Wrong Prescription for Greece

 

Published:  July 9, 2013

 

Greece and its financial overseers agreed on terms for continued bailout payments on Monday. The agreement is cause for relief — without it Greece would go bankrupt. But, at the same time, it is no cause for celebration — indeed, quite the opposite. Greece must eventually carry out painful reforms. But the precondition for these reforms is not the austerity demanded by the agreement but economic revival.

 

Greece is already in critical condition and Monday’s agreement will only make things worse. Years of austerity and depression have poisoned Greek politics, idled more than one in four of its workers (and nearly two in three of its young people) and torn holes in its social safety net.

These sacrifices have choked off investment and squandered human resources. Experts say there is little chance that further sacrifices will revive Greece’s economy or make its debt burden more sustainable. Yet that is just what the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund have again insisted on. Greece’s prime minister, Antonis Samaras, felt he had no choice but to accept. He agreed to cut public-sector paychecks and eliminate 15,000 Civil Service jobs — not by attrition, but by dismissing the current jobholders.

Greece’s Civil Service is bloated, patronage-ridden and inefficient, and it clearly needs reform as part of a broader program of economic renewal and revival. But throwing thousands more out of work when the unemployment rate is 27 percent is not a promising path to real reform, especially when done on the orders of foreign bankers. The last such round of public-sector cuts, in June, which shut down the state broadcasting system, badly backfired and nearly shattered Mr. Samaras’s fragile governing coalition.

Monday’s agreement also calls for a staggered payment schedule that will allow the lenders to suspend bailout payments if Greece has not met its job-cutting commitments by July 19.

In brief, the more implausible austerity becomes as an economic remedy, the more unchallengeable it seems to become as a political mantra. Its most consistent advocate, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, is up for re-election this September. She is unlikely to change her tune — which is popular among German taxpayers — before that. Nor is she likely to change it if she wins another term.

Other lenders like the International Monetary Fund seem more troubled by evidence that austerity has done real damage to the Greek economy. But that realization has, so far, brought no change in policy and no relief to suffering Greeks.

 

The New York Times Editorial Board

 

Lessons of a Greek Tragedy

ATHENS – A visit to Greece leaves many vivid impressions. There are, of course, the country’s rich history, abundance of archeological sites, azure skies, and crystalline seas. But there is also the intense pressure under which Greek society is now functioning – and the extraordinary courage with which ordinary citizens are coping with economic disaster.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

Inevitably, a visit also leaves questions. In particular, what should policymakers have done differently in confronting the country’s financial crisis?

The critical policy mistakes were those committed at the outset of the crisis. It was already clear in the first half of 2010, when Greece lost access to financial markets, that the public debt was unsustainable. The country’s sovereign debt should have been restructured without delay.

Had Greece quickly written down its debt burden by two-thirds, it would have been able to shed its crushing debt overhang. It could have used a portion of the interest savings to recapitalize the banks. It could have cut taxes, rather than raising them. It could have jump-started investment and gotten its economy moving again, if not in a matter of months, then, with luck, in no more than a year.

In its official post-mortem on the crisis, the International Monetary Fund now agrees that debt restructuring should have been undertaken earlier. But this was not its view at the time. Under the leadership of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Fund was in thrall to the French and German governments, which adamantly opposed debt relief.

The European Commission, for its part, has rejected the IMF’s mea culpa. Preoccupied by the state of the French and German banks, it continues to argue that delaying debt restructuring was the right thing to do. It has no regrets about throwing Greece to the wolves.

Given this opposition, the Greek government would have had to move unilaterally. Hindsight suggests that the authorities should have done just that. Faced with foreign opposition, the government should have announced its decision to restructure as a fait accompli.

Clearly, there would have been risks. The “troika” – the IMF, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank – might have refused to provide an aid package, forcing Greece to compress imports even more sharply. The ECB might have cut off emergency liquidity assistance, forcing the government to impose capital controls and even consider abandoning the euro.

But, by acting preemptively, Greek leaders could have shaped the dialogue. They could have said to their EU colleagues, “Look, we have no choice but to restructure what is clearly an unsustainable debt. But make no mistake: our preference is to remain in the eurozone. We are committed to reforms. Given this, don’t you agree that we are deserving of your support?”

Making a compelling case would have required Greece to get serious about those reforms. The government could have started by bringing together employers and unions to negotiate an equitable burden-sharing agreement, including an across-the-board reduction in wages and pensions, thereby getting a jump on internal devaluation. This could then have been complemented by a simultaneous agreement to restructure private debts. With everyone accepting sacrifices, it might have been possible to reach an accord on liberalizing closed professions and on comprehensive tax reform.

But, instead of working together with its social partners, the government, heeding the troika’s advice, dismantled the country’s collective-bargaining system, leaving workers unrepresented. Greece thus lacked a mechanism to negotiate a social compact to cut wages, pensions, and other obligations in an equitable way. With every vested interest fighting for itself, closed professions proved impossible to pry open. Doubting that there would be shared sacrifice, those same interest groups were unable to negotiate meaningful tax reform.

With the Greek government thus failing to push through structural reforms, it was unable to earn the trust of its creditors; and, skeptical that the government was committed to reform, the troika demanded a pound of flesh, in the form of front-loaded austerity, as the price of assistance. Those front-loaded tax increases and government-spending cuts plunged the economy deeper into recession, making a farce of claims that the public debt was sustainable – and forcing the inevitable debt restructuring after two more agonizing years.

Greece is now seeking to make the best of a difficult situation. It is attempting to breathe life into the campaign for structural reform. It is lobbying the troika for further debt relief. But the damage will not be easily undone. Past mistakes, committed not just by Greece, but also by its international partners, make a difficult short-term future unavoidable.

It is important that other countries draw the right lessons. If they do, Greece’s brave, beleaguered citizens can at least take comfort in knowing that many people elsewhere will be spared the same unnecessary sacrifices.

Source

An amazing mea culpa from the IMF’s chief economist on austerity

Consider it a mea culpa submerged in a deep pool of calculus and regression analysis: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist today acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth.

The new and highly technical paper looks again at the issue of fiscal multipliers – the impact that a rise or fall in government spending or tax collection has on a country’s economic output.

IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard writes that the fund misjudged the impact of austerity on European economies. (Stephen Jaffe/IMF)

 

That it comes under the byline of fund economic counselor and research director Olivier Blanchard is significant. Fund research is always published with the caveat that it represents the views of the researcher, not the institution itself. But this paper comes from the top, and attempts to put to rest an issue that has been at the center of debate about how fast countries should move in their efforts to tame large debts and deficits.

If fiscal multipliers are small, countries can cut spending faster or raise more in taxes without much short-term damage. If they are large, then the process can become self-defeating, at least in the short run, with each dollar of government spending cuts, for example, costing the economy more than a dollar in lost output and thus actually increasing debt-to-GDP ratios.

That is what has been happening with a vengeance in Greece, where fund forecasters, as part of the country’s first bailout program in 2010, predicted that the nation could cut deeply into government spending and pretty quickly bounce back to economic growth and rising employment.

Two years later, the Greek economy is still shrinking and unemployment is at 25 percent.

Of course no two circumstances are alike. Shut out of international bond markets, Greece had little choice but to begin bringing its public finances into line or face a catastrophic default. Financing wasn’t available to sustain prior spending levels. For an economy that has been reeling for several years, however, a billion or two in extra government programs or investment could have kept a few small businesses open and kept a few more families employed and spending.

“Forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline in domestic demand associated with fiscal consolidation,” Blanchard and co-author Daniel Leigh, a fund economist, wrote in the paper.

That somewhat dry conclusion sums up what amounts to a tempest in econometric circles. The fund has been accused of intentionally underestimating the effects of austerity in Greece to make its programs palatable, at least on paper; fund officials have argued that it was its European partners, particularly Germany, who insisted on deeper, faster cuts. The evolving research on multipliers may have helped shift the tone of the debate in countries like Spain and Portugal, where a slower pace of deficit control has been advocated.

But the paper includes some subtle and potentially troubling insights into how the fund works. Blanchard – effectively the top dog when it comes to economic science at the fund – writes in the paper that he could not actually determine what multipliers economists at the country level were using in their forecasts. The number was implicit in their forecasting models – a background assumption rather than a variable that needed to be fine-tuned based on national circumstances or peculiarities.

Heading into a crisis that nearly tore the euro zone apart, in other words, neither Blanchard or any one of the fund’s vast army of technicians thought to reexamine whether important assumptions about the region would still hold true in times of crisis.

That, it turns out, was a big mistake. Multipliers vary over time: They may be low in a country where the economy is growing, interest rates are normal  and the banking system is sound. As this research showed, they get larger if interest rates are low, output is falling and the banking system is creaky – conditions that make everyone, from households to investors, less likely to spend, and thus makes the role of government-generated demand that much more important.

Blanchard and Leigh deduced that IMF forecasters have been using a uniform multiplier of 0.5, when in fact the circumstances of the European economy made the multiplier as much as 1.5, meaning that a $1 government spending cut would cost $1.50 in lost output.

What are the implications for the future?

This paper may not be an official position of the IMF, but coming from the agency’s top economist, it is bound to change how the agency generates forecasts.

As for fiscal policy – an issue of interest as the U.S. debate turns towards austerity – Blanchard and Leigh said a better understanding of multipliers does not produce any definitive conclusions.

Many countries still need to cut their deficits – some faster, some slower, depending on a host of other factors.

“The results do not imply that fiscal consolidation is undesirable,” the two write. “Virtually all advanced economies face the challenge of fiscal adjustment in response to elevated government debt levels and future pressures on public finances from demographic change. The short-term effects of fiscal policy on economic activity are only one of the many factors that need to be considered in determining the appropriate pace of fiscal consolidation for any single country.”

 

The Washington Post

The root of Europe’s riots

No wonder the protesters are back. They are angry at the backdoor rewriting of the social contract.

Rioters beat a policeman during a rally against government austerity measures in Athens. Photograph: John Kolesidis/REUTERS

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, when many developing countries were in crisis and borrowing money from the International Monetary Fund, waves of protests in those countries became known as the “IMF riots”. They were so called because they were sparked by the fund’s structural adjustment programmes, which imposed austerity, privatisation and deregulation.

The IMF complained that calling these riots thus was unfair, as it had not caused the crises and was only prescribing a medicine, but this was largely self-serving. Many of the crises had actually been caused by the asset bubbles built up following IMF-recommended financial deregulation. Moreover, those rioters were not just expressing general discontent but reacting against the austerity measures that directly threatened their livelihoods, such as cuts in subsidies to basic commodities such as food and water, and cuts in already meagre welfare payments.

The IMF programme, in other words, met such resistance because its designers had forgotten that behind the numbers they were crunching were real people. These criticisms, as well as the ineffectiveness of its economic programme, became so damaging that the IMF has made a lot of changes in the past decade or so. It has become more cautious in pushing for financial deregulation and austerity programmes, renamed its structural adjustment programmes as poverty reduction programmes, and has even (marginally) increased the voting shares of the developing countries in its decision-making.

Given these recent changes in the IMF, it is ironic to see the European governments inflicting an old-IMF-style programme on their own populations. It is one thing to tell the citizens of some faraway country to go to hell but it is another to do the same to your own citizens, who are supposedly your ultimate sovereigns. Indeed, the European governments are out-IMF-ing the IMF in its austerity drive so much that now the fund itself frequently issues the warning that Europe is going too far, too fast.

The threat to livelihoods has reached such a dimension that renewed bouts of rioting are now rocking Greece, Spain and even the usually quieter Portugal. In the case of Spain, its national integrity is threatened by the separatist demand made by the Catalan nationalists, who think the austerity policy is unfairly reducing the region’s autonomy.

Even if these and other European countries (for other countries have not been free of protests against austerity programmes, such as Britain’s university fees riot and the protests by Italy’s “recession widows”) survive this social unrest through a mixture of heavy-handed policing and political delaying tactics, recent events raise a very serious question about the nature of European politics.

What has been happening in Europe – and indeed the US in a more muted and dispersed form – is nothing short of a complete rewriting of the implicit social contracts that have existed since the end of the second world war. In these contracts, renewed legitimacy was bestowed on the capitalist system, once totally discredited following the great depression. In return it provided a welfare state that guarantees minimum provision for all those burdens that most citizens have to contend with throughout their lives – childcare, education, health, unemployment, disability and old age.

Of course there is nothing sacrosanct about any of the details of these social contracts. Indeed, the contracts have been modified on the margins all the time. However, the rewriting in many European countries is an unprecedented one. It is not simply that the scope and the speed of the cuts are unusually large. It is more that the rewriting is being done through the back door.

Instead of it being explicitly cast as a rewriting of the social contract, changing people’s entitlements and changing the way the society establishes its legitimacy, the dismembering of the welfare state is presented as a technocratic exercise of “balancing the books”. Democracy is neutered in the process and the protests against the cuts are dismissed. The description of the externally imposed Greek and Italian governments as “technocratic” is the ultimate proof of the attempt to make the radical rewriting of the social contract more acceptable by pretending that it isn’t really a political change.

The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies – not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract. Especially if they are going to have to go through long tunnels of economic difficulties in coming years, and in the context of global shifts in economic power balance and of severe environmental challenges, European countries can ill afford to have the legitimacy of their political systems damaged in this way.

The Guardian