD countries

Source: T.T. Herbertsson & J.M. Orszag, The Cost of Early Retirement in OECD, 2001. OECD, Pensions at Glance, 2009.

Fiscal imbalances arising from unsustainable PAYG public pension systems in OECD countries cannot be assessed without a sufficient estimate of economic costs of unfunded pension liabilities. I approximated the cost of early retirement using Auerbach-Kotlikoff-Gokhale (1999) methodology that directly estimates the size of generational imbalances created by public social security systems. Large and rapidly unsustainable net pension liabilities occured in late 1980s. Van den Noord and Herd (1993) estimated the size of net pension liabilities in seven major OECD countries. The results suggest that continental European countries have had the largest net pension liabilities in terms of GDP. The size of pension liabilities in France and Italy had been about 2.5 times the size of their respective GDPs and twice the stock of the public debt.

Gokhale (2008) directly estimated fiscal imbalances arising from unfunded pension liabilities to current and prospective generations. The size of generational fiscal imbalance, as a share of the GDP, is extremely large and rapidly unsustainable in all OECD countries. In fact, the size of the imbalance is the most severe in Greece (875 percent of the GDP), France, Finland and the Netherlands (500 percent of the GDP) while it is more than twice the size of the GDP in all OECD countries except for the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Fiscal imbalance in OECD countries

Source: J. Gokhale, Measuring Unfunded Obligations of European Countries, 2009.

I built the econometric model of public pension expenditure for a cross section of 23 OECD countries in 2007 to assess which variables might explained the cross-country variation in public pension expenditures. I've been aware of the possible drawbacks of choosing a cross-section model since it might be vulnerable to specification errors and the unbiasedness of regression coefficients. To account for possible specification bias, I conducted Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Shapiro-Wilk and Jarque-Bera normality tests. By performing normality tests, I have examined whether the normality assumption of normally distributed error terms is valid in the studied sample of 23 OECD countries considering error terms as identically and independently distributed.

In the set of explanatory variables that might yield consistent and robust estimates of regression coefficients I chose 10 various demographic, economic and institutional independent variables. Apart from demographic and economic variables, institutional variables are dichotomous since the institutional features can be captured by binary modes of choice. The dependent variable is the size of public pension expenditures in the share of the GDP.

The results suggest that public pension expenditures are positively correlated with the share of population aged 65 and older (0.746**), difference in life expectancy after age 65 between 1960 and 2005 (0.477*) and dichotomous variable for continental European countries (0.697**) where * and ** indicate the statistical significant of the sample correlation coefficient at the 5% and 1% level. The estimates suggests that the probability of higher pension expenditures in the share of the GDP is likely to occur in a continental European country known for a relatively large share of older population and a high difference in life expectancy after age 65 between 1960 and the present. On the other hand, public pension expenditures are negatively correlated with average effective retirement age (-0.475**), private pension funds as a share of GDP (-0.658**), labor market exit age (-0.523**), dichotmous variable for Anglo-Saxon countries (-0.544**) and a dichotomous variable for private pension system (-0.672**), where ** denotes the statistical significant of the sample correlation coefficient at the 1% level. Again, the estimates suggest that the probability of lower pension expenditure is likely to occur if a randomly chosen country from the OECD sample is Anglo-Saxon and has a high effective retirement age, large private pension funds as a share of the GDP, high labor market exit age and a mandatory private pension system. The coefficients suggest that in repeated sampling, the estimated sample correlation coefficient will include the true or correct population value in 99 percent of cases.

I conducted the econometric model which consisted of 8 regression specifications. I chose double-logarithmic model which yields direct elasticities as regression coefficients. However, I added two exceptions. In regression specifications 5 and 6, I chose a mixed specification mostly due to the inclusion of private pension funds (assets) variable in the regression specification. Unfortunately, but the share of private pension funds in Greece in 2007 equals 0 percent of the GDP which does not enable the researcher to apply double-logarithmic model as the basis of regression specification.

The estimates suggest that the share of population aged 65 and older is statistically singificantly positively related to the share of public pension expenditures in the GDP. Hence, the elasticity of public pension expenditures with respect to effective retirement age ranges from -1.465 to -4.935, suggesting that an increase in effective retirement age by an additional year leads to per unit increase in public pension expenditures by more than a unit increase in the share of the GDP. The coefficient of private pension funds is highly statistically significant. The elasticity of public pension expenditures with respect to private pension funds (as a share of the GDP) ranges from -0.34 to -0.38 and is statistically significant at the 1% level. The elasticity suggests that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of private pension funds reduces the share of public pension expenditures in the GDP, on impact, by 3.4-3.8 percent, holding all other factors constant. In addition, the estimates of coefficients for dichotomous variables suggest the following: the probability of higher public pension expenditures (as a share of GDP) is likely to occur in continental European countries with mandatory private pension system. Five estimates of dichotomous coefficients are statistically significant at the less than 10% level.

The significance of dichotomous (dummy) coefficients has been tested by beta coefficient analysis to rank the magnitudes of separate effects of explanatory variables on public pension expenditures as dependent variable. The results suggest that continental European countries are significantly more likely to face higher public pension spending in the share of GDP compared to Anglo-Saxon countries.

Earlier I mentioned the necessity of normality assumption in yielding robust, consistent and unbiased estimates of regression coefficients. The assumption has been questioned by conducting Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S), Jarque-Bera test (J-B) and Shapiro-Wilk (S-W) normality test. The aim of the testing the normality assumption is to observe whether error terms distribute normally so that estimated test statistics, standard errors and confidence intervals are reliable. In setting test statistic, I set the normality assumption as null hypothesis. The results from K-S, J-B and S-W tests show that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at 5% level, suggesting that the normality assumption is valid in the studied sample. Hence, test statistics, standard errors and confidence intervals are both valid and reliable.

The meaningful question to evaluate the prospects of the coming public pension crisis is how to reverse the growth of fiscal imbalances and reform public pension system as to avoid erratic generational indebtedness. Aging population and the growth of old-age dependency ratio trigger an enormous future burden on public finances in OECD countries. Lower fertility rate and population growth shall place an incurable burden on the stability of PAYG public pension systems. The estimates suggest that life-expectancy after the age of 65 is likely to increase by 2050 and gradually approach the age of 90 for both male and female. Assuming the effective retirement age is 65, the remaining life expectancy is 25 years or almost one-third of the average lifetime. As Alemayehu and Warner (2004) suggest: "Old-age health care costs thus will impose increasingly severe pressure on private finances and government coffers. Indeed, applying our age-specific estimates to the age distribution anticipated for the year 2030, we find that if nothing is done to alter current patterns of health care, per capita health care expenditures will rise by one-fifth due to population aging alone."

The long-term pension reform that aging societies of the West should undertake is a complementary measures of three key policy features of the reform.

First, the transition to fully-funded retirement savings accounts is the only viable and sound pension reform that can alleviate the damage generated by the growing fiscal imbalances. The theoretical foundation of the transition from public pension systems to fully-funded pension system has been laid down by Feldstein and Liebman (2001). The authors derived an algebraic solution which suggests that keeping a PAYG public pension system does not attenuate the persistence of a growing demographic pressure on the stability of public pension system. As I discussed earlier, PAYG system crucially depends on three key assumptions: high fertility rate, very low share of population older 65+ and high population growth. These assumptions are incompatible with actual demographic parameters and, hence, OECD countries should undertake a drastic transition towards fully-funded pension systems based on individual savings accounts. Otherwise, the growing demographic pressure will inevitably result in the exponential growth of generational debt, creating an enormous deadweight loss for current and prospective generations.

Fully-funded pension system is based on the premise of investing pension contributions into the capital market, earning a compound interest over time. The stock of individual's lifetime earnings is paid in the form of annuities upon individual's withdrawal from the labor market. In addition, there is a growing disparity between the implicit return of PAYG public pension system and real rate of return in the capital market. Under realistic assumptions, such as that the marginal product of capital (MPK) is below the welfare-maximizing level and the real rate of return exceeds the implicit return from PAYG system, fully-funded pension system would not create a deadweight consumption loss to the working-age population. In fact, Feldstein and Liebman (2001) derived an analytic solution for the transition to fully-funded pension system in which the transition induces a short-term consumption loss in the next period while, at the same time, it creates a geometrically-growing future consumption for both retired and working-age population.

The only remaining question is whether the real rate of return would compensate the consumption loss of working-age population and, hence, increase the stock of future consumption to all generations. According to Feldstein and Liebman (2001), assuming 6.5 percent inflation-adjusted rate of return, the payroll cost of fully-funded pension system would represent only 27 percent of the payroll cost incured under PAYG public pension system. Tax rate, required to bear the cost of current stock of pension liabilities is 12.4 percent respectively.

According to Congressional Budget Office, the average real rate of return for large-company stocks between 1926 and 2000 is 7.7 percent, 9.0 percent of small-company stocks and 2.2 percent for long-term Treasury bonds. Feldstein (1997) estimated that PAYG implicit rate of return is 2.6 percent.

Assume an individual wants to maximize the lifetime earnings in the capital market. An individual is offered 2.6 percent implicit return from PAYG system. The individual enters the labor market at certain age, say 25, and intends to retire upon the age of 65. Assume he invests $10.000 annually in the capital market to create retirement annuities upon labor market withdrawal. Assuming the implicit rate of return (2.6 percent), the stock of overall annuity would be 10 times the initial investment in 90 years. Assuming the average long-run real rate of return from large-company stocks (7.7 percent), the the overall annuity would be 10 times the initial stock of investment in 31 years. Therefore, the individual would reach the desired level of lifetime earnings at the age of 56 or 9 years before the targeted retirement age.

I assumed the distribution of lifetime investment portfolio is weighted average of availible asset types: large-company stocks (33 percent), small-company stocks (19 percent), long-term corporate bonds (20 percent), long-term Treasury bonds (20 percent) and 3-month Treasury bills (8 percent). According to the average annual real rates of return in the United States (1926-2000), I calculated the weighted average real rate of return (5.247 percent). Investing $10.000 annually at the age of 25 would buy $100.000 annuity at 5.247 real rate of return in 45 years (the age of 70) compared to 90 years (the age of 115) under the PAYG implicit rate of return (2.6 percent). Of course, the time to buy the annuity would shift alongside the changing composition of portfolio.

In addition, OECD countries should immediately increase the effective retirement age. I believe the solution suggested by Gary Becker is both meaningful but sustainable in reversing the growth of generational debt. Becker (2010) suggested "One simple and attractive rule would be to raise retirement age by an amount that makes the ratio of years spent in retirement to years spent working equal to the ratio that existed at the beginning of the social security system."

When President Roosevelt signed the notorious Social Security Act in 1935, the normal retirement age was 65. However, life expectancy after the age of 65 was significantly lower than is today. In 1940, average life expectancy after 65 in the U.S was 13.7 years. In 2006, it stood at 18.6 years, according to OECD. In 1935, the average life expectancy at birth in the United States was 61.7 years. We assume that individuals in 1935 worked for 35 years and spent 12 years in retirement. The ratio is thus 0.4 (12/ 35=0.34). Today, if individuals retire at the age of 65, they can expect further 18.6 years in retirement. To equalize the ratio to the 1935 level, (18.6/x=0.34), individuals should spend 54.7 years working. The estimate time is an equivalent measure of years required to spend working if PAYG public pension system is left intact. Assuming the individuals enter the labor market at the age of 25, then the expected effective retirement age is the age of 80.

In the long run, PAYG public pension system is unsustainable since demographic parameters do not suffice the assumptions under which the PAYG system is possible without distortions of labor supply incentives. The future of OECD countries will be marked by aging population, lower fertility rates and a growing demographic pressure on public finances. Without bold and decisive pension reform, OECD countries will experience increasing pension deficits and, hence, an explosive growth of generational indebtedness.

Parametric pension reforms are not a substitute for the postponement of paradigmatic pension reform. Thus, implementing the transition to fully-funded pension system essentially requires higher effective retirement age. A comprehensive pension reform cannot be made possible without these measures. At last, but not least, the major challenge in the systematic pension reform in OECD countries to address the burden of global aging, is whether political courage will withstand the pressure of interest groups to maintain the status quo of early retirement incentives. Nonetheless, eliminating early retirement incentives is the essential step towards creating retirement system without perverse incentives to retire too early. Unless political leaders encourage a transition to fully-funded pension system, OECD countries will be unable to withstand the deadly consequences of an enormous generational indebtedness.

The economic future of Ireland

2010-10-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

The economic and financial crisis of 2008/2009 hit Ireland heavily. The asset price bubble and the subsequent deflation have added to the uncertain macroeconomic outlook. How did the country went from the times of the "Irish miracle" to the prolonged economic slowdown? Following the beginning of the 2008/2009 economic and financial crisis, Ireland was hit by an unprecedent economic slowdown. In 2008, the GDP declined by 3.0 percent on the annual basis. In 2009, the GDP further declined by 7.1 percent in real terms. The unemployment rate increased to almost 12 percent.

Prior to the outburst of the economic crisis, Ireland enjoyed stable and predictable levels of public debt. In 2007, the country was known for having stabilised the public debt at 25 percent of the GDP - the lowest level of any Western European country. In 2009, the debt-to-GDP ratio increased to 64 percent of the GDP. Once known as the sick man of Europe, Ireland's economic policymakers have implemented a set of fiscal policy measures aimed to boost the long-term economic growth and abolish the economic policy based on the state intervention, high tax rates on labor and capital and export-led growth.

Eversince the 1960, Ireland pursued a soft version of industrial policy targeted at the promotion of inward foreign direct investment and the education of highly skilled workers. In addition, Ireland reduced the corporate income tax rate to 12.5 percent and provided a thorough technical assistance and to multinational companies located in Ireland. Indeed, U.S. multinationals such as Microsoft, Dell and Intel were encouraged to locate in Ireland mainly because of its geographic proximity to key European markets, skilled English-speaking workforce, membership in the EU, relative low wage level and favorable corporate taxation.

In early 1990s, the results of a precise set of economic policies were spectacular. By the end of 2006, the unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 percent from 18 percent in early 1980s. Between 1992 and 2005, Irish GDP increased by an average of 6.9 percent while the investment grew by 8.6 percent on the annual basis. The largest contribution to GDP growth was domestic demand (5.3 percentage point). Hence, Ireland's public finance enjoyed a favorable outlook mainly due to the rapid decline of debt-to-GDP ratio from 1980s onwards, and from a relatively low demographic pressure on the budgetary entitlements.

During the Irish boom, Irish banking and financial sector were highly dependant on the wholesale funding. Due to largely positive macroeconomic outlook from 1990 onwards, Irish banking sector received high and consistent credit ratings from agencies such as Moody, S&P and Fitch. In turn, the reliance on fragile wholesale funding resulted in overleveraged balance sheets. After the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the short-term outlook on Irish banking sector signalled a significant rise in credit-default swaps which raised concerns over the ability of banks to provide the wholesale funding for a mountain of short-term debt liabilities. And since the overleveraged balance sheets downgraded the outlook on Irish banking sector, the institutional investors demanded higher risk premium to extend the funding channel to the Irish banks.

The Directorate Generale for Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission downgraded the macroeconomic forecast of Irish GDP growth. By the end of 2009, the economic activity plummeted by 7.1 percent. The housing market crash was largely a result of the asset price bubble channeled through the overinvestment in the construction sector which represented 12 percent of the GDP. Nothing could explain the deflationary pressures in the aftermath of the financial crisis than excessive housing prices during the pre-crisis Irish economic boom. After 2008, Ireland's household savings rate increased to the level above 10 percent which is a result of the adjustment in the household balance sheet. In fact, between 2001 and 2007, the share of household debt in the GDP nearly doubled.

Meanwhile, the mountain of liabilities in the Irish banking and financial sector raised the concern over its solvency. The Irish Government immediately facilitated a bailout plan for the troubled banking sector. Consequently, the large budget deficit resulted in excessive debt-to-GDP ratio which grew by 39 percentage points between 2007 and 2009. In the annual European Economic Forecast (Spring, 2010), the European Commission estimated that by the end of 2011, the debt-to-GDP ratio could reach as high as 87.3 percent. while the cyclically-adjusted government balance is estimated to increase up to -10.2 percent of the GDP. The contraction of domestic demand which, by all measures, is the main engine of Ireland's economic growth led to a rapid increase in the unemployment rate which increase from 6.3 percent in 2008 to 11.9 percent in 2009. By 2011, the European Commission forecast that the unemployment rate is expected to further increase by 1.5 percentage point compared to 2009. In World Economic Outlook, the IMF estimated that the unemployment rate in Ireland would increase by 1.1 percentage point by the end of 2011. In 2009, Ireland experienced net outward migration for the first time since 1960s in the wake of expected 13.8 percent unemployment rate in 2010.

The macroeconomic forecast for 2011 is favorable. The European Commission upgraded GDP growth estimate to 3 percent. Meanwhile, the investment is expected to increase for the first time since the 60 percent cumulative decline of the construction sector. The positive contribution of net exports to the gradual narrowing of the current account deficit could be an important measure to alleviate the rising pressure over debt-to-GDP ratio. On the other hand, Ireland's Department of Finance revised the macroeconomic forecasts and estimated that by the end of this year, the GDP would grow by 1 percent on the annual basis.

The essential measure of Irish economic recovery is the retrenchment of wage rates in the public sector and the adjustment of public sector wages to the cyclical dynamics of economic activity to prevent the possibility of excessive inflationary pressures in the course of economic recovery. Current measures of retrenching public sector wages successfully anchored the inflationary expectations. According to the IMF, the annual inflation rate is estimated to peak at nearly 2 percent by the end of 2015. The falling wage rates in the private sector could induce the reallocation of resources in the tradeable sector, further adding to the contribution of net external trade to the GDP growth.

The key measures to alleviate the consequences of economic and financial crisis in both real and financial sector are the immediate narrowing of Ireland's excessive budget deficit and public debt in the share of GDP. High public debt is mainly the result of government capital injection into Anglo-Irish Bank which represents about 2 percentage points of net deficit increase in 2010. The entire consolidation package represents 2.5 percent of the GDP.

Deutsche Bank recently published Public Debt in 2020 and estimated the levels of public debt by the end of that year for both advanced and emerging-market economies. The analysis by Deutsche Bank predicted the effect of a combined negative shock in real interest rate, primary government balance and real GDP growth. If the combined shock of all three variables were to change by about one-fourth standard deviation from the estimated growth rate, the public debt in 2020 would reach 154 percent of the GDP. If the combined shock of all three variables increased by one-half standard deviation from the baseline estimates, the public debt in 2020 would increase to 197 percent of the GDP. The difference in the estimated increase is due to higher intensity of the combined shock. In addition, to restore the debt-to-GDP ratio to pre-crisis level, Ireland would be required to increase the primary government balance to 6 percent of the GDP.

Given the enormous magnitude and burden of public debt and overleveraged corporate and financial sector, the immediate facilitation of measures to alleviate the public indebtedness is necessary. Ireland's economic future is constrained by the persistence of budget deficit which adds to the future burden of public debt. Prudent efforts to reduce the burden of both debt and deficit are of the essential importance. Nevertheless, Irish policymakers should not neglect the economic policies that created the Irish miracle as well as the policy errors that caused the deepest economic decline in Western Europe during the 2008/2009 economic crisis.

Economic growth and democratic institutions

2010-10-01T03:43:00.000-07:00

Professor William Easterly recently presented (link) an intriguing empirical evidence on the relationship between nation's politics and economic growth. In particular, professor Easterly presented data on long-run economic growth and the scope of democracy for a majority of countries between 1960 and 2008. Professor Easterly identified that the highest-growing countries in the world were those with autocratic political regimes. Among ten highest-growing economies between 1960 and 2008, all of them, except for Cyprus, have been characterized by hybrid and autocratic political regimes. On the other hand, ten countries with the lowest growth rates of real GDP per capita between 1960 and 2008 were equally known for authocratic political systems or flawed democracies.

Presumably, the evidence bodes against the recent prediction by Dani Rodrik that authoritarian political regimes ultimately create economic systems vulnerable to external shocks and structural change, thus hampering the prospects of structural change as a neccessary condition for economic development.

To estimate the general pattern of the relationship between economic growth and the nature of political system, I reviewed real per capita GDP growth rates between 1970 and 2007 for a group of 134 countries across the broad spectrum of different levels of GDP per capita. Based on Summers-Heston dataset of real GDP per capita growth rates (link) between the stated time period, I estimated average rates of growth of GDP per capita and collected data from Economist Intelligence Unit on the level of democracy across the world in 2008 (link). The intuition behind this approach is the identification of endogenous and casual direction between the two variables. From the theoretical perspective, it is nonetheless difficult to establish a relationship between the form of government and long-run economic growth. There are at least two possible directions of casuality.

First, the underlying assumption of the relationship could be that systemic changes in political environment are essential to the structural change and, hence, are the main mechanism behind the enforcement of constitutional changes and public policies. The assertion of the underlying theory is that autocratic and authoritarian political system hinder structural changes and the establishment of institutions and democratic governance that is crucial for economic growth. This particular view has been asserted by Dani Rodrik (link), Andrei Shleifer, Florencio Lopez de Silanes and Rafael La Porta (link). While Dani Rodrik's perspective heavily relied on the importance of institutions for long-run economic growth, Shleifer, Lopez de Silanes & La Porta captured the essence of economic development in the legal origins of nations.

Second, the casuality in economic growth and political system could also stem in the opposite direction. The basic underlying assumption could be that higher rates of economic growth encourage systemic changes in the political system and enable the adoption of democratic institutions. The notion of economic growth as the engine of democratic changes has deserved a strong empirical support.

Robert Barro's analysis of long-run economic growth across the world (link) has examined the relationship between the level of democracy and long-run economic growth rate. The empirical evidence suggests a non-linear, inverted-U relationship between democracy and 10-year growth residuals, both coefficients in partial quadratic equation and the partial correlation coefficient being statistically significantly different from zero.

The notion would suggest that as countries depart from a low level of real GDP per capita, the adoption of democratic institutions accelerates economic growth but only up to some point. After the tipping point, the economic outcome of further democratization results in lower growth of real GDP per capita, partly because a high level of democracy tends to promote public policies that diminish growth prospects such as higher tax rates on labor and capital and the redistribution of income, all of which exert a somewhat negative effect on productivity growth and incentives for labor supply and investment.

The first table portrays the distribution of real per capita GDP growth rates across 134 countries between 1970 and 2007. The distributive pattern resembles the properties of normal distribution curves. In fact, the estimated coefficients of skewness and kurtosis suggest a rather very mild departure from the assumption of normality which is of the high importance, especially in testing hypotheses about the effects of explanatory variables on long-run growth dynamics. The normality assumption of normally distributed errors was not tested via normality tests.

Ten highest growing countries in terms of real GDP per capita between 1970 and 2007 are Equatorial Guinea (8.39 percent), Taiwan (5.98 percent), China (5.97 percent), St. Kitts & Nevis (5.49 percent), Botswana (5.45 percent), Bhutan (5.38 percent), Maldives (5.38 percent), Hong Kong (5.37 percent), Macao (5.30 percent) and Singapore (5.29 percent). In real terms, the estimated average real per capita GDP growth rates suggest that it took only 13 years for Singapore's real GDP per capita to double and 21 years to triple. In China, where the estimated average growth rate exceeded Singapore's growth rate only by 0.69 percentage point, it took roughly 11 years for real GDP per capita to double and only 19 years to triple. In the lower tail of growth distribution are mostly countries from Sub-Saharan Africa such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Somalia, Central African Republic and Niger. Average real growth rates of GDP per capita of these countries were negative. The negative average real GDP per capita growth rate occured in 11 percent of country observations.

Distribution of economic growth across 134 countries between 1970 and 2007

Source: own estimate based on Summers-Heston dataset

The following graph illustrates the relationship between long-run average growth rates and the level of democracy in 2008 for the entire sample of 134 countries. The attempt to analyze the effect of democracy level on long-run economic growth is based on the notion that democratic institutions elevate economic growth in the longer run. The estimated slope coefficient (0.2277) suggest that a one-point increase in democracy index increases the average long-run per capita GDP growth rate by 0.2277 percentage point controlling for other factors.

Although the cross-country variation in the level of democracy explains only about 9 percent of growth rate variance, and even though the direct effect of democracy on economic growth seems minor and almost non-existent, the estimated sample regression coefficient is statistically significant at 5 percent level. It suggests that the effect of democracy on growth is persistant and evident in the particular sample.

Democracy and average long-run growth rates in a sample of 134 countries

Source: own estimates

Hence, to account for different degree of variation in average real GDP per capita growth rates, I divided the sample into quartiles. The goal of the pursued empirical strategy is to see whether the difference in variance composition between countries with similar growth rates persists. I divided the total sample into four groups: high growth performers (average growth rate higher than 3 percent) moderate growth countries (average growth rate below 3 percent and above 2.05 percent) and low growth countries (average growth rate below 1.09 percent). The next graph shows the relationship between democracy and average real GDP per capita growth rate in high-growth countries between 1970 and 2007. The parameters suggests a different relationship. The estimated slope coefficient is negative (-0.1638), suggesting that a one point increase in democracy index decreases the average real GDP per capita growth rate by about 0.1638 percentage point.

The share of variance explained by the democracy variable increased by 22.5 percent. In the statistical sense, the effect of democracy on economic growth in high-growth countries has been more powerful compared to the total sample. The estimated slope coefficient is statistically significant at 5 percent level. I also estimated beta coefficient (-0.338) to account for the effects of standard deviation increase on the average growth rate in real GDP per capita. The estimated beta coefficient suggests that a one standard deviation increase in democracy level (2.4 points) would, on impact, decrease the average real GDP per capita growth rate by 0.338 standard deviation or 0.394 percentage point in real terms.

From a theoretical perspective, the enforcement of democratic policies in high-growth countries would have a minor negative effect on economic growth, holding all other factors constant. Surprisingly, authortarian regimes previal in 44 percent of countries in the high-growth sample. Thus, the hypothetically negative effect of democracy on economic growth is evident but it is far from significantly negative.

Democracy and average long-run growth rates in high-growth countries

Source: own estimates based on Summers-Heston and EIU datasets

The next graph portrays the relationship between democracy and average real GDP per capita growth rates in low-growth countries. Contrary to the sample estimate in high-growth country group, the effect of democracy on real GDP per capita growth rate is positive and persistent. The correlation coefficient is positive and moderate (0.458) and statistically significant at 1 percent level. The beta coefficient (0.458) from the regression specification suggests that a one standard deviation increase in democracy level (cca. 1.497 points) would raise the average real GDP per capita growth rate on impact by 0.458 standard deviation or 0.382 percentage point, ceteris paribus. In fact, the variability in level of democracy explains 21.1 percent of the variance of average per capita GDP real growth rates. The estimated slope coefficient is statistically significant at 2.1 percent level and 0.6 percent level, suggesting a very low probability of rejecting the null hypothesis and a strong influence of democratic institutions on economic growth in the long run.

Democracy and average long-run growth rates in low-growth countries

Source: own estimate based on Summers-Heston and EIU datasets

In the next subsample, I jointly added high-growth and low-growth countries in the single sample and changed the casual direction. The underlying assumption is that democracy level is endogenously determined by the long-run average real GDP per capita growth rate. In real terms, I assumed that the public choice of political institutions across the world depend on the real GDP growth rate. Hence, I estimated the relationship by including the squared term in the regression equation. The estimated slope coefficients suggest a typical inverted-U relationship between real GDP per capita growth rate and the level of democracy. The real GDP per capita growth rate alone explains 30.6 percent of the cross-country variaton in the level of democracy. Intuitively, the results suggest that there exists an optimum level of real GDP per capita growth that maximizes the level of institutional democracy.

Differentiating the conditional expectation function of the level of democracy with respect to the real GDP per capita growth rate yields the partial derivate dy/dx = -(ß2/2ß3). Plugging the two coefficients in the partial derivate yields 3.65. Thus, the growth rate of real GDP per capita that maximizes the level of institutional democracy is 3.65 percent. Hence, both coefficients are statistically significant. The p-values are 0.000 suggesting a zero probability of rejecting a null hypothesis when it is, in fact, true - and a strong predictive influence of both variables on the expected level of democracy.

The effect of long-run economic growth on democratic institutions in high-growth and low-growth countries

Source: own estimates based on Summers-Heston and EIU datasets

Countries with the comparable growth rate are Iceland, Ireland, Trinidad & Tobago and Spain. Except for Trinidad & Tobago, none of these countries is either flawed democracy or an authoritarin political regime. Therefore, the expected level of democracy is low in countries where the average growth rate of GDP per capita is either very low or negative or very high.

Hypothetically, the conditional pattern of real per capita GDP growth supports the notion that the highest-growing countries in the 20th century such as Singapore, Taiwan and Botswana had a relatively low level of democracy and a significant degree of political authoritarianism. In addition, countries with the lowest growth rate of real GDP per capita such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia were also authoritarian political regimes. The predictive power of the regression equation is reasonably high since more than 30 percent of the variance of the level of democracy is explained by a non-linear shifts in the long-run average real GDP per capita growth rate.

Democracy is a controversial question of the modern theory of economic growth. Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that the highest growth rates were achieved in those countries with a considerable degree of political dictatorship. However, the lowest long-run growth rates of real GDP per capita were achieved by countries in which political dictatorship prevails. The pattern suggest that the quality of institutions such as the rule of law, judicial independence and a constitutional democracy complement the significance of human capital which is the essential engine of long-run economic growth.

The most important growth engine of the highest growing countries such as East Asian tigers and Ireland has been the emphasize on human capital that resulted in a high level of knowledge intensity and high productivity growth rate. These countries were known for heavy doses of state interventionism aimed towards the implementation of industrial policy conducive to economic growth. However, the conclusion should be taken with caution. Political dictatorship or authoritarianism were detrimental to least-developed countries since it encouraged predatory political behavior and resulted in the political environment with a complete absence of the rule of law, judicial independence, protection of private property rights, institutional integrity and constitutional democracy.

The question which set of growth policies is essential to high long-run growth of real GDP per capita involves two answers. First, the primacy of institutional quality alongside the investment in human capital is by far the most important engine of long-run economic growth. Without first-class institutions and human capital, the vicious circle of poverty and social deprivation for less developed nations can be endless. And second, the components of constitutional democracy such as electoral rights and pluralism, good functioning of government, high level of political culture and civil liberties can deliberately increase the prospects of economic growth.

However, if the power of state is left unrestrained by the absence of the rule of law and a coherent set of checks and balances on the coercive strenght of redistributive interest groups, even a high level of democracy would not alleviate the persistence of poverty and weak structural indicators. On the contrary, it would only worsen the prospects of long-run economic growth.

Religion and economic growth

2010-09-27T04:54:00.000-07:00

In the course of economic growth theory, the impact of religion on economic growth and GDP per capita has been largely neglected by the mainstream economic theory. Basically, there have been two major conceptual forces behind the demonstration of the effect of religiousness on economic growth. First, traditional theoretical approach to the analysis of economic growth embodied in the Solow approach emphasized the role of capital accumulation and technological progress in the growth of total factor productivity where the technological progress accounted for the unexplained and exogenous feature that drove the growth of total factor productivity.

Early analyses of economic growth and its main determinants heavily neglected the effect of institutional variables on economic growth. Second, the theoretical framework of economic growth usually follows the empirical evidence on the existence of postulated hypotheses related to the economic growth. Primarily, the effect of religion and other institutional features on economic growth has been displaced to the lack of empirical estimation techniques that could account and control for the effect of the institutional phenomena on the course of economic growth.

The best lucrative and empirically consistent analysis of economic growth and its determinants had been documented by Robert Barro and Xavier Sala-i-Martin. In 2004, Robert Barro published Economic Growth Across Countries. In the explanatory framework, the author included several institutional variables and examined its effect on 10-year economic growth interval in a cross section of 86 countries over 1965-1975, 1975-1985 and 1985-1995 time periods. For a given set of institutional control variables, the rule of law exerted a strong, positive and statistically significant effect on growth. The effect of democracy, the second institutional control variable, was estimated by a single coefficient and its squared term to account for a possible movement of the effect of the level of democracy.

The magnitude of both coefficients was statistically significant. The sign of the squared term was negative suggesting for a typical inverted-U effect of democracy on economic growth. In the meaning of the economic theory, the estimated coefficients suggested that the adoption of democratic institutions and policies in the initial stage of GDP per capita boosts economic growth, particularly by the institutions such as the rule of law, electoral representation, and multiparty political system as well as by the constitutional protection of civil liberties.

However, as countries depart from the initial level of GDP per capita, the political pressure from electoral representation tends to enforce egalitarian policies that negatively effect economic growth, particularly by the fiscal redistribution of income to mitigate income inequality. Consequently, the effect of democratic institutions tends to diminish and, as the curve bends, the predictive effect of constitutional democracy is negative, thereby exerting a negative effect on economic growth. However, the hypothetical relationship between democracy and economic growth is dubious, if not intriguing. In fact, neoclassical growth theories suggest that the rate of economic growth tends to diminish alongside the expansion of the capital stock and productive capacity of the national economy. The hypothesized theoretical assertion postulates that the non-linear, inverted-U effect of democratic institutions on economic growth is overestimated.

In 2003, Robert Barro and Rachel M. McCleary wrote a seminal contribution (link) to the theory and empirics of the relationship between religion and economic growth. Even though in The Protestant Ethics, Max Weber argued that the religious practices and beliefs have had important implications for economic development, the economists paid little or no attention to the role of religiousness as a cultural measure on economic growth. Arguably, the most difficult inferential problem in economic theory is to capture the direction of causality in non-experimental data which indistinguishably confuses the empirical inference from sample estimates. The theoretical relationship between the religion and economic growth is nonetheless a daunting task of the economic theory.

Across the world, there is a whole spectrum of religious diversity in the interplay between religion and economic development. Some countries, such as the United States have been largely influenced by the Enlightenment thought, penned in Thomas Jefferson’s 1779 The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, on religious freedom as the principle of freedom from religious oppression. On the other hand, countries in Northern and some parts of the Continental Europe largely adopted Protestantism as the religious establishment while Southern and Central European countries experienced a strong and coercive influence of Roman Catholicism. Hence, the historical bond of nations in the Middle East and North Africa to the Islamic religion accounts for a significant share of the world population and a representative estimate of the effect of Islam on economic growth.

In addition, many political regimes, particularly in China, Soviet Union and Cuba, have attempted to suppress the religious freedom and, hence, establish a system that officially prohibited and punished the religious practice. Surprisingly, countries in Northern Europe such as Norway, Finland and Iceland have established an official religion that is effectively articled in the constitution. Given the vast difference in the distribution of GDP per capita across countries, the assessment of the relationship between the religion and economic growth is not a triviality per se.

Robert Barro and Rachel M. McCleary constructed a broad cross-country dataset which included national account variables and an array of other political, economic and institutional indicators in a cross section of over 100 countries since 1960. The predicted theoretical expectations postulate whether the religion fosters religious beliefs that influence individual cultural characteristics such as ethics, work and honesty. The authors estimated both the effect of different explanatory variables on religious outcomes such as monthly church attendance, the belief in heaven and the belief in hell.

The estimated coefficients suggest that monthly church attendance is strongly affected by urbanization rate and a set of dichotomous religious variables. In particular, a one percentage point increase in the urbanization rate decreases monthly church attendance rate by 1.49 percentage points, holding all other factors constant. In addition, a 1 percentage point increase in religious pluralism fosters the monthly church attendance rate by 1.35 percentage points, ceteris paribus, while the increase in the measure of the regulation of religion by 1 percentage point decreases the church attendance rate by 0.64 percentage point. Hence, the church attendance rate in countries with official state religion, on average, increases the religious participation by 0.87 percent more compared to countries with the absence of state religion, ceteris paribus. The belief in heaven and hell, on the other hand, is positively correlated with state religion and religious pluralism, Muslim religious faction and other religious factions. The belief in heaven and hell is significantly negatively correlated with urbanization rate, communist regimes, Orthodox religion, Hindu religion and Protestant religion. Barro and McCleary regressed growth rates of real GDP per capita on variables of monthly church attendance rate, belief in heaven, belief in hell and dichotomous (dummy) religious variables representing the share of religion in the countries observed. The table below reports dummy coefficients of each religion relative to the Roman Catholicism. The sign of the coefficient is negative suggesting the increase in the share of each religion (see table) decreases the growth rate of real GDP per capita by less than by the anticipated increase in the share of Roman Catholic religion.

The effect of religion on long-run economic growth
Source: R. Barro & R.M. McCleary: Religion and Economic Growth, 2003.

The p-value for religion shares in the regression specification is about 0.001, suggesting that the hypothetical zero simultaneous effect of the explanatory dummy variables of religious share is easily rejected at 0.1 percent level of statistical significance. The estimate suggests that religious shares influence the growth rate of real GDP per capita. Interestingly, sample estimates of regression coefficients suggest that monthly church attendance is significantly negatively related to the GDP growth rate. The estimated coefficient suggests that higher church attendance will, on average, lead to significantly lower growth rate of real GDP per capita and, hence, a lower growth of the standard of living. On the other hand, the sample estimates of growth regression coefficients suggest that the extent of belief in heaven and hell is positively related to economic growth. Thus, the empirical evidence from the panel of over 100 countries since 1960 suggests that the belief in heaven and hell encourage ethical behavior and honesty and thereby simultaneously increases the growth rate of real GDP per capita. The reported p-value for church attendance and beliefs is 0.000, suggesting the rejection of null hypothesis on a simultaneous zero effect of church attendance and beliefs in hell and heaven on the growth rate of real GDP per capita, and a strong influence of religious factors on the distribution of economic growth across countries since 1960.

Regarding the true importance of religious freedom, not oppression, on the emergence of order alongside the abstract rules and the pursuit of individual liberty, Friedrich August von Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty: “It should be remembered that, so far as men’s actions toward other persons are concerned, freedom can never mean more that they are restricted only by the general rules. Since there is no kind of action that may not interfere with another person’s protected sphere, neither speech, nor the press, nor the exercise of religion can be completely free. In all these fields … freedom does mean and can mean only that what we may do is not dependent on the approval of any person or authority and is limited only by the same abstract rules that apply equally to all.”

In the microeconomic perspective, religious market is highly oligopolistic, especially in Europe where government subsidies to large religious groups discourage the entry of competitive religions in the market. Therefore, in strongly Catholic countries, such as Italy and Spain, Roman Catholic church firmly resembles the behavioral pattern of a dominant firm, facing price inelastic demand and price elastic supply. Subsidies to churches do not quite differ from subsidies to corporations and enterprises - the net effect are lower marginal costs, increasing the total producer surplus of the church and increasing the deadweight loss to the consumers of religious services. A cautionary approach would require not only the precise modeling of the religious market upon the theoretical assumptions but also the contestable empirical evidence on the existence of the Catholic church as a dominant firm in highly oligopolistic religious market.

Incidentally, the empirical evidence suggests strongly negative effect of the share of Roman Catholic religion on the long-run growth rate of real GDP per capita. Nonetheless, religion is an important determinant of economic growth. However, the evidence from the second half of the last century suggests that the prosperity and wealth of nations is greater if people allocate fewer resources to the exercise of religious activities.

Human capital, labor market and economic growth

2010-09-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

The OECD recently published the international comparison of the gap in employment rates between university graduates and workers with secondary education or less (link). There is no single exception to the fact that the employment rate is the highest in the group of individuals with college and university degree. Nonetheless, the comparison of the variation in employment rate in the cross section of OECD countries is very interesting.

Among the OECD countries (link), Iceland enjoys the highest employment rate (94.7 percent) of those with college or university degree followed by Switzerland (93.9 percent), Norway (92 percent) and Denmark (91.4 percent). The lowest employment rate for university graduates in 2008 was in Turkey (81.4 percent), Italy (86.5 percent), Israel (86.6 percent) and Greece (87.2 percent). In contrast, the employment rate for those below the secondary education is the lowest in Slovakia (39 percent), Hungary (47.5 percent), Poland (55 percent) and Czech Republic (57.4 percent).

The persistence of high unemployment rate for those below the secondary education degree is a broad outline of the findings from the course of labor economics. The human capital, defined as the stock of years of education per capita, is highly positively correlated with career earnings. The evolution of human capital across the countries has been a subject of debate on economic growth. The empirical study by Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee (link) has shown that, for instance, upper secondary school attendence by males has a significant long-term impact on the economic growth. The level of education, sustained by the years of schooling, is not a sole determinant of economic growth in the international perspective. Although, the economic growth is strongly positively correlated with the average years of schooling, the relationship is less powerful considering different parameters of the educational attainment. In the Barro-Lee dataset (link), there is a significant variation between the share of female population that enrolled in a tertiary education and the share of female that completed the tertiary degree. The difference is significant not only in the cross section but also in the country-based time series.

By far the highest tertiary degree completion rate for female has been present in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. Among other countries, the completion rate of Iceland and the Netherlands has been significantly higher compared to the countries of the Continental and Mediterranean Europe. The rate of return to an additional year of schooling significantly differed across countries and across the level of education. For instance, Barro and Lee estimated that the rate of return is the highest at the tertiary level (17.9 percent per annum) compared to the secondary level (10 percent) while the rate of return from an additional year of schooling at the primary level is statistically insignificant from zero. The picture shows the regional variation in the average rate of return from an additional year of schooling.

Rate of return from an additional year of schooling across the world

Source: R. Barro & J.W Lee: Educational Attainment in the World, 1950-2010 (link)

The creation of human capital is essential to higher economic growth. Ultimately, the investment in human capital is the essential means of higher standard of living in poor countries. An interesting theoretical question is what could account for a divergence across the countries? Considering the relevant economic theory as well as scholarly contributions to the theory and empirics of economic growth, there are several factors that explain the significance of divergence in the rate of return from an additional year of education.

First, the impact of behavioral patterns on education and labor market decisions explains a pretty large part of the difference between the effect of education and labor market structure on the rate of return from schooling. Although the field of behavioral economics (link) is still a largely evolving discipline within the economics, the existing empirical studies of the effects of institutional variables on education outcome try to capture these effects by different proxies such as the estimates of political freedom, the rule of law and civil liberties. The changes in the return to education may be related to these factors since the relative worth of education in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America may incur high opportunity cost given the payoff from predatory behavior or working in the informal sector of the economy.

Second, general and firm-specific human capital investment, the increase in college premium and the enormous increase in female labor force participation help explain high rate of return from an additional year of schooling in advanced countries and East Asia. In particular, East Asian tigers were able to sustain high economic growth rates partly because of well-trained and educated labor force able to use the modern technologies. The resulting outcome of the Asian economic miracles has been a steady growth in output per worker and a gradual convergence of wage rates in South Korea and Japan to the level of U.S. According to Kevin Murphy and Finis Welch (link), the premium of getting a college education in the U.S in 1980s was 67 percent. The growth in college and university attendence rates is largely explained by the robust increase in tertiary education premium.

And third, greater labor force participation of women has also led to higher rates of college and university attendence. In spite the persistent male-female pay gap, women have experienced a tremendous increase in lifetime earnings as a consequence of higher rates of college and university attendence. The persistence of the male-female pay gap can be explained by the rewards to education rather than by inherent gender bias. The U.S. Census published the relevant data (link) on the distribution of female earnings. In 2003, the female earnings of high school graduates in the 25-34 age thresold represented 78 percent of average male earnings. The earnings of the same female age thresold with bachelor's degree represented 89 percent of male earnings and 71 percent for those female with master's degree. What accounts for the gender earnings gap across the levels of age and education is the asymmetric self-selection that led to dispersed gender distribution of relative earnings. Men usually self-select into the areas of work requiring a significant amount of risk-taking and rather uncertain payoffs while the female labor market pattern is inclined towards less risk-taking and greater certainty regarding the stability of lifetime earnings.

The data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (link) published in 2003, showed that female-to-male earnings ratio in high-paying jobs is the lowest in the field of chief executives where female earnings represented 80 percent of average male earnings in the same field of occupation. On average, the female-to-male earnings ratio declined in low-paying occupations such as cashiers (93 percent), cooks (91 percent), food preparation (93 percent) and hand packaging (101 percent). Contrary to the popular perception, female earnings in the field of computer systems management and legal industry represented 91 percent of average male earnings while the highest ratio in high-paying occupations was recorded in pharmaceutical industry (92 percent).

Indeed, there is a persistent and historically lowest male-female earnings gap. But, as the labor economic theory of human capital predicts, the gender pay difference reflects different cognitive abilities and preferences of occupational selection considering the degree of risk-taking and payoff uncertainty. Even the international test scores (link) confirmed that advantage of female cognitive abilities comprehends in verbal reasoning and reading skills (link) while the cognitive abilities of male are more inclined towards the use of computer technology (link) and mathematics (link).

Even in a cross-country perspective, the gender wage differential persists. The gap, defined as the female-male ratio, ranges from 0.9 in France to 0.7 in Canada. The gender wage differential is a cross section of major economies is shown in the table below.

The Gender Earnings Gap Across Countries

Source: F.D Blau & L.M Kahn, Gender Differences in Pay, 2000

The set of different institutional characteristics of labor market in different countries could easily complement the productivity growth rates as to explain the evolution of wage differential across countries. Even though wage rates are primarily determined by the productivity growth, the existence of collective bargaining schemes and rigid labor market mechanism determining wage rate and total compensation can add significantly to the enforcement of particular labor market policies affecting gender bias in wage determination. In the United States and other advanced countries, the main cause of the wider gender earnings gap is a significant gap between college education premium and high school premium. In addition, reductions in personal income tax rates furthermore increase the rewards to college education relative to the education levels of high school or less - which, by the empirical evidence, seems to be the main determinant of earnings gap in the labor market of advanced countries.

OPEC AND THE LOGIC OF CARTELS

2010-09-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

Recently, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) celebrated its 50th anniversary (link). The organization was founded in 1960 with the purpose of regulating world's oil prices and controlling the supplies of oil. Currently, OPEC controls 80 percent of world's proven oil reserves and its 12 member states oil production capacity accounts for 40 percent of world's total oil production.

OPEC's oil production and the world economy

Source: The Economist (link)

As a profit-maximizing monopolist, OPEC is faced with a downward sloping demand curve and upward sloping marginal cost curve which represents the market supply curve of the orgaization's 12 member states. As a profit-maximizing agent, OPEC countries equate marginal cost of production and marginal revenue from oil supplies and thus extract the entire consumer surplus from oil importing countries such as the United States, Japan and the European Union. There are several plausible explanation of OPEC's monopoly power in the world oil market. First, oil is a good with no close substitutes. Thus, the price elasticity of oil demand curve is significantly price inelastic. The average empirical estimate of the world price elasticity of demand for oil is -0.4, suggesting that a 10 percent increase in the price of oil would, on average, reduce the market demand for oil by 4 percent, ceteris paribus.

The relationship between the total revenue of the monopolist and the elasticity of demand suggests that the unit elasticity of demand is the revenue-maximizing point elasticity of demand for the monopoly firm such as OPEC. As the graph shows, OPEC's price spikes occured mostly during external shocks such as the 1973 oil shocks, Arab-Israeli war and the recent financial crisis. The spikes in the world price of oil reflected the pure logic of OPEC's cartel. By pushing the price upward, OPEC countries realized that, in the short run, the price elasticity of demand for oil is even more inelastic, thus reducing the consumer surplus of oil importing countries while expanding the producer surplus of OPEC member states.

The strategic behavior of OPEC mostly depends on the nature of external shocks affecting the production capacity and reserves of world's oil supplies. During political conflicts, the short-run demand for oil spiked and, therefore, the price elasticity of demand for oil decreased, increasing OPEC's short run producer surplus. Thereupon, OPEC member states set oil production quotas which exactly reflected the organization's intention to extract the entire consumer surplus from oil importing countries. Also, during the pre-2008 economic boom, the economic growth in emerging markets further inflated the world price of oil since the OPEC's short run production capacity outpaced the quotas set by the organization. But during the recent financial crisis, the short-run response of OPEC has been the reduction of per barrel oil price as an strategic step towards maintain the stability of market demand for oil. During the recent crisis, personal consumption and incomes have fallen substantially and therefore, assuming the positive income elasticity of demand for oil, the world demand for oil decreased considerably. The change in the aggregate consumption of oil has led to relatively more price elastic demand for oil. Partly, the increase in the price elasticity of oil is explained by the technological innovation and market access to long-run substitutes of oil such as fuel-efficient and electric vehicles and electric cars.

The technological development of fuel-efficient vehicles has decreased the monopoly power of OPEC by increasing the price elasticity of demand for oil due to the availibility of closer substitutes. In the follow-up of the financial crisis, the OPEC set the per barrel price of oil at $75. Given the downward sloping market demand curve, the short-run oil consumption increased and OPEC thus raised the relative price of oil's substitutes since it acknowledged the switching costs of changing the consumption of durable goods which complement the consumption of oil. What OPEC did is that it attempted to establish the short-run price elasticity of oil close to unity and, thereby, effectively increase the total revenue of the organization's member states. However, if in the long run, the market demand for oil was elastic, the net effect of increasing the price of oil, would incidentally fall on the burden of OPEC producers. Therefore, relatively price inelastic demand and price elastic oil supply is the main source of OPEC's monopoly power in the world oil market.

The rationale behind the cartelled market organization of oil supply is the stability of demand for oil across the world. Could OPEC's monopoly power, in effect, be broken if one country would set asymmetric prices on the global oil market. The desire of OPEC member states to fully collude in the cartel is the well-known phenomena from industrial organization known as the trigger strategy. According to trigger strategy, a member of the cartel is likely to divert from the cartel's strategy only if long-term gains outpace short-term losses of acting in accordance with the cartel's strategic behavior. In purely theoretical terms, if Nash equlibrium exists in the long-term benefits of cooperation, the diversion from cartel's strategic behavior, will not be feasible.

Even though some OPEC member states face asymmetric market demand curves in the short run, the stability of world oil demand embodied in the relatively price inelastic oil demand decrease the feasibility of defection from the cartel's strategic targets, discounted benefits from the collusion far outpace potential short-term losses.

EARNINGS AND EDUCATION: A SURVEY

2010-09-10T13:44:00.001-07:00

In 2009, the median weekly earnings of workers with bachelor's degrees were $1,137. This amount is 1.8 times the average amount earned by those with only a high school diploma, and 2.5 times the earnings of high school dropouts (link).

CHINA'S GROWTH MODEL

2010-09-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

According to some preliminary estimates (link), China's trade balance is on the course for a significant surplus this year. IMF's annual forecast of current account balance predicted China's trade surplus at $334 billion in 2010 or roughly 6.2 percent of China's GDP. The IMF's medium-term forecast suggests a growing trade surplus by 2015 when the surplus is estimated at a little more than 8 percent of GDP.

Recently, Dani Rodrik questioned (link) the persistence of China's mercantilism based on persistently low exchange rate. The partial fixation of the exchange rate then stimulates export-led growth model and, consequently, results in a large trade surplus which translates into foreign exchange reserves, thus enabling China's central bank to foster exchange rate intervention to defended the targeted yuan exchange rate against the U.S dollar. The implications of China's growth model extend beyond the scope of effects on country's economic growth, investment and current account balance. China's export-led growth model has tremendously affected the macroeconomic performance of developing nations. The exports of developing nations in the European, Japanese and U.S markets basically substitute, not complement, China's exports to the markets of advanced countries. The persistent lack of the appreciation of renmimbi thus forced the economic policymakers of other developing nations to either adopt the same model of exchange rate intervention or lose the export share in developing countries. This intuition is underlined by the theoretical and empirical support.

In 2007, Hausmann, Hwang and Rodrik demonstated (link) that the pattern of specialization by developing countries predicts the subsequent economic growth, suggesting that the share of exports in advanced countries is highly positively correlated with the rates of economic growth. If China shifted the main source of economic growth from export-led model to domestic consumption, the renmimbi would have to appreciate considerably. Contrary to the assertion that China's exchange rate undervaluation hampers the economic growth, industrialization and development prospects of developing nations, the OECD recently stated that developing countries would be hurt significantly if the renmimbi exchange rate were allowed to appreciate. There is also an empirical support for the particular assertion. The OECD recently estimated (link) that, if China's output grew by 1 percentage point, the output of developing countries would decrease by 0.3 percentage point.

The empirics supports the argument I mentioned earlier - China's exchange rate misalignment inevitably hinders the growth prospects and industrialization of developing countries. The essential question in the course of economic development is what is the best model of growth for developing countries to boost industrialization and development frontiers.

One possibility is the so called surplus model. Historically, growth models of low-income countries were primarily based on exporting natural resources to the rest of the world. Countries such as oil-rich gulf states, Botswana and Argentina became wealthy. Such growth model heavily depends on export demand in other countries. The most notable failure of this growth model is that it doesn't encourage the diversification of economic activity. Thus, countries such as Libya have sustained relatively high levels of GDP but, at the same time, rather depressing domestic indicators. For instance, Libya's GDP per capita is at almost the same level as Chile's GDP per capita, but Libya's unemployment rate is 30 percent - almost three times the average unemployment rate in countries with the same level of GDP per capita. When foreign demand deteriorates, these countries experience the Dutch disease - an overheating economic activity and overvalued exchange rates that discourage investment, entrepreneurship and typically result in higher unemployment rates.

Industrialization and economic development mostly depend on domestic structural change based on the adopting the institutions of macroeconomic stabilization and the rule of law. China's exchange rate policy of renmimbi undervaluation is a failed temporary growth model that is set on the unsustainable course. Without shifting the major engine of growth from export-boosting exchange rate undervaluation to consumption-based growth, Chinese economy will no longer be able to sustain high productivity growth rates. Letting the renmimbi appreciate by free floating could significantly boost the potential for institutional change in China and other developing nations. Therefore, the systemic abuse of macroeconomic policy by exchange rate undervaluation would no longer be feasible and the costs of failed exchange rate regime for developing countries would diminish substantially.

PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN BRAZIL

2010-09-06T01:45:00.000-07:00

Carlos Pereira of the Brookings Institution (link) has reviewed the dismal productivity growth and the consequent macroeconomic indicators in Brazil in the last decade.

"Although there are several expenditures in this category, the one that stands out high above all others is outlays for social security and pensions. Practically one-third of the federal budget is devoted to these expenditures, whereas expenditures in investments were less than 6 percent in 2003. Pensions in Brazil since the 1988 constitution have been notably generous, especially in the civil service. A new group of non-contributing rural pensions was added, contributing to systematic deficits. With about 11.7 percent of GDP, Brazil has one of the highest social security expenditures in the world, especially considering that the Brazilian population is much younger than that of most countries with similar levels of expenditure."

SKILLED IMMIGRATION AND INNOVATION

2010-09-05T13:09:00.000-07:00

A recent paper by Jennifer Hunt (link) finds that the increase in foreign-born graduates strongly contributes to the innovation in the United States:

"In this paper I have demonstrated the important boost to innovation per capita provided by skilled immigration to the United States in 1950-2000. A calculation of the effect of immigration in the 1990-2000 period puts the magnitudes of the effects in context.

The 1990-2000 increase from 2.2% to 3.5% in the share of the population composed of immigrant college graduates increased patenting by at least 81:3 = 10:4%, and perhaps by as much as 18%. The increase in the share of post-college immigrants from 0.9% to 1.6% increased patenting by at least 10.5% and perhaps by as much as 24%. The increase from 0.30% to 0.55% in the share of workers who are immigrant scientists and engineers increased patenting by at least 13% but probably by less than 23%.

While I find evidence for the crowding-out of natives in the short run, in the long run there is evidence for the reverse: that skilled natives are attracted to states or occupations with skilled immigrants. The results hint that skilled immigrants innovate more than their native counterparts, especially if they are scientists or engineers. If correct, the result could reflect higher education of immigrants within skill categories, or positive selection of immigrants in terms of ability to innovate. However, the effect of natives is not as well identified econometrically as the effect of immigrants."

Thanks to New Economist (link) for the pointer!

WHY DO THE POOR CHOOSE TO LIVE IN CITIES?

2010-09-05T13:01:00.001-07:00

In the recent edition of Yale Economic Review (link), Ed Glaeser, Matthew Kahn and Jordan Rappaport ponder one of the most difficult and challenging puzzles of urban economics:

"The 2000 U.S. Census shows that the average poverty rate in American cities drops signiﬁcantly, from about 20% to 7.5%, as you move from the CBD of a city to its suburbs. How can we tell that this connection between city residence and poverty comes from treatment – that is, cities make people poor – rather than from selection, where the poor disproportionately move to central cities? Here, the data support selection: although ghettos may exacerbate poverty, poor people move disproportionately to the center of the cit- ies, either when switching homes or moving to a new metropolitan area... Given the high proportion of the urban poor who are Black, one might think that inner-city poverty is really just another example of the segregation of minorities. However, [the authors] found that poor Whites have roughly the same central city - suburb poverty gap as Blacks, so it is unlikely that race plays an important role in the centralization of the poor."

AFRICAN SUCCESS STORY: BOTSWANA

2010-09-05T12:53:00.001-07:00

An intriguing empirical finding from the institutional perspective of economic development from Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson (link):

"Botswana has had the highest rate of per capita growth of any country in the world in the last 35 years. This occurred despite adverse initial conditions, including minimal investment during the colonial period and high inequality. Botswana achieved this rapid development by following orthodox economic policies. How Botswana sustained these policies is a puzzle because typically in Africa, ‘good economics’ has proved not to be politically feasible. In this Paper we suggest that good policies were chosen in Botswana because good institutions, which we refer to as institutions of private property, were in place...

Why did institutions of private property arise in Botswana, but not other African nations? We conjecture that the following factors were important. First, Botswana possessed relatively inclusive pre-colonial institutions, placing constraints on political elites. Second, the effect of British colonialism on Botswana was minimal, and did not destroy these institutions. Third, following independence, maintaining and strengthening institutions of private property were in the economic interests of the elite. Fourth, Botswana is very rich in diamonds, which created enough rents that no group wanted to challenge the status quo at the expense of ‘rocking the boat’. Finally, we emphasize that this situation was reinforced by a number of critical decisions made by the post-independence leaders, particularly Presidents Khama and Masire."

AUTHORITARIAN POLITICS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

2010-09-03T06:04:00.000-07:00

Dani Rodrik argues (link) that political dictatorship is damaging to economic growth since democracies not only outperformed countries with flawed political regimes in the dynamics of economic growth but also in terms of greater civil, economic and political liberties and investment in education that help enforce better public policies and yield better prospects of economic development.

"Democracies not only out-perform dictatorships when it comes to long-term economic growth, but also outdo them in several other important respects. They provide much greater economic stability, measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle. They are better at adjusting to external economic shocks (such as terms-of-trade declines or sudden stops in capital inflows). They generate more investment in human capital – health and education. And they produce more equitable societies."

THE 2015 SOVEREIGN DEBT FORECAST

2010-09-03T05:51:00.000-07:00

Source: The Economist, Sovereign Debt: Wiggle Room, September 2, 2010 (link)

POVERTY, INCOME INEQUALITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

2010-07-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

Financial Times reports (link) on the new measure of poverty proposed by economists from Oxford University. The authors suggested the modification of current measure of poverty which, defined by the World Bank in annually published World Development Report, is currently set at the thresold of $1.25 per day or less. The new measure proposed by economic researchers from Oxford University sets the definition of poverty in a more sophisticated framework based on the household availibility of access to clean water, education, health care and other durable and non-durable goods. The new method, called Alkire-Foster approach, incorporates the qualitative elements into the measurement of poverty.

Using the new method, the authors examined poverty rates in four Indian provinces and evaluated the approach in comparison to the existing income method which had been used in economic and policy analysis by the World Bank and other institutions of economic development. The authors found a significant divergence of poverty rates when measured in both methods. For instance, under Alkire-Foster approach, the poverty rate in Indian state Jharkhand is 50 percent higher compared to the rate of poverty measured under the income method. On the other hand, the authors of the new poverty measure have shown that in some Indian provinces such as Uttaranchal (link), the official measure of poverty highly over-estimates the effective poverty measure as defined by Oxford's Poverty and Human Development Initiative. The multidimensional worldwide poverty index is also availible on the web (link).

The intuitive question arising from the data and empirical research on poverty is whether higher economic growth in less developed countries boosts the growth of income per capita and what is the role of institutional characteristics in economic development. The authors of the abovementioned measure of poverty have shown that despite abundant economic growth in past years and falling income poverty rates, the share of population without access to clean water, sanitation and minimum required nutrition remained unchanged. The percentage of malnourished children in India decreased from 47 percent in 1998-98 to 46 percent 2005-06.

The theoretical and empirical literature on economic growth suggests that there is an inverse U-relationship between inequality and income per capita known as Kuznets curve (link). The intuition behind the relationship is simple. At the very low levels of income per capita, income inequality is low. Alongside the course of growing income per capita, income inequality steeply increases and, after reaching a maximum, it decreases as countries achieve higher levels of income per capita. The rate of income inequality is closely related to the evolution of economic policies over time. Wagner's law, discussed in one of the previous posts, states that government spending over time increases due to long-run income elastic demand for public goods and capture of the democratic system by the particular interest groups that pose a permanent pressure on the growth of government spending and resist the reversals of government expenditures by trading votes.

There's a wide array of disagreement among economists on the effect of income inequality on economic growth. Back in 2001, Joseph Stiglitz re-examined the East Asian economic miracle and concluded that the evidence from the period of high economic growth in East Asian countries suggests that income redistribution has a positive effect on economic growth (link). Stiglitz's argument is based on the income distribution in East Asian countries during the economic miracle. East Asian countries have been known for relatively even distribution of income demonstrated by high Gini index and relatively high income tax rates.

On the other hand, the empirical investigation of the initial conditions in East Asian countries before the economic miracle shows that the political influence of interest groups had been relatively weak compared to Western Europe after the World War 2 when the productivity growth stalled from early 1970s onwards. The relative weakness of interest groups and a stable judicial system, inherited from English common law tradition, enabled high economic growth in the longer run given an enduring stability of property rights protection and the rule of law. In such conditions, income redistribution had relatively little effect on economic growth since the empirics of East Asian miracle suggests that the sizeable proportion of growth in East Asian countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Korea and Taiwan) had been driven by technological progress, investment and export orientation. Considering export orientation, Rodrik et. al (2005) provided the evidence (link) on the positive effect of high-quality export orientation on economic growth. The productivity growth in East Asian countries between 1975 and 1990 had been a pure example of economic miracle defined by the share of growth that could not be explained by the contribution of labor and capital input. In Taiwan and Hong Kong (link), total factor productivity accounted for about 60 percent of output per capita growth. Between 1975 and 1990, in Singapore, output per capita had increased by 8.0 percent. Consequently, the resulting outcome of almost two decades of robust productivity growth had been a significant decrease in national poverty rates (link). The lowest poverty rate, as defined by the measures of home authorities, is in Taiwan where 0.95 of the population live below the poverty thresold.

The basic set of policies that alleviate extreme poverty such as providing access to clean water, nutrition, medical protection against HIV/AIDS and basic sanitary standards have a positive effect on the economic growth and the standard of living. However, the major cause of persistent under-development in Subsaharan and Tropical Africa is mostly the lack of institutional enforcement of property rights, the rule of law and independent judiciary. In spite of billions of USD of direct foreign aid, countries such as Zambia, Sierra Leone, Mali and Rwanda endure in persistent poverty and under-development. Esther Duflo, this year's recepient of John Bates Clark Award, has shown in several studies how field experiments can enlighten the understanding of incentives in least developed countries (link). Understanding the significance of incentives in reducing poverty is crucial to further examination of the relationship betwen income inequality and economic growth.

U.S. POPULATION STRUCTURE: 2010-2050

2010-06-17T09:35:00.001-07:00

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (link)

THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON WAGNER'S LAW

2010-06-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

Ever since the original proposition by a 19th century German economist Adolph Wagner, Wagner's law has undergone significant theoretical and empirical discussion on its long-run validity. In the most basic and rudimentary version, the law states that alongside the economic development of industrial societies, there is a persistent tendency of an increasing share of government spending in the GDP. Since the beginning of the 20th century course, the growth in government expenditures has escalated in all major industrial countries. The economic literature has centered the discussion on two elementary versions of Wagner's law. The first version of Wagner's law attributes the growing share of government spending to the ever expanding power of interest groups.

The concept of interest groups has been thoroughly developed by a rigorous theoretical analysis by Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. There is a remarkably positive correlation between the growth of government spending and the political power of interest groups. Back in 1954, Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets have analyzed the income dynamics in independent professions (link). Although there has not been much discussion in the economic literature, the Friedman-Kuznets analysis is an important milestone in the explanation of the evolution of interest groups. Friedman and Kuznets examined five independent professions. Using a comprehensive statistical analysis, they showed how income growth in five profession has exerted an upward trend without significant gains in productivity. The five independent professions analyzed by Friedman and Kuznets emerged as pure interest groups. These groups have imposed a regulated labor market structure marred by occupational licencing and aimed at gaining an insider's earnings rent at the expense of entry restriction. Occupational licensing is one of the most powerful explanatory features of low coefficient of price and income elasticity of labor supply of physicians, dentists, legal consultants and medical practitioners. In most of the industrial countries, these groups have emerged as powerful interest groups and triggered an unbreakable increase on the growth of government spending. The evolution of interest groups in fields such as agriculture, social security and trade has resulted in the intensive pressure on the growth of government spending. The interest group perspective on Wagner's law emphasizes the state capture created by the democratic system and an irreversible pattern of increases in government spending centered on small and powerful interest groups. If interest group's representative utility function can be described as a relationship between the group's size and its price elasticity of labor supply: U(f,e)=f(1-|e|), then the effect of a unit change in price elasticity of labor supply dU/de=-f indicates that greater price elasticity of labor supply will reduce the size (f) of the interest group as a result of pure substitution effect at work. On the other hand, if price elasticity of labor supply of the particular interest group will decrease, causing more price inelastic labor supply, the size of the interest group will increase since most of the excess wage increases will spill into physician's pocket.

The second version of Wagner's law states that an increase in government spending in time is a result of a high income elasticity of demand for public goods. Rati Ram (1986) has tested this hypothesis on the sample of 115 countries between 1950 and 1980. His conclusions suggest that income elasticity of demand for public goods is very elastice (exceeding 1) in 60 percent of all countries in the sample. A comprehensive development of econometric methodology has enabled a more rigorous and empirical evaluation of Wagner's law on the basis of long-run simulation using time-series data. For example Sidelis (2006) has applied cointegration analysis and Granger casuality tests to determine whether long-run changes in income account for the growth of government spending in Greece between 1833 and 1938 (link). The author concludes that income elastic demand for public goods caused a growth in government expenditures. A recent study by Lamartina and Zaghini (2008) indicates (link) a negative relationship between government spending and economic growth in a sample of 23 OECD countries. The study further suggests that the correlation between income growth and government expenditure is stronger in countries with low initial levels of GDP per capita. Neck and Getzner (2007) collected data on government expenditure in Austria between 1870 and 2002 and examined whether the surge of government expenditure is attributed to either Wagner's law or Baumol's cost disease. The authors applied Phillipe-Perron and Augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity tests, concluding that government spending time series more likely represents a stationary time series. In concluding remarks, the authors note that much of the increase in government expenditure is a problem of increasing prices in public sector, relating the growth in public expenditures to Baumol's cost disease where output reduction in public sector is a result of net decrease in productivity growth which yields a significant pressure from public sector interest groups on expenditure increases.

Wagner's law is an intriguing theoretical and empirical issue. In spite of the numerous empirical evaluation and theoretical design, the issue will probably remain an intensive course of the academic debate.

THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF SODA TAX

2010-06-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

Greg Mankiw (link) and David Leonhardt (link) have opened a debate on whether govenrment policymakers should levy a tax on soda and other soft drinks as an attempt to reverse the growing trend of obesity among the U.S. population. The idea of taxing soda has become popular as governments around the world have recorded high budget deficits and revenue shortfall. The real question is what would be the effects of taxing soda and, if so, would the introduction of the tax contribute to the reversal of the obesity pattern, especially among the child population.

There is a decent amount of empirical studies and health policy analyses on the patterns and causes of obesity. Obesity and the risk of premature death resulted from high blood pressure and the potential heart attack is the most individual cost of fast-food consumption. For a long period of time, we assumed that these costs at the individual level could be internalizied and, thus, raise no cost to the society. In the article published in Sunday's edition of NY Times Greg Mankiw drew parallels between soda and tobacco tax. If individuals consume a lot of cigarettes at home, there is, presumably, no negative externality shifted onto the society. The logic could be applied to soda taxation. However, there is a flip side to the argument. Taxing soda, tobacco and other goods with a negative impact on bystanders is an answer to the growing cost of health care delivery to the individuals who consume these goods. The adverse impact levied on other individuals is seen through higher health insurance premiums and total cost of health care.

John Cawley published an extensive analysis of the causes of early childhood obesity (link), suggesting greater government intervention and various cost-effectiveness measures to mitigate the adverse impact of childhood obesity on other members of the society. A study by Jason M. Fletcher, Daniel Frisvold and Nathan Tefft (link) has been one of the first attempts to measure the effect of vending machines restriction on childhood obesity. The authors concluded by suggesting higher tax rates and soft drink access restrictions in schools to fight the on-going increase in childhood obesity.

As Kelly Brownell of Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity mentioned, the link between sugary drinks and obesity is stronger than the link between obesity and any other kind of food (link). The evidence suggests that distance from fast-food restaurant is a significant feature of childhood obesity. A study conducted by Janet Currie et. al (2009) has shown that among children in the 9th grade, a fast-food restaurant within 1/10 of the mile in school is associated with at least 5.2 percent increase in obesity rates (link). The study found that the direct impact of distance from the fast-food restaurant is significantly larger for less educated African-American and less educated women.

The question is whether taxing soda and other kinds of fizzy drinks could potentially reduce and/or reverse the growing trend of obesity. The basic question to start with, is what is the elasticity of demand for soda drinks. The estimates suggests that price elasticity of demand for the majority of soda drinks ranges from -0.8 to -1.0. For example, -1.0 elasticity coefficient suggests that a 10 percent increase in the price of soda would - ceteris paribus - lead to 10 percent decrease in soda drink consumption. The price elasticity of demand for soda drink is relatively high considering that coefficients of price elasticity of demand for other kinds of food ranges from -0.2 to -0.5. If policymakers considered the introduction of a tax on soda consumption, the relevant question is who would bear the burden of the tax? Given elastic demand, the tax would be beared by consumers. However, high price elasticity of demand suggests that there is a widely availible range of close substitutes with potentially negative adverse effects for the individuals. So it is not unlikely that children would switch to other kinds of fast food with equally negative impact on obesity, blood pressure and quality of living.

Given the lack of experiments and availibility of household surveys, it is difficult to estimate the consumer response to the introduction of tax on soda. The estimate of price elasticity of demand suggests that part of the tax would be beared by the consumer. However, it also suggests that a change in the relative price of soda would induce children to consume other varieties of fizzy drinks. Experimental studies by health policy experts suggests different approaches to tackling the adverse impact of soda drinks and other kinds of fast food. The most notable approach is the restriction of vending machines in school districts. However, restricting the access to vending machines would encourage the consumption of fast food outside school districts. A general tax on soda would be preferable to the restrictions of access of vending machines. There is absolutely no doubt that a tax would discourage consumption of soda and other kinds of fast food. Estimates suggest that soda and other kinds of fast food such as hamburgers, donuts and cakes are complementary. Assume, the cross-price elasticity of demand for burgers is -0.9 Thus, if the price per unit os soda increases by 10 percent, the demand for donuts, burgers and cakes decreases by 9 percent (0.9×10 percent). Since a tax on soda would raise the relative price of soda, the consumption of these kinds of fast food would diminish, resulting in less adverse impact of fast food consumption on the individuals. I would disagree with the statement that negative externalities from soda and fast food consumption are internalized by the individual. For example, an article by Trasande, Liu, Fryer and Weitzman (2009) published in Health Affairs (link) investigated the annual cost of childhood obesity in the U.S. between 2001 and 2005, based on the nationally representative data from U.S. hospitals admissions. The authors found that from 1999 to 2005, obesity-related hospitalizations doubled. In addition, costs related to hospitalization, treatment and diagnosis of obesity increased from $125.9 to $237.6 million, an 88.7 percent increase. The cost is partly beared by Medicare while the rest of the total cost is beared by the private insurance premiums.

Given the perverse system of employer-provided health care and implicit subsidizing of health insurance suppliers by the federal government, the periodic increase in obesity-related health care costs indicates a further rise in Medicare expenditures and health insurance premiums. In such conditions, there is little incentive for children and parents to reverse the consumption of soda drinks and fast food. Taxing soda and complementary fast food is a step in the right direction. But it should be noted that the introduction of a tax on soda should be compensated by a corresponding decrease in personal income tax. However, without the parent-guided awareness of the adverse impact of fast food on obesity, it would be difficult to reverse the increasing pattern and cost of childhood and adult obesity. Therefore, much of the obesity-related health care risk in childhood can be solved within the household. It would be irrational and foolish to believe that a tax on soda and government paternalism could solve the obesity puzzle and mitigate its neighborhood effects on bystanders.

THE EUROZONE AS NON-OPTIMUM CURRENCY AREA

2010-06-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

In WSJ, Vaclav Klaus, the president of Czech Republic, draw important conclusions from the long-term economic sustainability of the Eurozone (link), arguing that the eurozone is not an optimum currency area as suggested by the famous four criteria from economic theory. In a puzzling essay, Mr. Klaus demarks the eurozone as a monetary union of particular economic viability and, based on the assessment of growth dynamics in Europe, suggests that the eurozone will face a deepening problem in the future.

SLOW GROWTH AND PUBLIC DEBT IN EUROPE

2010-06-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

Gary Becker (link) and Richard Posner (link) have initiated an interesting debate on low economic growth as the main macroeconomic concern of European economies in overcoming the increasing burden of public debt.

TAX WEDGE AND PRODUCTIVITY IN OECD COUNTRIES

2010-05-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

The OECD Factblog highlighted a comparison of tax burden across the OECD countries. The main findings of the comparison is that overall tax burden, measured as a percentage of labor costs, is the highest in Western European countries. Belgium, Hungary, Germany and France are the countries with the highest overall tax burden while Ireland, Iceland, Australia and Korea have sustained low tax wedge. The data acquired by the OECD pose an intriguing question: is slow economic growth in European countries attributed to high tax burden of labor supply and, if so, has the gap between the U.S. and Europe grown further?

Let's decompose the data and underline the main findings. Tax wedge, measured as a percentage of taxes and transfers paid in the share of total labor costs, is a suficient measure of the overall level of taxation. In the analysis of the effect of taxation on labor supply, the economic theory distinguishes between substitution and income effect. The former means that tax rate on labor supply would reduce the number of working hours and shift the individuals to allocate more time into leisure. The income effect, on the other hand, states that the effect of tax on labor supply would be neutral and would, hence, not have an effect on the relative allocation of resources between working hours and leisure. In general, there are two largely opposing views in economic policy regarding the relationship between taxation and labor supply. Conservative and liberal economists tend to emphasize the role of incentives. Higher tax rate would raise the labor cost and the corresponding decline in wages would be offset by the re-allocation of resources into leisure sector of the economy. Left-wing economists mostly disagree with the abovementioned proposition. Instead, they emphasize the role of elasticity of labor supply. According to New Keynesian view, short-run tax elasticity of labor supply is low in absolute terms, meaning that the amount of working hours does not respond significantly to relative changes in tax rates. The Keynesian economists thus emphasize the significance of income effect while the conservative and liberal economists tend to emphasize the substitution effect. The distinctions and policy effects of these two theoretical propositions remains a controversial issue of economic policy debate.

The country distribution data is extensively underlined in the data (link). For example, one-earner married couple at 100 percent of earnings distribution is taxed at 20 percent of the overall labor cost in the United States, 22 percent in Australia, 18 percent in Switzerland and 13 percent in New Zealand. On the other tax wedge statistics for Western Europe is a completely different picture. In Sweden, one-earner married couple at 100 percent of earnings distribution will earn only 57 percent of net earnings, indicating a 43 percent effective tax rate on labor supply. In Belgium, the effective tax rate on labor supply is 42.6 percent. Is the difference in effective tax rates statistically significant feature of productivity variation across OECD countries. The OECD recently composed a breakdown in key productivity statistics in developed countries (link). To estimate the relationship between productivity and tax burden, I collected data on multifactor productivity dynamics from Groningen Growth and Development Center (link) and data on tax wedge across OECD countries (link). I estimated the noted relationship for 16 developed OECD countries. Multifactor productivity is a dependent variable while tax wedge is an explanatory variable.The estimates are displayed on the graph below.

Multifactor productivity in OECD relative to the U.S. and total tax burden (% of labor cost)

Source: GGDC, OECD Factblog

The horizontal line on the graphs marks the U.S. level of multifactor productivity. As the graph shows, the underlying relationship between multifactor productivity (MFP)and tax wedge is fitted with quadratic equation. Total tax wedge explains about 34.5 percent of the variation in multifactor productivity index across OECD countries. The trend exerts a decreasing MFP as the tax wedge rises and, after reaching a local minimum, a slight increase alongside the proporional rise in tax wedge. The relevant question is at which rate of tax wedge the MFP reaches the minimum. Setting the first-order derivate to zero (dy/dx=0) yields 0.0016x-0.0488=0. Rearranging the equation yields x=30.5. The first-order derivative implies that MFP reaches the minimum at 30.5 percent tax wedge. The estimate sample-based tax elasticity of productivity ((dy/dx)(x/y)) is 1.78. The elasticity indicates that 1 percentage point increase in tax wedge would reduce the multifactor productivity in a sample country by 1.78 percent, ceteris paribus. In other words, the estimated slope coefficient suggests that a 1 percentage point increase in tax wedge would widen the MFP gap between the average country and the US by additional 0.05 index points.

In economic terms, MFP would decrease as long as the countries in the sample would exert less than 30.5 percent tax wedge. In the horizon after the local minimum (30.5 percent), MFP would initially increase but at a smaller rate than before the function would reaches the minimum point. At 20 percent tax wedge (close to Japanese level), the expected decrease in MFP would be 0.0168 index point. At 40 percent tax wedge, the expected increase in MFP would be 0.0152 index point. Economically, the relationship between MFP and tax wedge should not be interpreted as a mixed effect of tax wedge on MFP. In countries, where tax wedge exceeds 30.5 percent (Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium etc.) , the multifactor productivity is close to the U.S. level. The only country with higher MFP level than the United States is Luxembourg. In these countries, the average number of annual hours worked per worker is lower than in the U.S. Hence, hourly productivity output is higher. The following graph illustrates the relationship between annual hours worked (per worker) and MFP level.

Average annual hours worked per worker and multifactor productivity relative to the US

Source: OECD Statistics (2010)

As the graph illustrates, there is a negative relationship between average annual hours worked and MFP. The estimated regression coefficient suggests that an increase in annual hours worked by 100 hours would reduce MFP level (compared to the U.S) by 0.06 index points. As expected, the implied elasticity of productivity is negative. Taking the average values ov both variables, an increase in average annual hours worked (per worker) by 1 percent would reduce the MFP relative to the U.S level by 1.16 percent, ceteris paribus.

The conclusion is that there is a significant and negative impact of tax wedge on multifactor productivity. Taking the differences in annual hours worked into account, tax wedge alone explains almost 35 percent of the differential in multifactor productivity across the OECD. The findings suggest that there is a relatively strong substitution effect in labor supply. The finding is underlined by the fact that higher tax wedge would correspondingly reduce annual hours worked. However, the interpretation should be taken with a grain of warning. As previous empirical studies have shown, there is a widespread disparity in the distribution of working hours in formal and household sector of the economy. A sizeable proportion of working hours in household sector of the economy is not officially measured. Consequently, a blick of distortion of the real relationship between labor supply and tax wedge, in its broadest sense, is a major impediment to the measurement of labor supply dynamics. These estimates will, in a large part, determine the future research of the effect of taxation on labor productivity.

WELFARE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF EUROZONE

2010-05-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

The $140 billion rescue package to Greece is a milestone in the European Monetary Union. A lively debate on recent macroeconomic imbalances in the weakest economies of the Euroarea - Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal - in the Eurozone has reopened the old debate on whether the Eurozone is an optimum currency areas (here, here, here and here). The idea of optimum currency areas was first proposed by Nobel-winning economist Robert Mundell. In general, if several countries form a currency union, they should have at least four common macroeconomic features as essential framework of the currency union. In this article, I'll review the labor market criteria and fiscal adjustment criteria in the light of a recent imbalances in the Euroarea, and leave production diversification and export criteria for future discussion.

First, there should be a high degree of labor mobility between countries in the currency union. The basic idea behind the labor mobility criteria is that the lack of labor mobility triggers divergence of productivity growth rates and asymmetric adjustment of wages. If inter-country productivity divergence persists, there is an upward pressure on wages adjustment given the lack of exchange rate adjustment since the countries share a common monetary policy. The formation of the currency union in the United States was relatively straightforward given the fact that labor mobility between the states is very high. In Europe, the level of labor mobility is relatively low. The lack of labor mobility has a lot to do with labor market institutions in European countries. Workers from the European periphery can hardly move to Germany, Netherlands or Denmark as they do not speak the same language. The lack of inter-country mobility resulted in significant wage premiums and rise in rents since European labor markets share a pretty high degree of monopoly power since European workers can't switch easily between labor market structure. The resulting outcome of the lack of labor market competition was a significant "union capture" of the labor market, leading to rigid wage determination and high market switching costs.

Paul Krugman recently argued (link) that the major problem behind the European Monetary Union is the lack of common fiscal policy. To a very large extent, the absence of common fiscal policy seriously affects the future prospects of the European Monetary Union. Common fiscal policy could easily absorb asymmetric shocks withing the Euroarea. However, instituting the policy could not alter the trade-off between fiscal autonomy and asymmetric shock intensity. In other words, the main problem of the Euroarea right now is the free-riding of Eurozone's most problematic countries on a common monetary policy using disrectionary fiscal policy. Before the economic crisis, Spain had a budget deficit while, at the moment, the 2010 budget deficit forecast is more than 8 percent of the GDP. The estimate Greece's balooning public debt in 2009 ranges from 110 to 115 percent, depending on the consensus forecast. If the EMU countries unified a fiscal policy, the countries would not have an incentive to free-ride on discretionary fiscal policy and further increase the stock of public debt. The major impediment on the recovery and long-term economic outlook of Eurozone countries is largely dependent on how these countries will reform the pension systems in the light of a growing old-age dependence and a near fiscal insolvency of the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension schemes. It will be impossible to reverse the aging population and its persistent pressure on an increasing public debt. The integration of fiscal policy would require a sizeable harmonization of taxes given high costs of coordination and sufficient incentives for moral hazard. Without the reversion of long-term public debt pressure from aging, discretionary spending and entitlements, countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal would leave the Eurozone.

THE EMPIRICS OF CORRUPTION, INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

2010-05-04T12:26:00.000-07:00

Urska Zagar posted two very interesting empirical articles (here and here) about the connections between corruption, economic freedom and economic welfare. The first two indicators are qualitative while the third one is rather easily measurable. In a sample of 50 advanced, developing and least developed countries, she found a positive and robust correlation between corruption perception and GDP per capita, meaning that higher GDP per capita, on average, reduces the scope of corruption. The relationship between corruption and economic development is in fact even more intriguing than empirical figures suggest.

The impact of corruption on economic growth is an important theoretical and empirical theme in the economic literature. In this theoretical and empirical post, I will briefly review the main literature on corruption and development and discuss the empirical studies.

I would firstly refer to the article by Rodrik, Subramanian and Trebbi (2002) where the authors discuss the primacy of institutions for economic development over the exogenous factors such as geography (link). There has been an extensive amount of literature on the role of geography in economic development. The empirical strategy is quite simple. Usually, the basic equation includes the list of explanatory variables such as distance from equator, the percentage of land used for agricultural production and so forth. For example, the basic equation might take the following form:

log(GDP)=b1+b2(Dist)+b3(Land)+b4(Dummy_SubAfrica)+e

where GDP stands for GDP per capita, Dist for distance from equator, Land for the percentage of fertilized land and Dummy_SubAfrica is a dummy variable, taking the value of 1 if a country is located in the Subsaharan Africa and 0 if otherwise. In addition, e represents stohastic error unexplained by the selected predictors.

However, the basic problem with geographic approach to explaining economic development is that the approach does not, by itself, distinguish between the endogenous features of economic development. In regressing GDP per capita on the distance from equator, the empirical estimates usually result in a modestly negative correlation between the two variables. However, the distance from the equator cannot itself explain the nature of economic development and its significance over time mainly because of its low predictive power in explaining the evolution of institutions and governance.

An interesting approach has been incorporated by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001). They incorporate a historical and institutional perspective in the empirical framework of the explanation of economic development. The authors used mortality rates of colonial settlers to explain the institutional quality. They further argue that where settlers encountered few health hazards compared to European settlement, they established solid institutions, strong enforcement of property rights and a robust system of law. In other areas where health hazards frequently occured, colonizers focused on the extraction of natural resources and showed little or no interest in building high-quality institutions. Rodrik, Subramanian and Trebbi (2002) further estimated the impact of geographic variables, institutions and openness on macroeconomic variables.

The main findings in their study were the following. First, each degree distance towards equator, on average, reduces the income per capita by 0.94 percent. The geographical location by the equator is also negatively related to capital per worker (-1.68), human capital per worker (-0.25) and total factor productivity (-0.32). Second, the quality of institutions is a very good measure of the economic welfare. In their panel, the authors found that each additional improvement in the rule of law, on average, leads to 2.22 percent increase in income per capita. The result is statistically significant at 1 percent. The improvement of institutional quality is both positively related and statistically significant when capital per worker, human capital per worker and total factor productivity are regressed on the institutional quality.

Back in 1997, Peterson Institute published an extensive study, searching the causes of corruption (link). The author estimated that the highest cost of corruption in regressing a series of macroeconomic variables on corruption index is lower education expenditure and a decrease in private investment. The estimate of the total macroeconomic cost of corruption is a difficult and daunting empirical task.

The main causes of corruption are mostly endogenous and related to the institutional evolution ranging from legal origins, colonial historical variables to the public sector efficiency variables. In search of the grain of truth, it should be noted that capturing the stylized effect of corruption of economic growth and development requires an interactive empirical approach. In other words, it would be impossible to establish "cause-and-effect" connection between corruption and development indicators without extracting a large amount of historical data and regressing it on the key endogenous variables.

Clearly, the role of geographical characteristics should not be neglected. However, the primacy of institutions in explaining the contemporary patterns of economic development is rather undisputable. Daron Acemoglu recently wrote an in-depth article on the distribution and explanatory factors regarding world poverty (link) where it clearly stressed the lack of institutions of human capital in the evolution of world poverty. When discovering the true causes of corruption, there should nonetheless be a clear and distinct rationale underlined by the evolution of institutional quality over time as the most significant measure in explaining the evolution, causes and effects of corruption on economic development.

FEDERAL DEBT IN THE US (1940-2009)

2010-05-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

Source: Office of Budget and Management (2010)

PRODUCTIVITY AND LABOR COSTS INDEX IN THE UNITED STATES

2010-05-02T14:48:00.001-07:00

Bureau of Labor Statistics has recently published quarterly productivity and costs figures in the US nonfarm business sector (link).

EMU: RECOVERY OR DECLINE?

2010-05-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

NY Times recently reported on the agreed financial rescue assitance to Grecce from EMU (€110 billion) and IMF ($145 billion). Alongside Ireland and Mediterranean countries, the economic recovery of EMU is hampered by a high mountain of public debt and unfavorable macroeconomic data on growth, employment and current account.

Public debt in the European Union in 2009

Source: Eurostat (2009)

The graph I attached, shows the level of public debt in EU countries in 2009. Solid horizontal blue line shows the 60 percent debt-to-GDP ratio required by Maastricht criteria for each EMU entrant.

The underlying data (link) on economic recovery in the US point out a strong and robust recovery. The data from Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the US economy grew by 3.2 percent in Q1:2010 continued from a remarkable 4.6 percent growth in Q4:2009. While private consumption expenditure growth increased by 2 percentage points from the previous quarter, private domestic investment rebounded by 14.8 percent in Q1:2010 after a remarkable 46.1 percent increase in Q4:2009. In addition, labor productivity in Q4:2009 increased by 6.9 percent - the largest quarterly increase since Q3:2003 (link) On the other side, recent revision (link) of quarterly growth rate in the EMU has shown that quarterly GDP in Q1:2010 increased by 0.0 percent, revised from 0.1 percent. Industrial confidence, an important measure of manufacturing outlook, further decline by 12.2 index points.

The macroeconomic outlook for the EMU is downsized by high public debt and negative budget deficit which led 10-year bond premium spread between EMU economies and Germany (link). The premium spread between Greece and Germany stood at 8.57 percentage points on April 28 while the spread between Ireland and Germany was at 2.54 percentage points.

High level of fiscal deficits restrains the economic recovery of the EMU countries. In 2009, Spain, Ireland and Greece faced the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio while Denmark's 2 percent deficit-to-GDP ratio was the lowest in the European Union. NY Times recently collected annual dataset on public debt and budget deficit (link) in which an overview of key public finance indicators is availible.

The prospects of economic recovery in the EMU are further downgraded by unfavorable growth forecast. One of the key questions during the ongoing debt crisis has been whether the EMU will sustain fiscal discrepancy within the EMU since asymmetric fiscal policy undermine the ability of the common monetary policy. Even though Greece's debt crisis is the core of the debate regarding future viability of the single currency, growth estimates for Spain and Italy in 2010/2011 will determine the mid-term macroeconomic stability of the eurozone. European Commission recently updated the quarterly economic growth estimates for eurozone countries (link). Depending on the absorption of financial market spillovers into investment and net exports, economic growth estimates for Italy and Spain are quite pessimistic. After an estimated 0.1 percent growth rate in Q2, Spain's economy is likely to contract in Q3 by -0.2 percent and experience a slight rebound in Q4:2010. Quarterly economic forecast for Italy is positive throughout the year although the economic growth rate is likely to be close to zero. However, Italy's economic growth rate is likely to keep the increasing pace towards the end of the year although current macroeconomic outlook deters consumption, investment and inventories' contribution to GDP growth mainly because of high unemployment rate and sluggish productivity growth.

Robust economic growth is essential to the cure of high public debt. Since EMU countries have adopted a single currency, policymakers cannot trigger exchange-rate adjustment through currency depreciation. The latter would spill into higher inflation and modestly reduce the volume of public debt. Due to high unemployment and slower recovery of inventories, inflation rate is unlikely to rebound to pre-crisis levels.

EMU's most problematic countries' recovery is unlikely to be robust given public debt and deficit constraint on quarterly growth outlook. Without a prudent fiscal tightening, lower government spending, there will be a bleak economic outlook for the future of EMU countries which could result in a decade-long period of low growth, high unemployment and Japan-styled deflationary persistence.

RENMIMBI APPRECIATION: AN UPDATE

2010-04-25T13:31:00.001-07:00

Here (link) is an article by Barry Eichengreen discussed in the previous post.

RENMIMBI APPRECIATION

2010-04-25T00:19:00.000-07:00

Barry Eichengreen wrote a thorough defence of China's exchange rate policy response to the global demands for letting the renmimbi appreciate and thus stimulate the reduction of US trade deficit.

US Treasury Department recently launched a series of initiatives which labelled China as a currency manipulator and a true source of America's widening trade deficit and loss of manufacturing jobs. I pretty much disagree with this particular assertion. China maintains a fixed exchange rate of renmimbi against the US dollar (6.83 RMB/1 USD). True, it is a very difficult empirical task to estimate the true exchange rate of the two currencies due to the fixed exchange rate. If Chinese policymakers let the renmimbi to float freely in global currency market, estimating the real exchange rate would be an easier task.

Low exchange rate against the USD stimulated a large surplus of foreign currency reserves and a large trade surplus from a significant export advantage againist foreign exporters. China's low GDP per capita is pretty much associated with country's sizeable share of investment in national income. Gradually, as Chinese GDP per capita will grow, the share of investment in GDP will correspondingly decline.

The macroeconomic cost of renmimbi appreciation is a daunting empirical task. Earlier estimates suggest that Chinese annual growth rate might be lower by 1-1.5 percentage point. Renmimbi appreciation would also induce Chinese growth pattern shift from investment and export-driven growth to consumption-based growth. It is only a sheer guess whether Chinese policymakers will embrace lower economic growth and a shift towards domestic consumption as the main engine of growth.

However, it would be foolish to mark China as currency manipulator and an ultimate source of US trade deficit and manufacturing loss. The latter can be solely explained by a change in productivity structure which offshored many of America's jobs and created even more jobs at home. The only feasible means of reducing US trade deficit is to cut a galloping fiscal deficit which, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO), is likely to exceed 10 percent of the GDP in the medium term. A move to free-floating renmimbi exchange rate would yield substantial benefits for the world economy. However, China did a great jobs at ignoring Western political demands without any reliance on sound economic analysis

CHINA'S EXCHANGE RATE AND AMERICAN JOBS

2010-04-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a brief Sunday reading list on the issue of China's exchange rate and US manufacturing jobs.

Simon J. Evenett and Joseph Francois on whether Chinese currency revaluation will create net jobs for the US economy (link).

William R. Cline's discussion of estimating the effect of renmimbi appreciation on American jobs (link).

Abdul Abiad, Daniel Leigh and Marco E. Terrones's analysis of cost of reducing large current account surplus (link).

Paul Krugman's discussion of Chinese exchange rate policy (link) (link)

EU vs. USA

2010-04-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

I published a brief analysis (link) for the European Enterprise Institute, discussing a pattern of a growing income differential between the EU and America. The financial crisis diminished European growth rates and further widened the economic gap between the two continents.

Given a weak economic outlook for EU countries, the gap between European Union and the United States is likely to widen in the next decade although the US economy will be restrained by high tax burden and a growing federal debt. In 2010, I estimated the gap between the US and EU15 at 35-40 years, depending on EU's growth scenario.

INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

2010-04-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

Gary Becker (link) and Richard Posner (link) opened an intense debate on the issue of a growing US income inequality since 1980s onwards.

VALUE-ADDED TAX FOR AMERICA?

2010-04-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

Dan Mitchell wrote an interesting op-ed in NY Post (link) concerning the prospects of adopting a European-style value-added tax (VAT) in the United States.

Imposing a VAT would be detrimental to economic growth and productivity performance. If the U.S imposed the VAT, its spending levels would quickly approach the European spending levels. Indeed, the VAT is already used by OECD nations. In European Union, European Commission's Directive requires each country to harmonize value-added tax rate at the level of at least 15 percent. Federal spending in the U.S has already escalated. The consequence of $787 billion of stimulus measures is high public debt. Congressional Budget Office has forecasted the public debt to approach 70 percent of the GDP by 2012 and remain constant until 2020 (link). Rising costs of health care, entitlement spending and aging population have triggered government spending (link) and tax burden on the U.S firms and households. By 2020, health care spending is expected to reach 20 percent of the U.S GDP (link). Historical figures suggest a rather glimmering fiscal scenario for the United States in the next decade. In 1965, before the VAT spread across the European community, average tax burden of EU15 reached 27.7 percent of the GDP versus 24.7 percent in America. In 2006, the average tax burden for 15 developed European countries reached 39.8 percent. In United States, where VAT has not been introduced, average tax burden in 2006 remained close to the level of 1960s - at 28 percent of the GDP. The immediate consequence of VAT introduction in Europe was a surge in government spending. From 1965 to 2006, average government spending (as a share of the GDP) in the European Union increased by 17 percentage points while in America it increased by 7 percentage points. The total increase of spending growth in Europe and America is attributed to the widespread growth of the welfare state which includes entitlement spending and a growing cost of health care.

The economics of tax system is pretty straightforward. Alan Viard of the American Enterprise Institute (link) has outlined basic features of the VAT system. Contrary to the income tax system, VAT is a consumption tax. From the economic perspective, consumption tax is less distorting to economic behavior than the income tax. A pure VAT is tax at each stage of the supply chain. The taxation of individual income is a major distortion mostly because the source of direct taxation is labor supply. Introducing a tax on labor supply creates the so-called substitution effect where lower wage (w'=w(1-t)) is offset by a decrease in working hours and an increase in leisure hours either in pure leisure time or working more in household production or in the informal sector of the economy. Higher tax wedge in net wages has been the major factor behind fewer working hours in slow-growth European countries (Italy, France, Germany, Belgium etc.). The VAT is not as damaging as the income tax since the tax rate on individual consumption is applied when the income is already earned, so that income earning is not distorted. From a pure economic perspective, consumption taxation is more appropriate than income taxation mostly because the price elasticity of consumption goods is lower than price elasticity of labor supply. The consumption tax is based on the so-called Ramsey rule which states that the optimal tax rate is the inverse of the price elasticity of demand for a particular good ((t*=1/-dQ/dP*(P/Q)). It follows that on consumption goods with lower elasticity of demand, higher tax rate should be applied since the deadweight loss is smaller than in consumption goods with high price elasticity of demand. For example, price elasticity of demand is very low in goods such as gasoline since there's no close substitutes to gasoline. On the other hand, the elasticity of demand is pretty high in goods such as Big Mac or Coca Cola since there's a lot of substitutes for these goods (Subway snacks, Pepsi etc.) and a tax rate on Big Mac or Coca Cola can easily divert consumers to consume more Subway snacks, Pepsi or other goods.

While the introduction of a VAT is less income-distorting than a direct income tax, the imposition of both tax structures is a negative effect on economic growth, productivity and employment. Aside from the harmful taxation of income, the introduction of the VAT would further hamper individual consumption, raise consumer and producer prices and harm the manufacturing activity. One advantage of the VAT is a low cost and easy way of raising revenue. In economic theory, a uniform consumption tax is preferable to the income tax mostly due to fewer distortion in generating income which is the key feature of economic growth. A VAT also avoids imposing additional penalizing disincetives to labor supply and productivity.

Congressional Budget Office (link) has recently released Budget Outlook 2010, in which it laid out future perspectives of America's fiscal policy. Assuming an exerting pressure of tax burden in the coming years, the CBO has predicted the individual income taxes to grow from 6.4 percent in 2009 to 10.9 percent of the GDP by 2020. Imposing a VAT on top of the existing income tax would further reduce real disposable income and individual consumption. If a VAT were implemented on the federal or state level, there would be a significant and immediate increase in effective tax rates. The evolution of federal effective tax rates from 1970 to 2001 (link) shows a trend of decreasing effective tax rates and a growing after-tax income in all income quintiles.

The introduction of a VAT would dramatically change the US fiscal map. An article from OECD Observer (link) shows a comparative tax revenue distribution for the U.S, Europe and Japan. Back in 1999, the U.S was the only global economic giant with tax revenue from goods and service taxation of less than 30 percent of all tax revenues. The share remained steady until now. The non-existence of the VAT in America has contained the growth of overall tax burden. In 2004, total government revenues were 32 percent of the US GDP, far below the shares of high-tax countries. In Sweden, government revenue presented 59 percent of the GDP. While the U.S tax burden, measured as a share of government revenue in GDP, stayed below the level of France (50 percent), Germany (43 percent), Italy (45 percent), the introduction of a VAT may quickly turn America into a European-style country with high tax burden and benign economic growth. The international data (link) on total tax revenue in 2007 show that total tax revenue in the U.S presented 28.3 percent of the GDP. In 2007, taxes on goods and services presented about 4.7 percent of the US GDP; about three times less the level in Sweden (12.9 percent of the GDP) and four times less the level in Denmark (16.3 percent of the GDP). If a revenue from a VAT captured approximately 9.5 percent of the US GDP, America's tax revenue from a VAT would present about 14.2 percent of the GDP (9.5+4.7=14.2) comparable with high-tax countries such as Finland, Austria or Belgium and even more than in France.

Although the VAT is an easily applied method of taxing general consumption, imposing a VAT on the federal and state level would seriously harm America's future growth, investment, personal consumption, manufacturing activity and productivity. It would make America look like a typical slow-growth European welfare state for the first time.

GOOD NEWS ON GOOD FRIDAY

2010-04-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

From BLS (link):

"Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 162,000 in March, and the unemploymentrate held at 9.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Temporary help services and health care continued to add jobs over the month. Employment in federal government also rose, reflecting the hiring of temporaryworkers for Census 2010. Employment continued to decline in financial activities and in information. Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (10.0 percent), adult women (8.0 percent), teenagers (26.1 percent), whites (8.8 percent), blacks (16.5 percent), and Hispanics (12.6 percent) showed little or no change in March."

THE EUROPEAN BAY OF "PIIGS"

2010-04-02T02:53:00.000-07:00

The Economist published a fascinating overview (link) of the macroeconomic indicators in Europe's most vulnerable economies in the current debt crisis (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain).

ECONOMICS AND THE RETURN OF HISTORY?

2010-03-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

In Friday's edition of NY Times, David Brooks wrote a very interesting column (link) discussing the state of economics. Although subtle and rigorous in its assertions I doubt that the field of economics needs a fundamental change in the philosophical origins of economic methodology. I agree with the author that economists often ignore the notion of moral philosophy and history in economic analysis but that doesn't mean that old textbooks on classical microeconomics need to be disposed. The author points out the role of economic forecasters who often appear on the TV, essentially trying to forecast economy's future path. Econometrics, which constitutes time-series forecasts on which most economic projections are based, is a real discipline to which numerous new scientific articles are devoted, published mostly in The Econometrics Journal and Econometrica. In his famous 1983 article (link) Let's take the con out of econometrics, Ed Leamer wrote how econometric modelling can be misused if a researchers ditch the true role and significance of assumptions. A prominent example is the study of death penalty on crime deterrence. As you can read in more detail in Leamer's article, one study found out that each capital punishment deters more than 9 murders while another one found out that each additional capital punishment causes more murders.

The contradicting evidence doesn't imply the falsification of the scientific method in economics. It merely reveals the hidden difference in how economists set assumptions regarding the behavior of individuals, firms and countries. David Brooks pointed out that economists failed to predict the recent financial crisis. However, many economists (myself included) pointed out the true dangers of an over-leveraged economy and monetary easing which led to subprime mortgage crisis and the consequential aftermath.

Many of us have had clear evidence, models and studies that showed how an over-leveraged financial sector can induce a significant economic downturn. However, many policymakers ignored the evidence of the behavior of the financial system which could be easily compared with chaos theory in mathematics. In my recent paper on Iceland's financial crisis I showed that the depository banks' overall leverage and indebtedness in the small country was growing exponentially, beyond the limit of capital adequacy.

As Paul Krugman recently noted, lessons from the Great Depression were not learned because people forgot it too quickly. Although mainstream economics, as every field within economic science, needs some major cures, I disagree with author's assertion that economics is not a real science but a moral philosophy. True, economics is not exact science because human behavior is not as experimental as particle analysis in physics but economics tries to resemble the scientific methodology through models, data, statistical inference and evidence. In fact, new interdisciplinary fields within economics are emerging such as behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and transport economics in which economic analysis is combined with other disciplines such as law, psychology, sociology and neuroscience.

The limits of mathematical recourse in economics were already discussed by economic thinkers such as John Maynard Keynes. And agreeably, mathematical reasoning is bounded by economic reasoning. However, from the real point of view, we need models to address human behavior mostly because, as F.A Hayek noted, it's too complex to capture its essence in a scientific entirety. If the neccesity of assumptions, models and evidence were not the case, hardly any lessons would be learned from the episodes of crises, booms, busts and periods of economic advancement in human history.

UK ECONOMY UNDER LABOUR PARTY

2010-03-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

Daily Telepgraph collected a few interesting graphs (link) depicting the UK economic performance and discussing the economic legacy of the Labour Party.

LESSONS FROM CHILE

2010-03-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

Hernan Buchi, former minister of finance in Chile, recently published a new book The Economic Transformation of Chile (link) where he outlined comprehensive economic reforms that boosted economic growth, lowered unemployment, reduced poverty and set the stage for more than two decades of robust growth and an economic turnaround which has been unprecendent in Latin America.

The books serves the reader with a menu of intriguing facts, curious statistics and precise analysis of how macroeconomic stability was achieved. Chile has been the leading nation in Latin America with the most stable and predictable inflation rate. Country's decent fiscal management and solid macroeconomic outlook were important cornerstones behind the invitation to the OECD.

According to Jose Pinera (link), Chile is expected to enter the club of developed nations in 2018, the first Latin American country ever. Chile pioneered the privatization of the pension system in early 1980s. Today, country's fully-funded pension system based on individual savings accounts is a model for the rest of the world (link) in overhauling unfunded pay-as-you-go social security systems.

TEXAS VS. CALIFORNIA

2010-03-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting story from Washington Examiner (link) discussing the coming economic crisis in California (which has been notably called "The Greece of America") and the flourising economy in Texas which enjoyed a decade of robust growth, low taxes, favorable demographic outlook and superior public services. Not surprisingly, unions in free labor market in Texas did not allow public sector unions extracting $100 million from taxpayers for TV-adds in defence of the status quo for public employees:

"Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California -- almost as many as the number of immigrants coming in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 census... Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes -- and no state income taxes -- and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California's year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent."

ICELAND'S ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CRISIS

2010-03-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

I recently presented my recent paper on Iceland's economic and financial crisis (link) in the European Parliament in Brussels (link). Three days ago, the publication of the paper has also been approved by the SSRN (link).

Let me briefly touch the evolution of Icelandic crisis. The roots of the Icelandic financial crisis go back to late 1980s, when the Icelandic economy recovered from subsequent periods of high, volatile and unpredictable inflation. In 1983, the annual inflation rate reached as high as 100 percent. Throughout the 1980s, the economic policymakers were gradually abandoning the Keynesian doctrine. Until the oil shocks plunged the country into rampant inflation and fragile economic growth, it was widely believed that a little higher inflation is the price of low unemployment.

The period from late 1980s to early 1990s had been an important milestone for Iceland's macroeconomic recovery alongside the change in the political tide. The central bank was granted independence in inflation targeting, the government pursued a wide array of structural and economic reforms to boost the economic growth. Corporate tax rate had been reduced from a near 50 percent bracket, labor and product markets were liberalized and the financial sector was in the beginning of the privatization. The beginning of the 20th century was an unusually favorable period for Iceland's macroeconomic stability. Aside from one of the world's best institutions and governance, Iceland is perhaps the only developed country with favorable long-term demographics. The share of the population above the age thresold of 65 is only 11 percent. For instance, in Italy more than 20 percent of the population is in the age thresold of 65 and above. Iceland's favorable demographic outlook and a bold move towards defined-contribution pension system make the country the only developed nation with stable and fiscally solvent social security transition in the long-run. (total assets of pension funds as a share of GDP stood at 114 percent of the GDP in 2008 - more than any other OECD nation).

In 2001/2002, Iceland fell into a short-lived recession, mostly as a result of external imbalances and current-account adjustment to the global economic slowdown. In spite of the favorable macroeconomic outlook, Iceland's central bank failed in terms of the inflation targeting. From 1980 onwards, Iceland has had the most volatile inflation rate in the OECD, surpassing countries with unstable inflation such as Greece. Between 1980 and 2009, the average standard deviation of inflation was 20.45 percentage points, almost 20 times the deviation of inflation in countries with the least volatile inflation (Austria, Germany, Netherlands). Behind the unpredictable inflation rate was an unprecendent development of banking and financial industry. Iceland maintained high interest rate to contain inflationary pressures which were the main threat to macroeconomic stability since 1980s. Consequently, there was a large interest rate differential between Iceland and the rest of the world.

In a small and open economy such as Iceland high interest rate differential triggered "carry trading" against uncovered interst parity. Investors thus borrowed in Icelandic currency and invested in Icelandic stock and bonds in search of high short-term yields and then, after a certain period of time, swapped it into safer currencies. In the mean time, Icelandic currency (Krona) strongly appreciated and created an artificial wealth illusion which stimulated imports and further boosted economic growth towards an incredible 7 percent in 2007. The central bank raised the key interest rate further to contain potential inflationary pressure. Consequently, massive capital inflows strengthened krona's appreciation.

At the same time, the banking industry expanded abroad and enjoyed significant return on equity as a result of high interest margins on short-term loans in Krona-denominated loans. Icelandic banks were recognized as well-managed and, at the same time, enjoyed favorable ratings from Fitch, S&P and Moody. Three largest banks (Kaupthing, Glintir and Landsbanki) grew for more than 10 times the country's GDP. These banks easily expanded abroad as world interest rates converged towards zero. In such circumstances, banks offered loans in foreign currency and enjoyed strong interest margins from short-term loans in domestic currency. Icelandic households avoided loans in Icelandic currency given high interest rate but had significant foreign currency loan portfolio offered at very low rates. In a few years, loans in foreign currency exceeded domestic money supply by several times.

From 2004 onwards, Iceland's banking industry emerged as one of the most over-leveraged in the world. High leverage could be sustained as long as the global interbank marked was stable. When the subprime mortgage crisis spread across the U.S, there were early signs that Iceland will likely experience a significant contraction and current account deficit. For example, Danske Bank from Denmark warned in 2006 how disastrous could be the Icelandic crisis:

“On most measures, the small Icelandic economy is one of the most overheated in the OECD. Unemployment stands at 1 percent, wage growth is above 7 percent, and inflation is running above 4 percent despite a strong ISK. The current account deficit is closing in on 20 percent of the GDP. The Icelandic central bank has been hiking rates substantially in order to cool the economy and rates are now above 10 percent. Based on the macro data alone, we think that the economy is heading for a recession in 2006-07. GDP could probably dip 5-10 percent in the next two years and inflation is likely to spike above 10 percent as the ISK depreciates markedly. However, on top of the macro boom, there has been a stunning expansion of debt, leverage and risk-taking that is almost without precedence anywhere in the world. External debt is now at 300 percent of the GDP while short-term external debt is just short of 55 percent of the GDP. This is 133 percent of Icelandic export revenues.”

The global interbank market froze after the failure of Lehman Brothers when the crisis spread globally. At that time, CDS rates on Icelandic banks rose as investors demanded higher premia given the significant magnitude of financial risk. Bond spreads literally exploded. The three largest banks filed for bankruptcy. When the banks failed, gross external liabilites rose to more than 900 percent of country's GDP. Given spare fiscal and monetary capacity, the central bank failed to act as a lender of the last resort and the bailout such as Bear Stearns seemed implausible. The country fell into the deepest and most significant crisis ever experienced by a small country in a peace-time history. The recession, which lasted for more than year, was marred by turbulent inflation rate, stunning negative output gap and high unemployment rate.

The prospects for the Icelandic recovery were initially bleak due to unemployment surge, current account deficit and high public debt. In 2010, the recovery prospects seem more favorable with economic growth rate returning to 4 percent level by 2014. There's also been a lot of debate about Iceland's potential EMU membership - mostly in the light of Icesave deposit repayment to Dutch and British taxpayers. As I thoroughly discussed in the paper, Iceland is not an optimum currency area mostly because adjustment to common monetary policy would require a substantial exchange rate alignment which would inevitably result in inflationary wage pressure and seriously deteriorate country's macroeconomic stability in the long run.

CHINA'S EXCHANGE RATE POLICY

2010-03-16T10:01:00.001-07:00

Paul Krugman (link) and Greg Mankiw (link) analyze the costs and benefits of China's exchange rate policy.

READINGS FOR THIS WEEK

2010-03-13T03:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a list of interesting readings for this week.

Gary Becker (link) and Richard Posner (link) briefly discuss the economic effects of fiscal stimulus and review the main literature on fiscal multiplier and the macroeconomic cost of the stimulus bill.

Congressional Budget Office published Budget Outlook 2010 (link) in which it analyzed the total effects of policy alternatives on federal budget deficit.

In NY Times, Paul Krugman discussed (link) the painfulness of financial crisis in Ireland and the U.S and suggesting what we should learn from banking regulation in Canada to prevent future crises of similar proportions.

In How to close the productivity gap between the US and Europe: A quantitative assessment using a semi-endogenous growth model, Werner Roeger, Janos Varga and Jan in 't Veld from the European Commission suggest (link) that to catch-up the US productivity level, the EU should strengthen market competition and eliminate administrative and financial barriers to market entry to start closing the gap in knowledge investment.

In Waging War on Black Teens, Richard W. Rahn and Izzy Santa wrote (link) about the high unemployment rate among young African Americans. Furthermore, they suggest that minimum wage mandate is the main cause of steep unemployment rise thereupon.

The Economist (link) summarized the estimated total cost of reconstruction after the earthquake in Chile at $20-30 billion (13-19 percent of the GDP). Chile's sovereign wealth fund has just over $11 billion saved during the pre-crisis period of high copper prices which, at that time, stood at record levels.

HOW MILTON FRIEDMAN SAVED CHILE?

2010-03-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

Here (link) is the story of how decades of economic freedom prevent the unthinkable consequences of an earthquake which recently damaged Chile.

PENSION SYSTEMS - A GROWING FISCAL BOMB

2010-02-24T03:31:00.000-08:00

From this edition of The Economist (link):

WILL FISCAL ASYMMETRIES THREATEN THE EURO?

2010-02-17T03:35:00.000-08:00

Earlier this day, I came across Moody's Misery Index (link) which estimated the size of macroeconomic difficulties in European countries. In particular, European countries within and outside the Eurozone are likely to face stagnant GDP growth rates, high unemployment rates, deflationary pressures and a depressing fiscal outlook.

Moody's Sovereign Misery Index

Source: FT Alphaville (link)

The most problematic European countries seem to be the peripheral edge of the Europen Union - Greece, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia and Italy. Greece, Portugal and Slovenia are small economies without very much effect on the European GDP dynamics. However, the size of Spain's and Italy's economy is large enough to be able to exacerbate significant effect on GDP dynamics within the European Union and the Eurozone.

Debt-to-GDP ratio in selected countries

Source: Market Oracle (link)

Spain topped the Moody's Misery Index due to the highest estimated unemployment rate for 2010 and a whopping fiscal deficit. Where's the trouble? As I wrote earlier (link), prior to the outbreak of financial crisis, Spain had a favorable fiscal outlook in 2006 and 2007 and an unfavorable current account balance . In 2007, Spain experienced a 10 percent of the GDP current account deficit largely due to net capital inflows from surplus countries such as Germany and Netherands. These net capital inflows further inflated asset prices, causing an outburst of asset bubble. In the mean time, asset price inflation escalated and real estate price index soared. Government's remaining choice was to push for a fiscal surplus to avoid the inflationary shocks. When the bubble turned into burst, the shortage of external demand (in spite of favorable domestic consumption rate) caused the economy's overcapacity and a deeply negative output gap. In 2008, Spain's economy overheated and the output gap increased to historic highs (3.06 percent of potential GDP). In 2010, the estimated output gap is -2.12 percent of potential GDP. Due to weak aggregate demand - especially weak investment and external demand - asset and consumer prices are decreasing. As firms are reluctant to hire new labor, the result is high rate of unemployment, deflationary pressure and non-existent GDP growth. The macroeconomic situation in Spain pretty much reflects the general macro outlook for the entire Eurozone.

If the ECB decided to raise interest rates significantly, it would further depress an already weak investment activity. If ECB's interest rates decreased further, there would be a serious danger of deflationary trap which dragged the Japanese economy into a decade long period of deflation rates, zero-bound interest rates and stagnant economic recovery. As European population is aging rapidly (as in Japan and other industrialized nations), the outlook for the European economic recovery is rather timid.

Rapidly rising fiscal deficit (link) and public debt is a permanent threat to the stability of the Euro. Of course, the best possible cure to decrease the debt-to-GDP ratio is higher economic growth and also higher rate of inflation which decreases the stock of public debt through higher price level. Europe's real macroeconomic disease is not just low productivity growth and high tax burden but also very asymmetric economic policies. While the ECB sets interest rates for the entire Eurozone, Euroarea countries set independent fiscal policies. In addition, the appreciation of the euro hinders currency swaps into high-yield currencies. That could enable covered interest parity and the reinvestment of foreign currency back into Euro when its appreciation trend would reverse.

Asymmetric fiscal policies are likely to cause significant public debt concern if fiscal policies are discretionary. Prior to the emergence of economic crisis, half of the European countries ran discretionary deficit-financed fiscal policies. If European countries ran prudent fiscal policy based on low government spending and balanced budget, the asymmetric fiscal shocks weren't a major problem at all. However, strong public sector, high government spending and the lack of rule-based fiscal policies pose a significant concern for the stability of the Euro.

What I propose, is not the harmonization of fiscal policy but a strong committment of European countries to limit the scope of discretion in fiscal policy. Each country should forge a prudent fiscal policy without high fiscal deficit. In addition, countries should set a medium-term perspective of public debt reduction. That would ease the problem of asymmetric shocks during economic downturns and enhance the prospects of European single currency. In addition, European countries should rigorously liberalize labor markets. The liberalization of the labor market would remove the unneccesary wage adjustment rigidities. When wages are rigid downward - especially during the recession - higher wages exacerbate a significant pressure on unemployment. And when unemployment rate is high, the demand for discretionary fiscal policy and deficit spending is very high as well.

Without the necessary liberalization of labor market and the pursuit of prudent fiscal policies, the future of Euro and the prospects of the Eurozone are not bright at all.

CURRENT ACCOUNT BALANCE IN THE EUROZONE

2010-02-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

Source: IMF (2009)

THE EURO CRISIS

2010-02-13T05:02:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman has blogged an interesting analysis of the anatomy of the recent economic crisis in Europe (link).

Europe's difficult macroeconomic situation in the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis has exacerbated rising fiscal deficits and public debt alongside strong deflationary pressures. These pressures were triggered by the highly negative output gap - the difference between the economy's potential output and the real output. In fact, a brief observation of the output gap estimates (link) shows that the sick men of Europe (Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, Slovenia) are likely to face negative output gaps. In 2010, Spain is likely to reach -2.12 percent output gap. Slovenia, Italy and Greece will also face a negative output gap. The negative output gap triggered strong deflationary pressures since the nominal aggregate demand is insufficient, causing a decreasing price level.

Before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009 evolved, Europe's peripheral economies faced strong asset price bubble. As real estate prices were soaring, these economies attracted significant capital inflows which lead to inflationary pressures. Before the crisis, the inflationary dynamics in the peripheral countries of the Eurozone were strong. In Greece, Spain and Slovenia, consumer prices increased by more than 3 percent on the annual basis. The asset bubble was further spread by low interest rates. The asset price inflation in these countries was very high. In Slovenia, five-year asset prices increased by 500 percent (see: IMF, International Financial Statistics). As the increase in asset prices widened, Europe's sick men were faced with rising current account deficit.

In 2007, Spain's current account deficit amounted to more than 10 percent of the GDP. In such circumstances, a clever monetary policymaker would push up interest rates. As interest rates were at historic lows during the pre-crisis period, the real cure was on behalf of the fiscal policy. Before the crisis, Spain's fiscal picture was very well indeed. From 2004 to 2007, Spain was running a fiscal surplus which reached the level of 2 percent of the GDP in 2006 and 2007. However, massive capital inflows were not sterilized by raising interest rates which further inflated the real estate bubble and overheating of Spain's economy.

Independent fiscal policies and a common monetary policy - which is an economic model of the EMU - cause asymmetric shocks. During the years of high growth, these shocks are mostly neglected. However, during the crisis these shocks might cause a serious trouble in the macroeconomic adjustment. Greece, which recently declared a worrisome possibility of debt default, is a typical case of what happens when asymmetric shocks persist.

As Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Slovenia now face high fiscal deficits and poor economic growth, these countries will likely face years of deflationary pressures and high unemployment. The fiscal policymakers already exhausted the ability of governments to boost spending. Further growth of government spending is impossible unless European countries want the Greek debt episode to evolve in a domino effect throughout the Eurozone. The ECB will sooner or later this year raise the baseline interest rates to avoid the inflationary swings in Germany, Austria, Netherlands and other countries with current account surplus.

The macroeconomic outlook for the Eurozone is backlashed by the debt crisis in Mediterranean countries. An economic recovery may include indepedent monetary policies to adjust interest rates and prevent another asset bubble episode as well as to target current account balance. However, European countries will have to rethink the role of indepedent and discretionary fiscal policies pursued by the sick men of the Eurozone.

GDP GROWTH IN Q4 2009 IN EUROAREA

2010-02-12T15:44:00.001-08:00

THE ORIGINS OF GREECE'S DEBT CRISIS

2010-02-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

Paul De Grauwe published a very good article (link), discussing the macroeconomic origins of the current debt crisis in Greece.

"The period 1999-2009 has been organised in periods of booms and busts: the boom years were 1999-2001 and 2005-07; the bust years were 2002-04 and 2008-09.

One observes a number of remarkable patterns.

First, private debt increases much more than public debt throughout the whole period (compare the left hand axis with the right hand axis).
Second, during boom years private debt increases spectacularly.

The latest boom period of 2005-07 stands out with yearly additions to private debt amounting on average to 35 percentage points of GDP.

During these boom periods, public debt growth drops to 1 to 2 percentage points of GDP. The opposite occurs during bust years. Private debt growth slows down and public debt growth accelerates."

EUROPE'S BLEAK MACROECONOMIC OUTLOOK

2010-02-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

The Economist published a very lucid analysis (link) of the recent macroeconomic instability in the Euroarea, following the outbreak of Greek debt crisis (link) and disappointing quarterly data on GDP growth (link):

Barely had the ink dried on a statement by European leaders supporting Greece in its struggle to finance its debts when more bad news emerged from the euro zone. Figures released on Friday February 12th showed that GDP in the 16-country currency zone rose by just 0.1% in the three months to the end of December compared with the previous quarter. That there was any improvement at all was largely down to France, where a burst of consumer spending lifted the economy by 0.6%. In the region’s other big countries, GDP was either flat—as in Germany—or falling, as in Italy and Spain.

EUROPE VS. USA

2010-01-15T13:47:00.000-08:00

In NY Times, Paul Krugman (link) wrote about the comparison of European and U.S economic model, concluding that in the last 10 years, the European model of social democracy led to higher standard of living and, compared to U.S in output per hour and standard of living, and relative convergence of European countries relative to the U.S respectively.

The real convergence is a complex mathematical and empirical issue, so I will rather outline the key patterns of GDP per capita gap between the U.S and Europe and the economic explanation of it. I downloaded the data from the IMF and composed a graph which shows the GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) in European countries as a percentage of the U.S GDP per capita. Switzerland is the only European country whose level of GDP per capita is more than 90 percent of the U.S level. Ireland, where the output contracted by 7.5 percent in 2009 (link), was once the poorest country in the European Union. Today, its GDP per capita reached 85 percent of the U.S level. In spite of the notorious advantages of the Nordic model, the GDP per capita level of all Nordic countries (excluding Norway), is below 80 percent of the U.S level. The UK GDP per capita is also far below the U.S level (75 percent). The levels of GDP per capita of the less developed countries in European Union (Slovenia, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic and Slovakia) are all below 62 percent of the U.S level.

Source: IMF, World Economic Outlook

The basic economic question is the length of the gap between the U.S and European countries. To answer the question, we have to set certain assumptions. So, let's assume that the U.S output will increase by 2 percent in the long run. The economic theory would predict faster growth of less developed countries, since countries with lower levels of standard of living (GDP per capita) tend to follow-up the countries with higher GDP per capita. In economic literature, that is the so-called "catch-up effect". So, what would happen if the UK economy increased by 3.5 percent in the long run. A quick estimate shows that the time gap between the UK and US is 19 years. So, what happens of the US economy increases by 2 percent in each of the next year while, at the same time, the UK GDP per capita is 75 percent of the U.S level? A fairly quick estimate shows that, if the UK GDP per capita will reach the U.S level in 10 years (although an unlikely scenario), the UK GDP per capita would have to increase by 4.9 percent each year to catch-up the U.S level of GDP per capita. If France's GDP per capita reached the U.S level in 10 years (assuming 2 percent growth in U.S GDP per capita), it would have to increase the economic growth to 5.3 percent in each of the next 10 years. If the convergence objective is set at 20 years, the French economy would still have to grow at the annual rate higher than 3 percent.

The main question is why the European countries are still behind the U.S level of GDP per capita? There are, of course, many plausible explanations. As far as the GDP per capita is concerned, the difference in the level and growth of productivity is the most important figure in setting conclusions. After all, in the long run, productivity determines the standard of living across countries.

First, the European disease is mostly the result of high tax burden. High tax rates diminished the incentives to work, since each additional hour of labor reduced worker's marginal productivity. Hence, as professor Mankiw explains, the rise of European leisure (link) is mostly the result of fewer working hours. In addition, early retirement is a common phenomena across Europe. By 2030, each worker will support one retired individual in Germany. The coming of Europe's pension crisis (link) is a consequence of generous PAYG pension systems. Lower employment-to-population ratio led to higher tax rates to finance the financial liabilities for the retired. In addition, high government spending and periodic budget deficits discouraged productivity growth.

Second, another key to the explanation of the anemic growth rates in Europe is rigidity of the labor market. In many European countries, labor costs are very high (link). If the cost of labor market entry is high, people prefer longer studying and working in the shadow economy. The shares of shadow economy are relatively high in all European countries (link). The highest rates of shadow economy are in the following countries:

1. Slovenia 27%
2. Greece 26%
3. Italy 24%
4. Spain 21%
5. Belgium 20%
6. Germany 15%
7. France 13%

Source: ATKearney (2009), Friedrich Schneider (2005)

Third, Europe's relative decline compared to the U.S, is not a consequence of the lack of R&D investment. High percentage of R&D investment in the GDP is not a cure for the real cause. In fact, European universities rank far below the top universities in the world. In the field of engineering and computer sciences, the first non-US university is in the 15th rank. Europe's brain-drain is a known phenomena since many bright European minds immigrate to places such as the U.S, Canada and Australia. The outcome is deteriorating international ranking of universities and low efficiency of R&D expenditure on misguided projects such as the intention of the European Commission to build a "European MIT" (link) to boost Europe's global technology leadership.

Without higher growth of GDP, productivity and market working hours, European countries will hardly sustain the convergence towards the U.S level of GDP per capita. To boost economic growth, bold structural reforms are required to cut the rates of shadow economy, reduce tax and social security burden, decrease government spending and deregulate the labor markets.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EUROPE AND THE U.S

2010-01-11T10:39:00.001-08:00

In today's edition of NY Times, Paul Krugman opened a puzzling discussion on the economic performance of Europe relative to the United States (link), suggesting that the European model of social democracy is an envy for economic success compared to the U.S economy.

ECONOMICS OF WOMEN'S PROGRESS

2010-01-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

Gary Becker (link) and Richard Posner (link) discuss the economic perspective in the empowerment of women and the weigh costs and benefits of public policy aimed at the empowerment of women.

MONTHLY U.S BUDGET REVIEW

2010-01-11T10:22:00.000-08:00

CBO has released the monthly budget review of recent fiscal estimates for the U.S budget (link).

BEN BERNANKE AND THE GREAT RECESSION OF 2008/2009

2009-12-25T13:08:00.000-08:00

Writing an op-ed for NY Times, Nouriel Roubini discusses the role of Ben Bernanke in this year's recession (link).

THE MOST INFLUENTIAL GLOBAL THINKERS

2009-12-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

Foreign Policy composed the rank of the most influential global thinkers (link).

INTERVIEW WITH JOSE PINERA

2009-12-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

ECONOMIC RECOVERY AND THE FUTURE OF EUROZONE

2009-12-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

Martin Feldstein offers some interesting thoughts on whether the eurozone will survive the economic recovery (link).

CHINA'S CURRENCY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

2009-12-21T09:18:00.000-08:00

Dani Rodrik wrote a nice article on the future prospects of China's currency and its industrial policy (link).

STOLPER-SAMUELSON THEOREM

2009-12-15T09:56:00.000-08:00

Dani Rodrik offers a nice insight into one of the most remarkable theorems in international trade (link).

IN MEMORIAM: PAUL A. SAMUELSON

2009-12-14T06:19:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, December 13th, Paul A. Samuelson has died at the age of 94 (link).

He was on the economic giants of the 20th century. His ideas reshaped the economic science and revolutionized the mode of economic thinking around the world. With the mathematical rigour and analytical mastermind, his groundbreaking approach to economic analysis transfored the economic science into a dynamic problem-solving tool. In this short essay, I will present my reflections on the life and contributions of Paul A. Samuelson to the economic science.

I first came across Paul Samuelson in the year before I entered the university. In the first year of the undergraduate class, Samuelson and Nordhaus's Economics was the assigned reading for the Introductory Macroeconomics. I read the textbook back and forth and I liked it; not because of its simplicity in introducing the analytical framework of economics but rather because of the clarity, intuition and incentives to undertake a rigorous pursuit of analytical economics at the theoretical and empirical level. In addition, Samuelson penetrated the application of linear programming to economic problem-solving.

Together with Milton Friedman, Paul A. Samuelson is the economic giant of the 20th century. Hardly any economist could take the same place in the scope of influence as an economic thinker. He conducted the Neoclassical synthesis. As an interested reader can verify in his Nobel prize lecture (link), Samuelson's synthesis combined a Keynesian macroeconomics with a rigorous Marshallian microeconomics. In microeconomics, Samuelson extended the Marshallian analysis of partial equilibrium with strong mathematical articulation of demand and supply curves, cost curves and deadweight loss. On the abstract level, together with Abram Bergson, he constructed social welfare functions based on three marginal conditions and extracted from earlier work of Kaldor-Hicks-Scitovsky analysis (link). In macroeconomics, Samuelson further affirmed the dominance of Keynesian macroeconomics with a strong emphasis on the role of fiscal policy in stimulating full-employment output. In addition, he invented the term multiplier and the acceleration, the former relating to the effect of change in exogenous macro variables on endogenous variable (notably, output) and the latter referring to the partial adjustment of aggregate investment to the capital stock. Samuelson-Hansen multiplier-accelerator principles spurred the theoretical foundations of Keynesian economic policy. He also popularized Overlapping Generations Model which later became the corner stone of innovations in the modeling of aging population. In macroeconomics, Samuelson also proposed the so-called "Samuelson-Mishi condition for the efficient provision of public goods. When the condition is satisfied, it implies that further substitution of private goods provision for public goods will result in a diminishing social utility.

Assuming Pareto efficiency, Samuelson-Mishi condition satisfied the criteria for Lindahl equlibrium. The equilibrium states that when individuals are willing to pay for the provision of public goods according to marginal benefits, it will be Pareto efficient. However, such condition is not compatible with the incentive mechanism since it requires the complete knowledge of individual demand functions for particular public good which could result in the asymmetric distribution of benefits in response to relevation-principled taxation.

As a student of international economics, I came across the influential theoretical work of Paul Samuelson. Modern international economics is a combination of mathematical economics, advanced microeconomics, game theory and international finance. One of the most interesting and penetrating areas of international economics are theorems in international trade. Under particular assumptions theorem postulate axiomatic explanations based on previous statements. Back in 1941, he proposed Stolper-Samuelson theorem together with Wolfgang Stolper. The theorem quickly became a source of academic debate. In its simplest form, the theorem states the following: assuming constant returns to scale and perfect competition, a rise in the relative price of good will lead to higher return on the factor which is used more intensively in the production of the good and to the fall in the return to the other factor. Stolper and Samuelson wrote:

"Second only in political appeal to the argument that tariffs increase employment is the popular notion that the standard of living of the American worker must be protected against the ruinous competition of cheap foreign labor… In other words, whatever will happen to wages in wage good (labor intensive) industry will happen to labor as a whole. And this answer is independent of whether the wage good will be exported or imported."

The theorem showed that the international trade between two countries could lead to the opposition of international trade since the relative price of labor-abundant good in the high-wage country will be higher than the world price of that good, reflecting the relative abundance of capital or human capital. The theorem quickly became the main theoretical weapon of opponents to free trade. Even today, Stolper-Samuelson is the best explanation of why labor unions in high-wage countries oppose free trade agreements and further economic integration with low-wage countries.

Another important contribution of professor Samuelson is the so called Ballasa-Samuelson effect which states that higher growth productivity growth rate in tradable goods relative to non-tradables will lead to the real exchange rate appreciation. Balassa-Samuelson effect also went through numerous time-series regression. The effect has been tested 60 times in 98 countries. Cross-section regression studies of Ballasa-Samuelson effect were analyzed in 142 countries. In a vast majority, the empirical evidence of Ballasa-Samuelson hypothesis was supported. The main empirical findings emphasize that productivity differential between tradeable and non-tradable sector is positively correlated with differences in relative prices. The empirical evidence also supported Samuelson's initial proposition that productivity differentials translate into higher purchasing power parity through real exchange rate appreciation.

In finance, Paul Samuelson penetrated the analytical aspects of lifetime portfolio selection. In 1972 he published The Mathematics of a Speculative Price which later became the ground of option pricing. Based on discoveries of Bachelier's pioneering work, he laid the foundations of stohastic price movements and random forecasting matches. His pioneering work in financial theory of speculation and random walk (stohastic) movements in stock prices became the underlying theoretical foundation in the emerging financial industry. In an article entitled Probability, Utility and the Independence Axiom (Econometrica, 1952), he discussed the role of probability models in measuring the overall utility. In this sense, he relied on Keynesian defence of subjective theory of probability and argued that thesubjective perception of probability does not inhibit the proper functioning of financial markets. In 1965, he published A Proof that Properly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly where he provided the foundation of the efficient market hypothesis that has been further developed by Eugene Fama and other scholars. For a detailed discussion of Paul Samuelson's contribution to financial economics, see Merton Miller's contribution in Britannica (link).

In addition to his theoretical and empirical work, he is the founding member of the Econometric Society and its president in 1951. In 1961, he was the president of American Economic Association. In the political sense, Paul A. Samuelson influenced the economic policy of the Kennedy Administration. In 1960, the U.S headed for the recession. President Kennedy, following Samuelson's advice, enacted tax cuts and a balanced budget. In 1964, when Kennedy tax cuts were enacted, top marginal tax rate was reduced from 91 percent to 70 percent. The economic reasoning behind tax reductions was firmly laid in the Keynesian multiplier (1/(1+c)(1+t)). Paul Samuelson and Walter Heller (Chairman of Council of Economic Advisers during Kennedy Administration) argued that lower tax rate would stimulate consumption spending and boosted output and employment. Throughout the 1960s, the U.S economy experienced one of the longest periods of stable economic growth, favorable employment outlook and balanced federal budget. Here is how JFK, following Samuelson's advice, supported the tax reduction (link). Also, David Greenberg's article on Kennedy tax reduction is a worthy source of further information on that topic (link).

On Sunday, the economic titan passed away. He not only revolutionized the field of economic science but also spurred the interest for economics and popularized it in a manner that turned dismal science into a problem-solving science based on theoretical foundations and empirical verification of theoretical postulates. His approach to economic analysis combined Marshallian microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics which he joined together after the WW2 in a Neoclassical synthesis. Compared to other economic thinkers, he knew how to formulate theoretical postulates in a manner that stimulates the research interest for further investigation.

He will be missed and remembered as the giant of the economic thought and a titan of economic theory.