from Edward Hadas:
For growth, focus first on jobs
In the labour market, there is a fine line between inefficiency and wastefulness. “This place is so inefficient,” it is said, often with justification, especially in rich economies. “We could do everything we’re supposed to with a third fewer people.” Factories can be streamlined, high quality new equipment can save on labour, and offices are prone to the incubation of worthless bureaucracy.
It also said, sometimes by the same people, that “The unemployment situation is terrible. My young friends can’t get jobs and lots of not-so-old people I know are retiring early.” Such statements are also accurate. In many countries, the Lesser Depression has sharply worsened a longstanding problem of inadequate job creation. Spain’s official unemployment rate is 24 percent. Almost half of the young adults in Greece are jobless. And the employed portion of the working age population in the United States has fallen by three percentage points over the last four years.
Politicians and other leaders have watched the job destruction with something like horror. They shouldn’t have been surprised. The unending fight against inefficiency leads to a natural employment asymmetry. As technology advances, businesses and governments usually find it easier to cut than to add jobs. Some businesses can progressively expand headcount, but in tough times there are more employers looking for ways to use less labour.
Most politicians and economists believe that GDP growth is the cure. It is considered not only the highest economic good but also the best way to create jobs. In search of higher output, governments run huge deficits, while central banks pass out money for free. The policymakers often invoke the name of John Maynard Keynes. But they twist the great economist’s ideas. As Pavlina Tcherneva points out in a recent article in the Review of Social Economy, Keynes thought “the real problem” governments should address during the Great Depression was “to provide employment for everyone”. In Keynes’s view, output follows jobs, not the other way around.
Keynes’s own preferred solution was for governments to organise projects with a high “elasticity of employment”. “There are things to be done; there are men to do them,” he said. “Why not put the two together? Why not put the men to work?” The best way for governments to create jobs quickly is still to hire people directly. A look at the dilapidated infrastructure of the United States suggests that Keynes’ prescription is still relevant.
Enthusiasts for small government might want to privatise such programmes, but they should still agree with the true Keynesian principle: it is better to pay people to work than to pay them not to. Programmes which protect the unemployed and disabled serve a valuable social purpose and payments for early retirement may be defensible, but programmes which create jobs are far preferable to either.
This Keynesian message has largely been lost in the current official policy mix, which aims at growth and hopes for jobs. Policies which support the financial system, put money in consumers’ hands and cut bloated government bureaucracies may eventually encourage job creation. Four years into the Lesser Depression, however, these highly indirect methods are at best working slowly.
Blame small government for U.S. GDP downer
Weak U.S. economic growth in the first quarter was driven in part by a pullback in business investment — but a sharp decline in government spending also played a role. Gross domestic product grew 2.2 percent, well short of the Reuters consensus forecast of 2.5 percent. Business spending fell 2.1 percent while government expenditures saw a 3 percent drop linked to lower defense spending. Consumer spending proved a bright spot in the report, climbing 2.9 percent. Still, there is concern that this too could fade because an unusually warm winter may have brought some spending forward.
Jay Feldman at Credit Suisse breaks down the numbers:
The big downside surprise from our vantage point was in federal government spending, which contracted 5.6% in the quarter (we expected an increase given the firmer readings in monthly Treasury data). Most of the shortfall was concentrated in defense (-8.1%). Combined with the ongoing contraction in state and local government output (-1.2%), the government sector overall shaved 0.6 percentage point from top line GDP.
Yet this pales in comparison to what might happen if Congress fails to break a budget logjam by the end of this year. If left unaddressed, the resulting spending cuts and expiring tax breaks — the dreaded fiscal cliff — could easily tip the world’s largest economy back into recession.
UK recession in charts
Britain’s economy slid into its second recession since the financial crisis after official data unexpectedly showed a fall in output in the first three months of 2012:
Starting real GDP at 100 in 2003 for the UK, U.S. and euro zone shows UK GDP flat since mid-2010 and well below the 2007 peak.
Survey data had been suggesting a stronger GDP number and perhaps points to upwards revisions to come.
As this chart shows past revisions have been substantial.
Never mind the pain, feel the austerity
Austerity in the euro zone seems to be working — at least as far as the headline, dry, soulless numbers of budget balancing are concerned. Bailed out Greece and Ireland have reported substantial improvements in last year’s profligacy performance. Spain, while going in the wrong direction, at least has the satisfaction of being told it is not telling fibs.
We will get to the smoke and mirrors in a bit.
First Greece, the euro zone’s poster child for budget ill-discipline. The 2011 budget deficit to GDP ratio – basically the annual overspend — came in at 9.1 percent. This may seem like a lot given the EU target is 3 percent, but it was down from 10.3 percent a year earlier and from 15.6 percent the year before that. Furthermore, if you take out all the debt repayments costs that Athens has to make , you end up with only 2.4 percent (although in truth that is like pretending you don’t have a mortgage).
In Ireland, the craic was all about trouncing expectations. The deficit to GDP ratio for 2011 came in at 9.4 percent, which compared with an original 10.6 percent target and even a revised target just last December of 10. 1 percent. Everything is on track, Dublin reckons, to meet this year’s 8.6 percent.
Now, those not wanting their party pooped, please look away.
The official figures suggest that Greece’s improvement is almost entirely down to increased revenues. Government spending as a percentage of GDP last year was 50.1 percent, barely changed from a year early and only a tad down from 2008. And this comes after a number of years of painful austerity that has helped keep Greece in recession for more than four years — it is into its fifth now, staring at a 4.8 percent 2012 contraction — and that has pushed more than a fifth of the country out of work. Greece’s debt (ie accumulated deficits) as a proportion of GDP last year was 42.3 percentage points higher than in 2008.
Ireland, in the meantime, was enjoying its deficit improvement (still the worst in the euro zone) by finessing away one-off capitalisations into its banks that were worth some 3.7 percent of GDP. Including those and some others, the deficit last year was 13.1 percent. This comes after Ireland has made budgetary adjustments totalling 25.4 billion euros since 2008 — the equivalent to 16 percent of it 2011 GDP — and has had to hike taxes and cut spending by 8.6 billion euros between 2013 and 2015, i.e. another 5 percent of GDP. It is back in recession and seeing its exports hit by the troubles is main trading partners in the European Union are having.
Biggest indicator of the week: China GDP
It wasn’t very long ago that economic numbers out of Asia would barely register a blip on Wall Street’s radar screen. That’s not the case anymore. Commerzbank touts Chinese gross domestic product figures due out on Friday as the most important gauge of global economic health following last week’s disappointing U.S. employment report.
Writes economist Jörg Krämer in a research note:
China’s economy has continued to slow into 2012 largely on the back of deliberate policy measures. We expect growth of 8% year-on-year in Q1, down from 8.9% in the final quarter of 2011 (consensus 8.3%), which is consistent with our call for full-year growth of 7.5% in 2012.
Fixed investment in particular has slowed recently, to its weakest year-on-year rate since 2002 and will be the primary driver of the slowdown in GDP growth. Net exports also deteriorated in the quarter, with China recording a very large trade deficit of US$31bn in February.
A report on Tuesday offered some reason for optimism. China returned to an export-led trade surplus of $5.35 billion in March, suggesting a rebound in the global economy may be lifting overseas orders just in time to compensate for a slowdown in domestic demand.
Gimme a P, gimme an M, gimme an I
If you have ever wondered why financial markets and economists are interested in purchasing managers indexes, here is why:
A recovery in Europe? Really?
There’s a sense of relief among European policymakers that the worst of the euro zone’s crisis appears to have passed. Olli Rehn, the EU’s top economic officials, talked this week of a “turning of the tide in the coming months”. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, speaks of “sizeable progress” and “a reassuring picture”.
At last week’s spring summit, EU leaders couldn’t say it enough: “This meeting is not a crisis meeting … it’s not crisis management,” according to Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen. All the talk is of how the euro zone’s economy will recover in the second half of this year.
But for the 330 million Europeans who make up the euro zone, the outlook has, if anything, darkened. As euro zone governments deepen their commitment to deficit-cutting, and rising oil prices mean higher-than-expected inflation, households can’t be counted on to drive growth. Not only did housing spending fall 0.4 percent in the October to December period from the third quarter, but unemployment rose to its highest since late 1997 in January.
Joblessness is reaching shameful levels in southern Europe. In Greece, unemployment rose to a new record high of 21 percent in December and to 23 percent in Spain in January. Even in wealthy, northern Europe, the number of people out of work has started to rise in France, the Netherlands and Germany.
Just over half of the euro zone‘s economic output is generated by domestic consumer spending, but demand for goods looks chronically weak and fiscal austerity is aggravating the situation. Euro zone governments, desperate to distinguish themselves from debt-stricken Greece, are completely unwilling to step in and spend. The European Commission, persuaded mainly by Germany that fiscal discipline will lift economic growth, is on their backs to get their deficits within the 3 percent level of GDP by the end of 2013.
“The case against Europe’s growth strategy is that it is all supply and no demand,” said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. “Fiscal policy is being tightened too rapidly. The more certain EU countries do to balance their budgets, the more output contracts,” he said in a recent paper.
So where will growth come from? The ECB’s Draghi said this week he is counting on foreign demand. Emerging Asia and a stronger recovery in the United States might help pull the euro zone out of its slump. But with Germany responsible for almost 40 percent of the euro zone’s exports, a wider tide of prosperity across the currency area looks unlikely.
Not your father’s ISM survey
Manufacturing activity picked up in January, an encouraging sign for U.S. growth prospects. Right? Perhaps not as much as it used to be. The shrinking role of factory production in the U.S. economy – now just over a tenth of the nation’s output – means the Institute for Supply Management’s closely watched survey is a less sturdy predictor of broader trends.
Neil Dutta, U.S. economist at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, explains:
The ISM Manufacturing Index improved to 54.1 in January from 53.1 in December, the highest since June 2011 and broadly in line with market expectations. A level of 54.1 on ISM is consistent with roughly 3.5 percent real GDP growth. This tells you more about the state of the manufacturing sector than the broader economy, in our view. And, we are skeptical the pick-up in the ISM manufacturing index is a harbinger of a coming acceleration in economic growth.
A 3.5 percent rate looks lofty indeed: Current expectations according to Reuters polls are for a 2 percent GDP reading in the first quarter, with a number of analysts citing downside risks to their forecasts.
The irrelevance of slightly better U.S. economic data
The latest round of reports on the U.S. economy, while hardly the ringing endorsement of a robust recovery, have been a bit better overall. Jobless claims, while still high, have fallen to a seven-month low of 388,000. Industrial output, meanwhile, posted its largest increase since July as factory and mining production expanded strongly.
But investors are far too obsessed with the mess taking place in Europe to pay the modest improvements any mind. Even if Europe’s financial morass were not an ongoing cloud over the U.S. outlook, the incremental gains in U.S. economic activity remain far too modest to warrant any sort of optimism about a substantial decline in unemployment. Moreover, analysts are worried that the current political propensity in Washington for spending cuts rather than renewed stimulus poses another threat to growth.
Thomas Lam at OSK-DMG sums up the sentiment nicely:
Incoming data over the past month or so have been generally more spunky. […] The continued tightening in financial markets and depressed sentiment indicators still imply downside risks to growth in subsequent quarters. But the key driver to the 2012 outlook, at least for the early part of next year, is fiscal policy considerations.
Lam is still forecasting 2012 GDP will come in at 2.4 percent for 2012 as a whole, but that is conditional on additional government spending:
Without additional fiscal stimulus measures to offset the expiring provisions (along with a modest drag from the debt ceiling negotiations), real GDP growth in the first-half of 2012 could average less than 1.5%, with sub 1% consumer spending growth.
from Ian Bremmer:
The secret to China’s boom: state capitalism
By Ian Bremmer The views expressed are his own.
One of the biggest changes we’ve seen in the world since the 2008 financial crisis can be summed up in one sentence: Security is no longer the primary driver of geopolitical developments; economics is. Think about this in terms of the United States and its shifting place as the superpower of the world. Since World War II, the U.S.’s highly developed Department of Defense has ensured the security of the country and indeed, much of the free world. The private sector was, well, the private sector. In a free market economy, companies manage their own affairs, perhaps with government regulation, but not with government direction. More than sixty years on, perhaps that’s why our military is the most technologically advanced in the world while our domestic economy fails to create enough jobs and opportunities for the U.S. population.
Contrast the U.S. and its free market economy with China’s system. For years now, that country has experienced double digit growth. Many observers would say that China’s embrace of capitalism since 1978, and especially since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, has been responsible for its boom. They would be mostly wrong. In fact, a new study prepared for the U.S. government says it’s not capitalism that’s powering China, but state capitalism -- China’s massive, centrally directed industrial policy, where the government positions huge amounts of capital and labor in economic sectors it intends to nurture. The study, prepared by consultants Capital Trade for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, reads in part:
In a world in which central planning has been so utterly discredited, it would be natural to conclude that the Chinese government and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party have been abandoning the institutions associated with the communist economic system, such as reliance on state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), as fast as possible. Such conclusion would be wrong.
In a G-zero world where no country can claim the mantle of international leadership, China has pulled an accomplished head fake. While the media focuses on China’s special economic zones, like Hong Kong and Macau, and the rise of the banker class and Chinese tech industry, state directed spending is the real engine of growth. Capital invested in infrastructure like factories, heavy industry, roadways, and high speed trains continues to power annual double digit growth in GDP. Reliable data from 2004 shows that 76% of Chinese non-financial firms are classified as State Owned Enterprises (firms with government ownership of greater than 10%).
In short, while the U.S. has spent decades and vast treasure building up its defense system (and yes, by extension, the sectors of the economy that service it), China has spent its time and money building up control over the broad direction of its entire economy. In today’s world, where the first sentence of this essay rings true, which country currently looks better positioned to, pardon the pun, capitalize, in the years ahead?
During last week’s euro zone bailout talks, French President Nicolas Sarkozy went hat in hand to China, painting a stark picture of China’s still-growing economic importance internationally. Never mind that the phone call didn’t result in any particular action; the mere act raised Chinese President Hu’s profile going into the G-20 talks in France this week. Not only that, the entreaty by Sarkozy made plain that China has nothing to hide about the economic path it’s chosen for itself. After decades of hectoring from the West, the tables are perhaps about to turn. After all, what economic model should China emulate? Europe’s? The United States’? “With all due respect,” you can almost hear President Hu saying, “we like the way our system is working, thanks.”
@parker1227
“But anti-development environmentalists, bidding disputes, union disputes, local politics, and right-of-way land use disputes – have crushed our ability to address large infrastructure needs, much less create much needed heavy industry.”
Was not it just unwillingness from the side of the GOP that stopped Obama from creating at least some jobs that could not be exported and would leave a stronger backbone to the American Society?
Then…laissez faire prohibits import duties, so if you would try to balance out too cheap imports…the only way to recreate heavy industry…you would find the “trade liberals” against you.
I am afraid that if the West will not introduce limitations to the supply side economy we will never survive this game. We only think markets(money), not people (work)
While I’m no match for Keynes, I submit the counter argument that employment is not the issue, capital is. It’s not that the desire to keep spending is not there, it’s the fact that the market will not allow them. The investor flight from national and local bonds restricts each government’s ability to carry out such projects. It’s not the job market that worries European investors; it’s the bond sales that continue to run the government.
Greece, and the rest of PIIGS, are in trouble because of the potential for capital freezes. These nations, because of their reliance on government sponsored decadence, have mismanaged public funds to the point of insolvency. Because some local and state governments have overspent, investors cannot, with any semblance of reason, risk their capital.
If Greece could continue Keynesian borrowing and spending, Greece would. Germany , the ECB, and the bond markets reject this strategy due to the specter of inflation. Deficit spending has growth potential, if and only if, the government has the confidence of the investor and the people to repay the debt. Because once that government faith vanishes, there is both investor and citizen flight. This is doubly dangerous. The tax base weakens and borrowing costs increase. Once slated for bankruptcy like La Jolla or Harrisburg or Central Falls, economic activity slackens and decay sets in. The government, then, responds by slashing public services and raising tax rates, further depressing the general mood of both residents and private enterprise.
Credit has been lost somewhere, I don’t believe the economists or the politicians anymore. I do not think they are competent enough to institute, to lead or to execute any policy of worth, like FDR’s CCC. The rhetoric has been so shallow politically lately. There seems to be a lack of real imagination or perceptive foresight from those who are tasked with adequately responding to economic, social and environmental problems that will impact the well being of citizens.
But anyways, nice article. Keynesian stimulus seems to working in the short term for the macro United States. Not really for budget burdened local places like Greece and La Jolla, though. I think you’re on to something with the inefficiency/job destruction problem, you should look into automation in the service industry. President Obama mentioned it a while back, something about ATMs. I’ve heard that S. Korea is working on a robot that does household chores. Then think about the impact on the fast food or the hotel industry.