Here‘s an article I wrote for Business and Finance on the current budgetary situation (complete with a nice picture of Mrs. Merkel). The article emphasises the importance of getting the upcoming budget right rather than worrying too much about the 3% target for 2014.
Author: Karl Whelan
With consensus on the likely size of a four-year adjustment unlikely to emerge (and perhaps not particularly relevant anyway) the key fiscal policy question for now is what the size of the adjustment is going to be in the upcoming budget.
Yesterday’s Fine Gael Dail questioning on this subject was interesting. Deputy Noonan:
Now that we have agreed that 3% in 2014 is the finish of the race, what is the Minister’s starting point on 7 December? Will he go soft? Will the budget deficit be 11%, 11.5% or 10.5% of GDP? Will he go below 10%? He needs to come up with this figure pretty quickly. I will not press him any harder on this; I am simply speculating. I have no information as to his thinking on this but this is an essential piece of information. Unless we know the starting point we do not know where the Minister is going.
I’m pretty sure that Noonan knows that an adjustment of €7 billion would be required to reach the 10% target but hasn’t yet said that he would support it. His lack of enthusiasm for the €15 billion four-year adjustment figure suggests he wouldn’t be too keen.
However, others in Fine Gael are calling for the 10% to be met. Here’s Simon Coveney
My understanding from the briefing from the Department of Finance is that the key requirement from bond markets to allow Ireland to issue bonds is that we will need to bring our deficit below 10% of GDP next year from our current position. No Government speaker, including the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance, addressed that issue as to what figure will be necessary in the 2011 budget to bring down the deficit to 10% or less of GDP. That is the guideline figure we have been given to issue bonds and raise money in order that we can keep Ireland functioning and keep our economic and political independence in terms of budgetary decision-making.
And here’s a bit of cat-and-mouse play from Damien English
Deputy Coveney is correct in stating that we must bring the deficit down below 10% of GDP next year, and I ask the Government to give us the figure now. Tell us what it is, whether it be €5.5 billion, €6 billion, €5 billion or €4.5 billion, and let us work to that.
Well, Deputy English, it’s not going to be €4.5 billion!
Labour’s participants in this debate seem to have stayed away from this issue. However, on the Vincent Browne show last night, Pat Rabbitte indicated he wouldn’t support more than €4 billion in adjustments. If this is the party line, then it means that Labour are not supporting reaching the 10% target.
Yesterday’s Dail debate shows that Fine Gael’s approach to the upcoming budget and four-year plan debates appears to be to emphasise the idea that economic growth may be higher in future years so that €15 billion in cuts will not be needed. The ESRI’s high growth scenario gets a lot of play in these discussions.
From Enda Kenny’s speech in the Dail:
There are better possible outcomes. For instance, if the ESRI’s updated high-growth scenario of an average growth of 4.5% were to materialise, a smaller package of fiscal measures would be needed to hit the 3% target by 2014.
That is why Fine Gael believes it is necessary, over the coming weeks, to put a relentless focus on the ways to support growth and jobs as the country attempts to repair its public finances. That is why Fine Gael believes that any fiscal plan has to operate in parallel with a credible growth and jobs plan to turn the present downward vicious cycle into an upward virtuous cycle. We have a different approach from the Government. Fine Gael offers real hope that we can rebuild our economy and restore trust in politics and in Government.
This was backed up by Michael Noonan, who was pretty clear about the political costs to the opposition of agreeing to the €15 billion figure:
When the €15 billion is a forecast and when minor adjustments in the growth rate can make such vast variations, would we not be desperate clowns to tie ourselves in to the Minister’s figure, especially when the Taoiseach could not answer Deputy Gilmore this morning when he asked what was factored into the estimate of growth? …. The key element is the forecast for growth and there is a vast variation between Davy’s forecast, which would take us over €20 billion, and the ESRI high growth forecast, which would bring us down to €9 billion. The Minister is on the mid point so maybe he is right, but we are not buying in. We need more information.
I’m pretty sure that Fine Gael are aware that the previous budget’s growth projections are now considered to be highly aspirational by the European Commission and that any plan that is agreed will have to be on the basis of lower growth figures than contained in the ESRI’s high growth scenario.
You can call this unfair if you want (and some will—no doubt we’ll have comments here about the need to wear shades due to the brightness of our economic future.) However, that’s the way things are going to work and with the EFSF waiting in the wings to bail us out, the government probably doesn’t have a lot of bargaining power to make the case for a more optimistic scenario.
Indeed, I’m sure even the ESRI don’t believe that their high-growth scenario is the appropriate basis for fiscal planning over the next few years. Recall that the Recovery Scenarios document gingerly raised the question as to “whether a more rapid fiscal adjustment than currently planned would have a more beneficial outcome for the economy.” Note also that, on its own, the news about €1.5 billion per year in promissory note interest would take us to €9 billion even on the basis of the government’s December 2009 calculations.
What this emphasises, I’m afraid, is that the current political situation makes a cross-party consensus on multi-year budgeting essentially impossible. Opposition parties do not want to campaign at the next election on the basis of €15 billion in adjustments and who can blame them? However, this will gravely undermine the credibility of any four-year plan introduced by the government and will also worry financial markets.
I’m having trouble making sense of most of the reporting of the budgetary discussions.
Two issues are particularly puzzling. The first is the consistent referencing of the idea that the higher requirement for budgetary adjustment is due to a relatively recent worsening in the forecasts for the Irish economy. (Indeed, a number of government politicians have also made reference to the idea that this worsening stems from a recent downgrading of the outlook for the international economy.)
The second is the dismissal of the €7 billion figure for budgetary adjustment mentioned by Michael Noonan and the lack of reference to the 10% deficit target that had been set for 2011.
Despite all the focus in the past few days on 2014 and European Commission, the key issue facing us right now is the how to convince sovereign bond markets that we are back on a stable fiscal path. Without access to the bond markets, you can be sure that the EU will be imposing the 3% target on us whether we like it or not.
Last December, the government told the EU that our general government deficit would be 11.6% in GDP in 2010 and 10.0% in 2011. So the questions we should now be asking are whether we should still aim to achieve the 10% target and, if not, what are the consequences of missing this target.
Michael Noonan appears to have said yesterday that the Department of Finance briefings called for €7 billion in adjustments. The department is now saying that “Given the current working macroeconomic forecast, indicative deficits were set out for consolidation packages of the order of €3bn, €4.5bn and €7bn.”
Fair enough, they could have set out a no-billion in cuts scenario for all it matters. However, as far as I can see, only the €7 billion scenario sees us meeting the 10% target and this likely explains why Noonan emphasised the €7 billion figure.
This isn’t rocket science. There are four elements to this calculation, none of which are complex or require access to secret figures:
1. Lower GDP: Last year, the government projected that €3 billion in adjustments would get the deficit to 10% of GDP. However, they were projecting GDP in 2011 to be €170 billion. Now, both the Central Bank and the ESRI are projecting GDP in 2011 to be closer to €160 billion. So, hitting the 10% target now requires a deficit of €16 billion rather than €17 billion. Hence, an additional €1 billion in adjustment, bringing the total required adjustment to €4 billion.
2. Promissory Note Interest: The 2009 budget figures did not include the interest on the promissory notes, which appears to be 5% on average. This adds €1.5 billion to next year’s deficit, bringing the total required adjustment to €5.5 billion.
3. Lower Tax Revenues: Tax revenues for 2010 are on target. However, last year’s budget projected a €9 billion increase in nominal GDP in 2011. The Central Bank are currently projecting a €5 billion increase in nominal GDP next year while the ESRI are projecting an increase of only €3.6 billion. Undoubtedly, any credible projection for next year will feature lower tax revenues. In my ongoing calculations (updated here to also include the ESRI’s GDP forecast) I’ve subtracted €1 billion from tax revenues next year. This brings the cumulative adjustment required up to €6.5 billion.
4. GDP Effects of Larger Adjustment: Unfortunately, if additional adjustment of this magnitude is required, then the GDP baseline in the ESRI and CB forecasts are probably too high. Hitting the 10% target will probably require about €7 billion in adjustment.
I’m happy to be corrected about any of these above points but, particularly when one factors in Noonan’s comments, I think it’s reasonable to assume that €7 billion is required to meet the original 10% target.
Is meeting the 10% target really necessary? Might an adjustment of €4 billion to €4.5 billion—perhaps getting us to somewhere between 11.5% and 12% of GDP—be ok if it was accompanied by an impressive-looking four year plan?
It might be but then again it might not. I’d be inclined to recommend assuming the latter. The current EU-agreed plan is already our second plan (there was a previous one in which we reached 3% in 2013). Ripping up this one, so we can start again with a third plan where, after years of cutting, we’ve still only got as far as a 12% deficit next year, doesn’t sound to me like the kind of plan that’s going to work.
So, that’s the debate that needs to be had. Wishful thinking involving only €4 billion in adjustments and still hitting the 10% target just isn’t helpful.
A side-issue in all of this is what exactly the government is (and has been) up to in relation to the budget figures. In relation to point one above, as Philip has pointed out, most of this downward revision in GDP stemmed from the CSO’s annual revision released this summer. Indeed, the Central Bank were projecting nominal GDP in 2011 of €163.7 in July, already over €6 billion short of the original budget projection. So the government has presumably known the 2011 adjustment requirement was drifting outwards due to this factor for a number of months.
On the second point above, since the government started issuing the magic promissory notes early this year, they will have known about the effect of this on the budget figures for some time.
It seems clear, then, that the government were clinging publicly to a figure of €3 billion in adjustments long after they must have known that this figure wasn’t tenable (e.g. as late as the mid-September Fianna Fail think-in the €3 billion figure was being held to).
Equally, it could be argued that yesterday’s dismissal of Noonan’s comments from, among others, the Taoiseach, also served just to obscure the full scale of the fiscal problem that we face.
Update: I’m not sure if this story pre- or post-dates what I wrote above. It says that “Government sources have firmly ruled out a €7 billion adjustment for 2011.” If so, it looks like they have ruled out meeting their previous target for next year of a deficit of 10% of GDP, though it may be some time before they admit this.