Tag: Fiscal compact

Austerity games

Kevin and Philip have been keeping readers of this site up-to-date with economic analysis of Grexit, problems with EMU and other big picture items over the last few days.

If I may, I’d like to bring things back down to the level of Ireland and the upcoming referendum on the Fiscal Compact. To my mind, a few important concepts have gone out the window as the debate in Ireland about the referendum on the Fiscal Compact has descended into political games. Perhaps the first victim was cause-and-effect, with the mere correlation of banking debts and government deficits being translated by many into iron-cast causation.

A close second in the casualty list was the concept of opportunity cost: in other words, there’s not really much point focusing on how bad or economically illiterate the Fiscal Compact is in and of itself. We need to ask how attractive it is relative to the other options. As of now, the most important attribute of the Fiscal Compact is its ability to get Ireland the funding that it otherwise would not be able to get, to allow the country to gradually close the deficit. By 2020, that may be completely unimportant and we may want to ditch the Compact. But we are voting in 2012, not 2020.

With that in mind, I’ve developed “Austerity Games”, as a basic guide to voters on deficits, debt, fiscal policy and the EU’s Fiscal Compact (below, click to enlarge). Hopefully it’s useful to some readers.

choices for Irish voters
Austerity Games: choices for Irish voters

For a fuller exposition on why the IMF will not be a panacea, Karl Whelan has an excellent blog post here.

Debating the fiscal compact at Joint Committee on European Affairs

Today saw contributors to this blog John McHale (wearing his IFAC hat), Alan Ahearne, and Karl Whelan, as well as TASC’s Tom McDonnell appearing before the  Joint Committee on European Affairs.

Colm Keena reports on the committee proceedings here. The transcript of the discussion will be up here fairly soon. Update: Karl’s remarks are here. Update 2: Tom’s remarks are here. The divergence in viewpoints is fairly obvious from the reporting, with Alan and John thinking the fiscal compact is the way forward, Karl thinking in practice it’s a done deal anyway and even though rule sets like this make little sense (which Colm McCarthy hacked away at in a previous post), we should sign it. Tom didn’t think it was a good idea at all.

Karl’s point on macroeconomic thinking is worth expanding upon. He is quoted as saying

“What is noteworthy about the new EU fiscal compact, however, is that it does not correspond to mainstream thinking among economists as to how an ideal fiscal policy framework should operate.”

I think this is an important point to make. You don’t see discussions about balanced budgets from year to year in macro textbooks because for very large economies they just don’t make sense. Even cyclically balanced budgets, where you save during the surplus years and spend during the deficit years, is a bone of contention between Keynesian and non-Keynesian economists (how’s that for a sweeping generalization?). Most macroeconomists will tell you that measuring a cyclically adjusted quantity like the budget balance is no joke, as this paper (.pdf) by Girouard and Andre sets out in some detail.
Karl is also reported as saying that:

“Structural deficits were a theoretical phenomenon and establishing legally binding rules about impossible to measure quantities was sure to create trouble sooner or later. He thought the rules would lead to more austerity across Europe than was required.”

So to summarise: arbitrary targets for at best very difficult to measure quantities don’t make much sense.
Now on the other side, having read the text of the treaty a few times, I think that what the fiscal compact treaty really tries to do is to reduce the chances for poor fiscal policy in one country affecting another country, and the rules as well as the budgetary oversight and coordination, as well as multi-year budgeting, are there to enshrine such good fiscal policy by making poor fiscal policies harder to enact. No bad thing on paper, but in practice, especially with a particularly harsh set of austerity policies, the fiscal compact may end up doing more harm than good.

The fiscal compact and referendum mechanisms in Ireland

The Minister for Transport, Mr Varadkar, in commenting on whether a referendum will be necessary for Ireland to sign up to the fiscal compact is reported to have made the commonplace point that

There’s only one reason why you have a referendum and that’s where there is a requirement to change the constitution.

Em, not quite.

Apart from a political view that a referendum might be desirable in any event, there is a particular mechanism in the Constitution of Ireland for holding a referendum, even when a measure does not require constitutional amendment. This is set out in Articles 27 and 47, whereby one-third of the Dáil and a majority of the Seanad could petition the President to decline to sign and promulgate a Bill “on the ground that the Bill contains a proposal of such national importance that the will of the people thereon ought to be ascertained.”

The detailed provisions of Article 27 envisage that if such a petition were successful, the will of the people could be ascertained either by referendum (in which at least one-third of those on the register would have to vote “no” in order to veto, by virtue of Article 47) or, in effect, by a general election.

I guess the fiscal compact itself may not in fact be a Bill, but presumably the detailed fiscal provisions of the agreement will have at least that legal form. Apart from whether the required numbers of TDs and Senators would line-up for the petition which Article 27 envisages, whether or not this mechanism will be applicable seems to me, as a non-lawyer, to turn on whether the Bill in question is a “Money Bill”. Money Bills appear to me to exempt from Article 27 (reading back to Articles 23 and 22) but I may be mis-reading that, so perhaps we might get some legally informed views in comments.

New Fiscal Compact Draft

Via the IIEA blog, a new leaked draft of the proposed fiscal compact. Importantly for Ireland, the wording that balanced budget laws need to be “constitutional or equivalent” has been replaced with “preferably constitutional”.