Showing posts with label Economics for Business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics for Business. Show all posts

Friday, June 29, 2018

29/6/18: Multilateralism and the Impossible Policy Trilemmas


"Global governance requires rules, because flexibility and goodwill alone cannot tackle the hardest shared problems. With multilateralism under attack, the narrow path ahead is to determine, on a case-by-case basis, the minimum requirements of effective collective action, and to forge agreement on reforms that fulfill these conditions."

Can Multilateralism Adapt?, Jean Pisani-Ferry.

International Political Trilemma applies to both monetary and fiscal policy dimension by making it impossible for modern societies to combine:

  1. Monetary sovereignty in the form of free capital mobility, with international political stability and political autonomy of democratic systems. In simple terms, free capital mobility means that capital flows will reflect economic and demographic conditions prevailing in the specific society. If these conditions deteriorate, triggering capital outflows (perhaps due to monetary accommodation response to ageing population), the society can respond either through imposing capital controls (preserving its standing in international political institutions, and allowing its democratic institutions to remain robust) or it can pursue non0-democratic suppression of its own population (allowing capital to flow out of the economy and not imposing cost of resulting economic decline onto international partners). Alternatively, the country can continue allowing outflow of capital and retain democracy by blaming the external shocks and restricting its engagement with international political institutions.
  2. Fiscal sovereignty in the form of free capital mobility, international political stability and autonomous fiscal policy. In simple terms, the above monetary sovereignty simply transfers democratic autonomy failure to fiscal policy failure.

To my students at TCD and MIIS, these are familiar from the following summary charts:

For more academically inclined readers, here is my paper summarising these Trilemmas and putting them into the context of the euro area harmonisation: Gurdgiev, Constantin, Euro After the Crisis: Key Challenges and Resolution Options (May 30, 2016). Prepared for: GUE/NGL Group, European Parliament, October 2015: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2786660.

It is, generally, not hard to find examples of the two trilemmas presence in a range of historical shocks in the past. More recent examples, however, are harder to come by due to time lags required to see these trilemmas in action. Pisani-Ferry's quote above hints at such.

During the 1990s, "After an eight-decade-long hiatus, the global economy was being reunified. Economic openness was the order of the day. ...The message was clear: globalization was not just about liberalizing flows of goods, services and capital but about establishing the rules and institutions required to steer markets, foster cooperation, and deliver global public goods."

As Pisano-Ferry argues, today, "Despite a decade of talks, the global trade negotiations launched in 2001 have gotten nowhere. The Internet has become fragmented and could break up further. Financial regionalism is on the rise. The global effort to combat climate change rests on a collection of non-binding agreements, from which the United States has withdrawn...  The very principles of multilateralism, a key pillar of global governance, seem to have become a relic from a distant past."

"...let’s face it: today’s problems did not start with Trump." In fact, the problems started with the above trilemmas. Or put differently, the problems are not an outrun of bad policies or choices, but the natural result of the impossibility of combining the conflicting policies objectives and institutions. "There is no shortage of explanations. An important one is that many participants in the international system are having second thoughts about globalization. A widespread perception in advanced countries is that the rents from technological innovation are being eroded precipitously... A second explanation is that the US strategy toward Russia and China has failed... neither Russia nor China has converged politically... Third, the US is unsure that a rules-based system offers the best framework to manage its rivalry with China. [and]... Finally, global rules look increasingly outdated. Whereas some of their underlying principles – starting with the simple idea that issues are addressed multilaterally rather than bilaterally – are as strong as ever, others were conceived for a world that no longer exists. Established trade negotiation practices make little sense in a world of global value chains and sophisticated services. And categorizing countries by their development level is losing its usefulness, given that some of them combine first-class global companies and pockets of economic backwardness."

In simple terms, the world became more complex and more fragile because we tried to make it less complex and more centralized (hegemonic positioning of the U.S. in Bretton Woods setting), while making it also more multilateral (through financial, economic, trade and human capital integration).

Pisano-Ferry offers a 50,000 feet level view on the solution to the problems: "the solution is neither to cultivate the nostalgia of yesterday’s order nor to place hope in loose, ineffective forms of international cooperation. International collective action requires rules... The narrow path ahead is to determine, on a case-by-case basis, the minimum requirements of effective collective action, and to forge agreement on reforms that fulfill these conditions." In other words, one cannot tackle trijemmas directly (correct view), but one can defuse them by limiting each node of the desired policies. E.g. less democracy here - to offset pressure from demographic of ageing, less capital mobility there - to reduce the speed of capital flows across the borders and lower volatility of financialized investment, less fiscal sovereignty - to provide better buffers for shocks arising in financial and economic systems, and less international institutions - to allow for more flexible rebalancing of monetary, trade and fiscal policies.

The problem with this is it requires for the hegemony (the U.S.) to put a hard stop to imposing its preferred solutions onto the rest of the world and international institutions. Or, put differently, the hegemony must stop being a hegemony. Good luck squaring that with American vision of the world a-la Rome 4.0.

Monday, May 23, 2016

22/5/16: House Prices & Household Consumption: From One Bust to the Other


In their often-cited 2013 paper, titled “Household Balance Sheets, Consumption, and the Economic Slump” (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128, 1687–1726, 2013), Mian, Rao, and Sufi used geographic variation in changes house prices over the period 2006-2009 and household balance sheets in 2006, to estimate the elasticity of consumption expenditures to changes in the housing share of household net worth. In other words, the authors tried to determine how responsive is consumption to changes in house prices and housing wealth. The study estimated that 1 percent drop in housing share of household net worth was associated with 0.6-0.8 percent decline in total consumer expenditure, including durable and non-durable consumption.

The problem with Mian, Rao and Sufi (2013) estimates is that they were derived from a proprietary data. And their analysis used proxy data for total expenditure.

Still, the paper is extremely influential because it documents a significant channel for shock transmission from property prices to household consumption, and thus aggregate demand. And the estimated elasticities are shockingly large. This correlates strongly with the actual experience in the U.S. during the Great Recession, when the drop in household consumption expenditures was much sharper, significantly broader and much more persistent than in other recessions. As referenced in Kaplan, Mitman and Violante (2016) paper (see full reference below), “… unlike in past recessions, virtually all components of consumption expenditures, not just durables, dropped substantially. The leading explanation for these atypical aggregate consumption dynamics is the simultaneous extraordinary destruction of housing net worth: most aggregate house price indexes show a decline of around 30 percent over this period, and only a partial recovery towards trend since.”

With this realisation, Kaplan, Mitman and Violante (2016) actually retests Mian, Rao and Sufi (2013) results, using this time around publicly available data sources. Specifically, Kaplan, Mitman and Violante (2016) ask the following question: “To what extent is the plunge in housing wealth responsible for the decline in the consumption expenditures of US households during the Great Recession?”

To answer it, they first “verify the robustness of the Mian, Rao and Sufi (2013) findings using different data on both expenditures and housing net worth. For non-durable expenditures, [they] use store-level sales from the Kilts-Nielsen Retail Scanner Dataset (KNRS), a panel dataset of total sales (quantities and prices) at the UPC (barcode) level for around 40,000 geographically dispersed stores in the US. …To construct [a] measure of local housing net worth, [Kaplan, Mitman and Violante (2016)] use house price data from Zillow…”

Kaplan, Mitman and Violante (2016)findings are very reassuring: “When we replicate MRS using our own data sources, we obtain an OLS estimate of 0.24 and an IV estimate of 0.36 for the elasticity of non-durable expenditures to housing net worth shocks. Based on Mastercard data on non-durables alone, MRS report OLS estimates of 0.34-0.38. Using the KNRS expenditure data together with a measure of the change in the housing share of net worth provided by MRS, we obtain an OLS estimate of 0.34 and an IV estimate of 0.37 – essentially the same elasticities that MRS find. …Overall, we find it encouraging that two very different measures of household spending yield such similar elasticity estimates.” The numerical value differences between the two studies are probably due to different sources of house price data, so they are not material to the studies.

Meanwhile, “…the interaction between the fall in local house prices and the size of initial leverage has no statistically significant effect on nondurable expenditures, once the direct effect of the fall in local house prices has been controlled for.”

Beyond this, the study separates “the price and quantity components of the fall in nominal consumption expenditures. …When we control for …changes in prices, we find an elasticity that is 20% smaller than our baseline estimates for nominal expenditures.” In other words, deflation and moderation in inflation did ameliorate overall impact of property prices decline on consumption.

Lastly, the authors use a much more broadly-based data for consumption from the Diary Survey of the Consumer Expenditure Survey “to estimate the elasticity of total nondurable goods and services” to the consumer expenditure survey counterpart of expenditures in the more detailed data set used for original estimates. The authors “obtain an elasticity between 0.7 and 0.9 … when applied to total non-durable goods and services.”

Overall, the shock transmission channel that works from declining house prices and housing wealth to household consumption is not only non-trivial in scale, but is robust to different sources of data being used to estimate this channel. House prices do have significant impact on household demand and, thus, on aggregate demand. And house price busts do lead to economic growth drops.



Full paper: Kaplan, Greg and Mitman, Kurt and Violante, Giovanni L., "Non-Durable Consumption and Housing Net Worth in the Great Recession: Evidence from Easily Accessible Data" (May 2016, NBER Working Paper No. w22232: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2777320)