Category: Fiscal Policy

A Fiscally-Neutral Stimulus Package

Minister Brendan Howlin on RTE’s The Week in Politics has said the government are preparing a “stimulus package that is fiscally neutral”.  As a macroeconomist, this strikes me as a pretty strange concept. Pretty much everywhere else in the world, a stimulus package implies a set of measures that cut taxes or raise spending and are not “fiscally neutral.”

Still, one can hardly argue that the current set of tax and spending policies are optimised to generate as much employment as possible, so it may be possible to adjust policies to generate additional employment and I’d be interested in people’s suggestions for fiscally neutral measures that can boost employment. But shouldn’t we stop calling such changes “stimulus packages”?

Paul De Grauwe on austerity and implications of the ESM

The Sunday Business Post carries an interesting opinion piece by Paul De Grauwe in today’s paper.   Although articles are not available on the paper’s website until the Monday after publication, Cliff Taylor has kindly given us early access to article. 

The European Stability Mechanism will not not lead to more stability

After much hesitation and a lot of pressure exerted by financial markets, European leaders finally decided at the end of March to set up a permanent financial support mechanism which was given the name of European Stability Mechanism (ESM). From 2013 on, Eurozone countries will pool financial resources to be disbursed to member-countries in times of crisis. This historic decision illustrates the painful and slow way the Eurozone moves in the direction of more political integration in Europe.

Will the establishment of the ESM shield the Eurozone from future crises? My answer is unambiguous. It will not. In fact it is worse than that. Some of the features that have been introduced in the functioning of the ESM will make it more difficult for a number of countries, in particular Ireland, to attract funds in private markets.  These features will have the effect of increasing rather than reducing volatility in the financial markets.

Continue reading “Paul De Grauwe on austerity and implications of the ESM”

Workshop: Eurozone With or Without Sovereign Default?

I’m going to Florence this afternoon to present at a workshop on “Life in the Eurozone With or Without Sovereign Default?” that will be taking place tomorrow at the European University Institute. The program looks interesting and there will be a live web stream of the event. The slides for my presentation are here in Powerpoint 2007 format and here in a somewhat grimier PDF.

IMF Fiscal Monitor

The new Fiscal Monitor is available here.   Required reading in order to understand the scale of the fiscal adjustment required in Ireland and other advanced economies.

Why we should hope fiscal multipliers are large

One of the frustrating things about doing macroeconomics during the crisis is that it is so hard to pin down key empirical parameters.    The size of fiscal multipliers is probably the main case in point.   The combination of short time series and a wide range of conditioning factors – confidence effects, the state of credit markets, import leakages, etc. – make it hard to identify the causal impacts of changes in taxes and government spending.  

While there is a widespread view that Irish fiscal multipliers are small (mainly due to the openness of the economy), I have always believed this is exaggerated given offsetting factors such binding credit constraints, an almost completely accommodating monetary policy and a large negative output gap.  At a time when I thought Ireland could retain its creditworthiness, this led me to believe we should pursue as gradual a fiscal adjustment as the State creditworthiness constraint would allow.    But with creditworthiness proving more fragile than expected, there is now little choice but to move expeditiously to close the deficit. 

With significantly more fiscal adjustment to come – probably at a minimum the €9 billion planned for in the EU/IMF programme – there is an obvious reason to hope fiscal multipliers are small.   But there is also a reason to hope they are large.   With the IMF reducing its growth estimate for 2011 and the exchequer returns hinting at a weaker than expected recovery, we would be better off if the fiscal adjustment is a significant source of the observed weakness in domestic demand.  

It is the underlying rate of potential output growth that really matters for Ireland’s debt sustainability.   Uncertainty about this rate is a significant part of our creditworthiness problem.    As others have pointed out, there are competing narratives about Ireland’s medium-term growth potential.   On the positive side is the strong growth in net exports (which added about 3.5 percentage points to Ireland’s real GDP growth in 2010).  On the negative side is the combined impact of the fiscal austerity and the drag from impaired balance sheets (which subtracted about 4.5 percentage points from growth in 2010).  

While unfortunately we are in for a good deal more austerity, it will eventually end; the more of the current drag on domestic demand that is coming from the austerity, the higher is the implied underlying potential growth rate.   Even if the fiscal adjustment is making less headway now in reducing the deficit due to relatively high multipliers, the large changes in taxes and social welfare rates should allow for a rapid improvement in the deficit once the austerity ends and decent overall growth returns.    The hoped for growth narrative – which I think we have good reason to believe is true – is that Ireland has an economy with a strong underlying export-driven growth potential that is being temporarily held back by unavoidable fiscal adjustment.