Feldstein on Italy

Martin Feldstein weighs in on the Euro crisis (Italy can save itself and the euro), and makes some interesting points.

First, as Feldstein notes, Italy has a huge stock of debt, but it's flow situation is not that bad - it has been running a large primary surplus for years, unlike Greece. It could reduce its deficit and enhance market confidence with realistic adjustments to taxation and spending. This is an important point, since the measures asked of Greece are truly impossible to successfully implement.

Feldstein also makes another good point - that with public spending running at half of GDP, there must be savings that Italy can make somewhere. This is clearly true: Italy has a public sector that wastes resources on a truly awesome scale. However, it is also true that any major cuts will be contractionary in the current climate, and could reduce what little growth Italy has in store.

And that brings us to another point. As Feldstein shows, that required fiscal adjustment, with measures taken to increase growth, could quickly rebalance the situation. But if the reforms needed were so easy to achieve, maybe they would have been implemented already, given Italy's poor economic performance over the past two decades. Clearly, the time for such reforms was in the more buoyant climate of the late 1990s and early 2000s - now they will probably have contractionary effects.

That all said, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to possible reforms. More women could be encouraged in the labour force very easily (see the weird but interesting proposal by Alesina and Inchino to reduce employment taxes for women), competition could be usefully introduced into some closed markets (the 'professions', local transport, retail). A bonfire of pointless regulations could save a lot of time and energy for businesses and citizens and allow resources to be deployed more productively.

The trouble is, there is at present no political constituency for these measures. The majority position in Italy is economic and cultural conservatism, with occasional bursts of intolerance towards groups such as immigrants that are key to the country's future. Berlusconismo has to be defeated before anything good can happen.

The Euro elite

Reuters reports that Germany is planning 'elite' bonds with 5 nations. So this is still all about saving Germany's skin? The only reason to be hopeful about a development like this would be if it was a preliminary step to a bailout of the periphery. But that bailout needs ECB intervention, and I can't see how a 'hard' Eurobond makes any difference to that.

The German burden

Paul Krugman once again puts the boot in (Mysterious Europe). What occurs to me reading this post is that ultimately all that the Germans would be required to do to resolve the problem is allow the ECB to backstop Southern European debt, and in the meantime spend some (preferably all) of their surplus on Southern European products.

So, we are inviting the Germans to spend some nice holidays in Greece and Spain, preferably eating lots of good local food, and buy a bunch of Gucci handbags and the odd Ferrari.

Is that really so much of a sacrifice?

'via Blog this'

Understanding the Euromess

Great lecture from Barry Eichengreen - Europe's Never Ending Crisis (link courtesy of Mark Thoma). All you need to understand the basics of what is going on in Europe.

Chart of the week

Here's great chart courtesy of Nick Andrews. It shows the bond yields for Eurozone countries from the early 1990s to the present:

Yet further proof of the efficient markets hypothesis, if you ask me.

Reform, reform, reform!

The technocratic turn in the Euro crisis has brought us yet more talk of 'reform'. German central bankers grimly warn that there can be no quick fixes and that debtor countries must 'reform' in order to save the euro. But what do they mean by reform?

There is a deep irony in all of this. Germany spent close to two decades being lectured by the Anglo-Saxons about 'reform' - the German social market economy, based on social partnership, long-term investment, strong social protection and a heavily regulated service sector, were singled out by neoliberals as the reason for Germany's weak economic performance after reunification. And Germany did reform - the Hartz measures moved the German social model in a more liberal direction, permitting the creation of more low skilled and low paid jobs and reducing welfare entitlements, at least for some workers. And lo and behold, Germany quickly shed its reputation as the sick man of Europe and is once again calling the shots in Europe.

How much of this is down to 'reform', rather than Germany's rather conservative consumer culture, is a difficult question to answer. However, one simple point that can be made is that Germany is not the only country in Europe that has 'reformed'. Italy and Spain have both had waves of labour market reform and important institutional changes in financial markets. The obvious implication is that reform is not necessarily a solution to anything, and that we need to be a bit more specific about what reform means.

One good example of this is that the dominant orthodoxy of the last couple of decades has been the deregulated capital markets were good for both stability and growth. Ahem. Germany actually resisted reform in this area (the famous Mannesman takeover by Vodafone led to a more restrictive law), much to the disgust of Anglo-Saxon observers. Meanwhile Spain embraced contemporary financial practice much more enthusiastically, resulting in an unsustainable housing boom which has left the country deeply exposed in the current crisis.

The Euro crisis is bad for everyone, but the pain does not seem to correspond in any consistent way with the extent of reform in the various European countries. It is not easy to see how more of this ill-defined reform is going to solve the problem.

The myth of technocracy

Paul Krugman has written a great Op-ed (Cruel Euro Romantics) which, as usual, nails it.

The arrival of technocrats at the helm of two of Europe's most stressed governments has been largely welcomed by people who should know better. And indeed, no genuine democrat can really regret the demise of Silvio Berlusconi. But what exactly can technocracy offer us in the middle of this terrible crisis?

Well, they don't have a magic wand, for sure. Times remain tough, and Italy's bond spreads have merely stabilized at the unsustainable levels they reached under Berlusconi. But, as Krugman argues, the problem with technocracy goes further - that in fact, these technocrats are the ones who got us in this mess in the first place, with their fantasy world of a diverse Eurozone gliding seamlessly towards convergence under monetary union. Why on earth should anyone have expected this to happen?

So these technocrats are really 'romantics' - rather than robotically applying the findings of the best economists, they chose instead to invent for themselves an imaginary world in which the Euro would succeed where other monetary experiments had failed. Krugman, of course, argues that the failure of technocracy is their choice to use the wrong kind of economics, and that the right kind - his kind - would allow us to solve the problem, or least avoid catastrophe. I'm inclined to agree. But there is something else here that Krugman misses.

The other problem with technocracy, is that it does not engage the people. In fact, this is the very point of it. Technocrats have the theories and facts to make the right decisions, so they should be left to do it, free of the daily noise and fury of politics. But even if they had the right policies, they still have to convince the people that their policies will deliver some approximation of the collective good, otherwise the compliance with rules and norms any society rests on will break down.

This is the colossal failure of the European Union. It is bad enough that they designed institutions that have left us on the brink of disaster. But worse, they did so without ever bothering to explain what the benefits, costs, and likely risks of the project were. Now, again, the European policy elite wants us to write another blank cheque to the same people who have already let us down. It can't work.