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Balance Of Payments Adjustments

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Paul Krugman seems to have been thinking on issues related to open economy monetary macroeconomics these days! He has recently warned his readers to not confuse accounting identities with causation but in a recent blog post he seems to be doing it himself.

So Krugman says:

So, here we go. Start from the observation that the balance of payments always balances:

Capital account + Current account = 0

where the capital account is our sales of assets to foreigners minus our purchases of assets from foreigners, and the current account is our sales of goods and services (including the services of factors of production) minus our purchases of goods and services. So in the hypothetical case in which foreigners lose confidence and stop buying our assets, they’re pushing our capital account down; as a matter of accounting, then, our current account balance must rise.

But what’s the mechanism? (Remember the fallacy of immaculate causation.) The answer is, it depends on the currency regime.

Strange. The last statement in the quote warns of potential mistake which is present in the previous statement! ie Krugman wants to have it both ways.

So “… as a matter of accounting …” ?

Let us consider a case (fixed exchange rate or floating) where there is an autonomous capital flow – such as a foreigner liquidating a bond and repatriating funds. This by itself doesn’t affect the current account. In fact it can be compensated by some accommodative flow in the capital account of the balance of payments.

There is a nice 1991 article by the BIS Capital flows in the 1980s: a survey of major trends. The author quotes James Meade who makes this distinction between autonomous flows and accommodative flows:

[accommodative capital flows] take place only because the other items in the balance of payments are such as to leave a gap of this size to be filled … [while] autonomous payments … take place regardless of other items in the balance of payments.

Of course because of flexible exchange rates, the distinction can become blurred but the same is also true in fixed exchange rates. So we have an item called Other Investment in the capital account of balance of payments – like the example in the IMF’s BPM6 (note: “financial account” in the BPM6 terminology, capital account means a different thing):

Balance Of Payments Capital Account

In addition Reserve Assets is also one. Again this is somewhat of a simplification and it is possible for other items to accommodate.

“Other Investment” is typically banking sector flows but refer to BPM6 for the full definition. “Reserve Assets” is things such as sale or purchases of foreign currency by the central bank or any other official institution. Sometimes a category Exceptional Financing is used – such as government borrowing in foreign currency in exceptional circumstances or official financing transactions from the IMF.

So changes in some items in the capital account can be balanced by changes in some other account in the capital account and not the current account. Of course this doesn’t mean that there is no causality from the capital account to the current account and I will come to it in a moment but what Krugman says is silly.

Let’s take a few examples starting with the simplest – and you guessed it right – the Euro Area 😉

Suppose there is a capital flow where a German financial firm liquidates Spanish government bonds and transfers funds back home.

As I have explained in posts long back, this will lead to a TARGET2 imbalance in which the Spanish NCB will have a rise in indebtedness to the ECB (which is considered to be a Spanish non-resident). Either it ends here or the Spanish banking system will try to attract funds from abroad. In either case there is an accommodative flow in the balance of payments – balancing the initial outflow and without affecting the current account.

Now take the example of a nation with its currency pegged to another anchor currency. Suppose a nonresident economic unit sells sells securities and transfers funds outside the country. Since banks acts as dealers in the foreign exchange markets, this leaves the banking system with a short position in foreign currency. It may try to close it by borrowing in foreign currency or try to attract funds from outside. In the latter case that is all there is to it (in the short term) and this flow is accommodating and will appear in Other Investment. In the former case, the banking system is left with an open position in foreign currency. As long as the bank’s own risk management or the central bank (with the confident knowledge that it has sufficient foreign exchange in case it has) thinks this it is alright, this is what there is for the short term. Else banks may need to attract funds from abroad. However if there is a depreciation outside the tolerable band (fixed doesn’t mean god has fixed it) in response to a huge amount of capital outflow, the central bank may sell foreign currency. It may also try to hike interest rates to get attract foreigners.

Again no change in the current account. One item in the capital account cancels another to preserve the accounting identity Krugman quotes.

In floating exchange regimes this is more complicated but the story is not too different from the BoP viewpoint. An outflow of funds will be accommodated by banks’ open position (or inventories). Banks will typically try to offload the inventories depending on market conditions and opportunities and it is sometimes said in the fx microstructure theory that the inventory half-life is around 15 minutes. The currency will depreciate to the point where expectations of the market participants reverse in the direction of appreciation bringing in flows in the opposite direction to the initial capital outflow. How this works precisely is a very challenging open question. Of course looked at from a medium term perspective, in general, it is not immediately obvious why the current account balance and capital account sum to zero since the magnitude of “Portfolio Investment” and “Direct Investment” may be quite different from the current account balance. But the sum of balances is zero as a matter of accounting. In such cases, banks may try to attract funds from abroad themselves by marketing bonds offshore – i.e., they may try to find offshore funding. More complications arise from derivative contracts with nonresidents which is not easy to go into in this post.

Of course this not guaranteed to work – pure float is the luxury of a few nations –  and sometimes the central bank may need to intervene in the foreign exchange markets and in the extremis, undertake exceptional financing transactions such as borrowing from the IMF.

In recent times, the Reserve Bank of India had an interesting swap scheme with the banking system who would attract funds from abroad.

Of course, none of this means there is no causality from the capital account to the current account. A nation may face troubles financing its balance of payments and it may try to deflate domestic demand by fiscal and monetary policy to keep its current account imbalance from getting out of hand. It is important to note here this is not a straightforward result of the identity but there is a more complicated story and that output suffers because of this. Krugman makes it sound as if nothing happens to output.

Balance Of Payments Crises

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Phil Pilkington takes an issue with Sergio Cesaratto on the usage of the phrase “balance-of-payments crisis” on problems of the Euro Area.

Phil’s argument is that typically nations facing balance of payments problems need foreign currency and it manifests itself as a depreciation of the domestic currency but in the Euro Area this isn’t the case (because the exchange rates are fixed irrevocably between the Euro Area nations by the national central banks and the ECB). So the usage of the phrase “balance-of-payments crisis” is an abuse of language.

Now, to be short my argument that there is nothing wrong with the usage is because of the definition of what “balance-of-payments” actually is. Here is why:

A balance of payments transaction is a transaction between residents and non-residents. It is not relevant in which currency the transaction really is. So if you were a U.S. resident and if I as an Indian pay you $1 in New York in person, it is still a balance of payments transaction from the viewpoint of the United States. (of course if I own a firm in the United States which pays you then it is not a balance of payments transaction because the firm would be a resident).

In this way it becomes clear that some Euro Area nations have a balance of payments financing problem and since it reached a crisis level, the problem can be classified as a balance of payments crisis even though there is no exchange rate which has collapsed.

The nations which were/are in troubled had difficulties because they had huge current account deficits and as a result became indebted to the rest of the Euro Area. This became unsustainable and turned into a crisis. And both borrowers and lenders are to be blamed.

Since these nations had huge indebtedness to the rest of the Euro Area, they had troubles borrowing and refinancing their debts with foreigners and still have.

So I do not know why someone can take an issue with the phrase “balance-of-payments crisis”.

Except for the huge depreciation of the domestic currency, the Euro Area economic dynamics resembles a typical balance-of-payments crisis in all other ways. There is deflation of domestic demand, financial instability, high unemployment, increase in poverty and decrease in happiness and standard of living etc. There is international help in both cases.

Once again. A BoP transaction is between residents and non-residents. (See 2008 SNA, and BPM6 on this). A BoP crisis hence is a crisis in which borrowing and refinancing existing debt from non-residents has become difficult and is at crisis levels.  Whatever a country such as Portugal does at the moment, some units will be left indebted to the rest of the world/Euro Area. This is because liabilities are greater than financial assets and the difference is the net indebtedness to foreigners. Whatever new debts are created are equal in value to newly created financial assets. So the arithmetic dictates foreigners should be relied upon. The one qualification is that Portugal significantly improves its net exports but that is the same as saying its balance of payments is improving.

So anyone saying it is not a “balance-of-payments crisis” is fooling himself/herself.

Here’s Blaming The Rest Of The World For India’s Problems

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Recently India is going through a mini-crisis where its currency has plummeted and with hosts of other reasons such as high inflation and a dysfunctional government not just because of the ruling party but also because of the opposition. In all this corruption has risen a lot. During the last few weeks, the Reserve Bank of India – the central bank – has tried to fight the depreciation of the rupee by taking various steps but in spite of this, the currency kept depreciating.

Unsurprisingly, a blame game has begun. To some extent it is good. It shows that the subject Economics isn’t what it has pretended to be – else we would never have had these debates. Simon Johnson recently wrote an article India’s Economic Crisis for NYT’s Economix which once again reminded economists of how dangerous the ideology that financial crisis are a thing of the past can be.

Initially some section of the media made it appear as if the Reserve Bank of India governor is blaming it on the “tapering” of the large scale asset purchases of the U.S. Federal Reserve. In fact an RBI release appeared to say it explicitly. But the RBI governor Duvvuri Subbarao has of course clarified saying that it was just a trigger but put the blame on India’s Finance Minister.

Economists seem to blame the Reserve Bank of India (and the supposed “fiscal indiscipline” of the government). According to them the RBI created a panic of sorts by reacting and this exacerbated the pressure on the Indian Rupee. So according to Swaminthan Aiyar, an economist who wrote an article titled India’s Problem Is Exports, Not the Rupee,

A falling rupee is a political, not an economic disaster

How silly can that get. While the title is okay (India needs more exports), but the above slogan just echoes the thought held among economists that the central bank shouldn’t interfere in the currency markets and that somehow the currency may have stabilized. Criticising the Reserve Bank is like criticising someone under attack for trying to defend (but failing to defend properly). It is important to realize that this “there is always a price” notion is an ideology of economists – a depreciation of a currency says something about it acceptability in international markets. So the fear is that the Rupee may become unacceptable in international markets and go to the IMF for help to refinance its international debts and the pound of flesh demanded in return. If the Rupee continues to depreciate, there will be further outflow of foreign funds and domestic banks will come under tremendous pressure in the foreign exchange markets in which they act as dealers. Perhaps Aiyar needs some lessons from Simon Johnson.

Paul Krugman suggests that India’s net international investment position hasn’t deteriorated and wonders what the issue really is. While it is true that India’s NIIP is not as worse as countries such as Hungary, there is no hard and fast rule that minus 20% is good and minus 100% is bad. India’s currency doesn’t have a brand and acceptability in international markets and 20% can be bad considering the direction in which it is headed given the current account deficits.

The silliest thing I heard (saw actually in a Tweet) is: Japan’s currency is depreciating and that is not a crisis but India’s currency is depreciating and that is a crisis – isn’t that self-contradictory? No it isn’t. Japan is a net creditor to the rest of the world and can talk up its currency as fast as it talked down its Yen. Japan is in a position where it instead can boost domestic demand instead of beggaring its neighbours.

There are other blame games as well. There has been a sharp rise in corruption – or perhaps it is more right to say that such cases have come to the limelight while it has always existing at a large scale. So this has caused India’s troubles. Although there is truth to it, this by itself doesn’t cure India’s external problems. Imagine if these problems hadn’t existed and that there was a rapid rise in output (which anyway is not bad compared to the rest of the world). The rise in output would come about with a rise in domestic demand and this would have also led to a rise in imports deteriorating the balance of payments.

One frequent slogan when such troubles arise in the external sector – and which has been repeated recently – is “increase productivity”. While increase in productivity is welcome (so long as it accompanies a rise in production), this is separate from relative competitiveness with the rest of the world. It is true that a rise in productivity can have some effects on competitiveness but the causality is quite different from what economists generally assume. The major cause of rise in productivity is the rise in production itself and if a nation faces a balance of payments constraint, its production is affected because of deflationary means need to be adopted to keep imports in check.

During the financial and economic crisis which began around 2007, India was the among the first nations to boost domestic demand by fiscal policy. India was already a Keynesian when the phrase “we are all Keynesians” became popular. India has done the opposite of the beggar-my-neighbour policies but has run out of steam and it is time the world boosts domestic demand and ease the constraint on the few “emerging markets” in the news.

It is a deep bias in the economics profession that balance of payments imbalances have a self-adjusting market mechanism. In the years of the Bretton-Wood it was thought that the Mundell-Fleming fixed exchange rate models explained how imbalances would self-correct. But this proved to be wrong. After the fall of the Bretton-Woods, when exchange rates floated, it was thought that there is a market mechanism via prices changes (exchange rate) to keep imbalances in check but – with exceptions of a few – economists again failed to notice their bias with their focus being shifted by Milton Friedman’s Monetarism who also hand-waved the “market mechanism” in order to promote free trade. India’s troubles is another reminder of how their intuitions are wrong. Instead of changing it, they simply blame the government.

It is time for the rest of the world to first boost domestic demand so that India’s exports rise to pay for its imports. This is beneficial to the world itself because it will enjoy more imports. Some criticisms of the Indian government are true but this alone is far from sufficient in solving India’s problems. More importantly, there is no market mechanism to resolve imbalances – a drastic change in coordination of fiscal and monetary policies combined with trade policies which are mutually consistent and beneficial are required.

Manmohan Violet Singh

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In a short recent speech, the Indian Prime Minister – the great man who steered the direction of the Indian economy in the early 1990s – says:

The purpose of the study of economics is not to provide settled answers to unsettled and difficult questions, but sometimes to warn economists and the world-at-large, how not to be misled by clever governments.

which is similar to what Joan Robinson once:

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

– in “Marx, Marshall And Keynes”, Occasional Paper No. 9, The Delhi School of Economics, University Of Delhi, Delhi, 1955.

I’d say Manmohan Singh doesn’t go as far as Robinson in putting the blame on economists themselves but I guess there is some amount of influence. But what Singh says is true – governments of advanced nations mislead the less advanced ones.

Also in the short speech:

I would like to say, that when we study economics, our impulse is not the philosopher’s impulse – knowledge for the sake of knowledge – but for healing that that knowledge may help to bring. These are the words of past thinkers: Wonder is the beginning of philosophy; but it is not wonder, but social enthusiasm, which revolts against the silence of fixed life, and the orderliness of the mainstream, which is the beginning of economic science.

Which is not not surprising since Manmohan Singh is influenced by Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. Here is a nice interview by the BBC’s Mark Tully from 2005 Architect Of The New India published in the October 2005 issue of the Cambridge University Alumnus Magazine. 

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

The thinking behind his solutions to India’s financial problems was first shaped at Cambridge by the theories of John Maynard Keynes. The great man had died almost 10 years before Manmohan Singh arrived but his legacy was still very much alive. ‘At university I first became conscious of the creative role of politics in shaping human affairs, and I owe that mostly to my teachers, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. Joan Robinson was a brilliant teacher but she also sought to awaken the inner conscience of her students in a manner that very few others were able to achieve. She questioned me a great deal, and made me think the unthinkable. She propounded the leftwing interpretation of Keynes, maintaining that the state has to play more of a role if you really want to combine development and social equity.’

‘Kaldor influenced me even more; I found him pragmatic, scintillating, stimulating. Joan Robinson was a great admirer of what was going on in China, but Kaldor used the Keynesian analysis to demonstrate that capitalism could be made to work. So I was exposed to two alternative schools of thought. I was very close to both teachers, so the clash of thinking sometimes got me into difficulties. But that made me think independently.’

In Other News

The Reserve Bank of India announced some measures recently to curb the instability of the Indian Rupee:

The first announcement – effectively raising short term interest rates and which caught everyone by surprise – was on 15 July 2013:

The market perception of likely tapering of US Quantitative Easing has triggered outflows of portfolio investment, particularly from the debt segment. Consequently, the Rupee has depreciated markedly in the last six weeks. Countries with large current account deficits, such as India, have been particularly affected despite their relatively promising economic fundamentals. The exchange rate pressure also evidences that the demand for foreign currency has increased vis-a-vis that of the Rupee in part because of the improving domestic liquidity situation.

Against this backdrop, and the need to restore stability to the foreign exchange market, the following measures are announced:

…

On 23 July it further tightened monetary policy:

Over the last two months, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has undertaken several measures to contain the volatility in the foreign exchange market. Among them, some measures intended to check excessive speculation adding to undue volatility in market conditions were instituted vide the RBI’s Press Release No.2013-2014/100 dated July 15, 2013. These measures have had a restraining effect on volatility with a concomitant stabilising effect on the exchange rate. Based on a review of the measures, and an assessment of the liquidity and overall market conditions going forward, it has been decided to modify the liquidity tightening measures as follows:

…

Thomas Palley On International Coordination

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Thomas Palley has a new article Coordinate Currencies or Stagnate on international coordination of exchange rates. (h/t Matias Vernengo). He has a nice small critique of the Chicago school according to which “market forces” work toward resolving imbalances.

It is great such a thing has been raised because the importance of policy coordination (in general – monetary, fiscal and exchange rates) is often forgotten.

In an article Agenda For International Coordination Of Macroeconomic Policies, Tobin wrote [1]

Coordinate policies! So economists urge governments. Financiers, journalists, pundits, politicians take up the cry. Central bankers and finance ministers agree, as do presidents and prime ministers. They meet, they talk, they announce progress. It turns out to amount to very little…

But the global imbalance has worsened and it has now created a situation in which such coordination is more badly needed.

Wynne Godley had been warning of such things in the 2000s. In a 2005 article [2] with his collaborators, he wrote:

A resolution of the strategic problems now facing the U.S. and world economies can probably be achieved only via an international agreement that would change the international pattern of aggregate demand, combined with a change in relative prices. Together, these measures would ensure that trade is generally balanced at full employment…Those hoping for a market solution may be chasing a mirage.

I have also found the last words in academic literature very insightful [3]:

… It is inconceivable that such a large rebalancing could occur without a drastic change in the institutions responsible for running the world economy—a change that would involve placing far less than total reliance on market forces.

Time will tell how right he was 😉

References

  1. James Tobin, Agenda For International Coordination Of Macroeconomic Policies, Ch 24, p 633, Essays In Economics, Volume 4: National And International, The MIT Press, 1996.
  2. Wynne Godley, Dimitri Papadimitriou, Claudio Dos Santos and Gennaro Zezza – The United States And Her Creditors: Can The Symbiosis Last?, Levy Institute Strategic Analysis, September 2005. Link
  3. Wynne Godley, Dimitri Papadimitrou and Gennaro Zezza – Prospects For The United States And The World – A Crisis That Conventional Remedies Cannot Resolve, Levy Institute Strategic Analysis, December 2008. Link

Nicholas Kaldor On Floating Exchange Rates

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Martin Wolf has a nice new column on imbalances creating troubles for the UK economy in the Financial Times: What a floating currency gives and what it does not.

Why are current account deficits a haemorrhage in the flow of circular income? Weak external trade performance implies a drain in demand and hence pressure on the path to full employment and also that fiscal policy has to give in: else public debt and net indebtedness to foreigners keep rising relative to output which cannot be sustained for long. This means that if an individual nation or the world as a whole needs reflation, drastic changes need to made on how the world is run – especially using a system of regulated international trade rather than a system of free trade.

Nicholas Kaldor had a lot of change of mind about exchange rates during his lifetime. In the introduction to Volume 6 of his collected essays Further Essays On Applied Economics, he has a lot to say about his views.

Nicky Kaldor also had a paper The Relative Merits Of Fixed Exchange And Floating Rates – a memorandum as an economic adviser to the Chancellor in 1965 in which he was arguing for the merits of floating the exchange rates. In page xiii from introduction to Further Essays On Applied Economics he confesses:

The strategy advocated in my 1965 paper “The Relative Merits of Fixed and Floating Exchange Rates” thus proved in practice futile …

… So the policy which I advocated in the 1960s and developed at greater length in my 1970 Presidential Address to the British Association, of reconciling full employment growth with equilibrium in the balance of payments through adjusting the relationship between import and export propensities by a policy of continuous manipulation of the exchange rate, proved in the event a chimera. The main reason for this was that (along with most economists) I greatly overestimated the effectiveness of the price mechanism in changing the relationship of exports to imports at any given level of income. The doctrine that exports and imports are kept in balance through induced changes in their relative prices is as old and deeply ingrained as almost any proposition in economics.

So there you have it – realising his mistake earlier than anyone else.

He goes on further to drive this point:

… In other words, what the Harrod theory asserts is that trade is kept in balance by variations of production and incomes rather than by price variations: a proposition which implies that the income elasticity of demand of a country’s inhabitants for imports and those of foreigners for its exports are far more important explanatory variables than price elasticities.

which is essentially saying that it is non-price competitiveness which is far more important than price competiveness.

Further …

… If the Harrod theory provides the realistic explanation of the underlying forces which maintain the trade flows of an industrial exporter in balance (subject, of course, to the exceptions to this rule in the shape of long-term surplus and deficit countries, which must be capable of being explained in the same framework) this also carries the implication that the relationship of import propensities to exports will be relatively insensitive to such variations of relative prices as can be accomplished by monetary or exchange rate policies.

This latter implication (though discussed in the 1930s) seems to have got lost when the debate on fixed versus flexible exchange rates flared up again in the 1960s. This explains perhaps the exaggerated hopes placed on variations in exchange rates as an instrument of the “adjustment process” in international trade and payments and, for Britain in particular, on a system of “managed floating” as a means of securing higher and stable growth rates.

Again he later emphasises his learning:

… I was convinced that once exchange rates are freed from the rigidities imposed by Bretton-Woods, the forces of cumulative causation which made some countries grow fast and others slowly will no longer operate, or not in the same manner. That belief was so badly shaken by experience of subsequent years for for reasons explained in my most recent paper on the subject, which is discussed below.

James Tobin said it best once:

I believe that the basic problem today is not the exchange rate regime, whether fixed or floating. Debate on the regime evades and obscures the essential problem.

Of course that doesn’t mean one ties both shoes together and irrevocably fixes exchange rates (and give up the government powers to make drafts at the central bank) but the essential problem referred above – although gets diluted – doesn’t go away outside a monetary union.

Cyprus Rescue

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Cyprus has recently received the attention of academicians and financial professionals in recent weeks. Need I say that?

So national bankruptcy is to be resolved by winding down a bank, moving guaranteed deposits (i.e., upto €100,000) to another and as per the latest Reuters article on this, big numbers (anywhere ranging from 20 to 40 per cent loss on deposits on amounts over €100,000) are quoted.

Martin Wolf has a good summary:

The current plan is closer to what one would wish to see in an orderly bank resolution. Laiki Bank is to be split into good and bad banks. Deposits of less than €100,000 in the bank and assets worth €9bn – the sum owed to the central bank as part of its liquidity support – will be transferred to Bank of Cyprus. The remainder will be wound down. Those with claims to deposits in excess of €100,000 will obtain whatever the value of the bad bank’s assets turns out to be.

Meanwhile, savers at the Bank of Cyprus with deposits of more than €100,000 will have their accounts frozen and suffer a “haircut” of still unknown size. That reduction in value is likely to be large: perhaps 40 per cent. Finally, temporary exchange controls are to be imposed.

Why are the reasons for such huge numbers?

The reason is that the nation has accumulated huge net indebtedness to foreigners over years and this has been financed by banks raising deposits from foreigners, so that if debt traps are to be avoided, foreigners are to be required to take losses.

The following is the international investment position of Cyprus at the end of Q3 2012 (source: Central Bank of Cyprus)

Cyprus - International Investment Position Q3 2012In the balance of payments literature, banks’ position is referred as Other Investment. Also, the above refers to a Financial Account but it really means net IIP. Ideally it would have been better if this data had been updated but the above information is useful nonetheless.

As a percent of gdp, the net IIP position (with the opposite convention to standard usage) was 81.1% (Source: Eurostat) which is big in itself but very much lower than the now famous banks’ liabilities to foreigners/Russians! (the second red box above).

If a nation wants to resolve bankruptcy, it is better to do it by imposing losses on foreigners – especially if an international lender of last resort is available! And if this is to done it in the optimal way, best to do it once – rather than keep doing it. The ratio of two red boxes in the table – i.e., net liability as a proportion of gross bank liabilities to foreigners is 24.56%.

So Cyprus needs to wipe out about this amount as a percent of deposits roughly. It is not necessary to reach a position of zero indebtedness but something low such as 10% of gdp is ideal. Some buffer is needed because there will be leakages in spite of capital controls – requiring fire sale of foreign assets (and subsequent losses) by banks or borrowing from the ECB which may want to ensure that banks have good collateral for the ELA. Foreign deposits below €100,000 shouldn’t be hit. So “net-net”, as a percentage, this may be higher than 24.56%. All this depends on the latest situation and the distribution of foreign deposits and also the distribution between residents and foreigners but 24.56% of deposits is a good starting point – it gives a rough estimate of the order of magnitude of the problem.

At any rate, losses imposed on foreigners have to be big for the ECB and Euro Area governments to stand behind.

A Nation’s Net Indebtedness: An Example

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Over this thread at Matias Vernengo’s blog Naked Keynesianism, I got into an exchange about current account deficits and sustainability with an anonymous commenter – a topic I had blogged on recently in 2-3 posts.

The commenter seems to not understand how this works or seems to believe that net indebtedness cannot keep rising relative to GDP in scenarios. I will present some scenarios below. The scenario presented below is not what literally happens but rather shows the absurdity of some types of growth.

Before this, let me give the expression for net indebtedness to foreigners. Ignoring revaluations, only current account transactions change claims on foreigners or claims by foreigners on residents. So

Change in Net Indebtedness to Foreigners = Current Account Deficit.

For simplicity, I will ignore other items in the current account – such as interest and dividend payments between residents and non-residents etc.

So start with GDP of £100, imports of £20 and exports of £15 and net indebtedness to foreigners of 20% of GDP.

Assume GDP grows at 5% annually. Imports as a percent of GDP is 20% and exports do not grow.

(In real life imports can be even worse when output changes but let’s just keep things simpler).

The numbers are nominal values.

So here is how it looks in Excel:

Net Indebtedness To Foreigners - Example

Now one can argue about the simplicity in the assumption that export was held constant. So here it is at 4% export growth.

To make it more realistic, I also use import elasticity of 1.5 – which means that for a 1% rise in GDP, imports rise by 1.5%.

Net Indebtedness To Foreigners - Example 2

Deteriorating in either case. If you were to extend the scenario to more rows in Excel, you can see how it rises forever.

It illustrates one thing: At sufficiently low growth of exports or a high propensity to import, a faster rate of growth of output comes with net indebtedness to foreigners rising relative to GDP which cannot be sustained for long.

Also if one assumes (although not always the case) that the private sector net accumulation of financial assets (NAFA) is a small positive number (such as 2% of GDP), then the current account reflects directly on the fiscal deficit because of the sectoral balances identity.

You can do this on your own sheet and see how these numbers change for different scenarios assumed.

The reason I have a numerical example is that it is easier to see how fast these stocks and flows change.

This example is an illustration of the balance-of-payments constraint nations face. Faced with rising current account imbalances, nations may be faced with little optimism – such as the ability to use of fiscal policy to improve demand and output. In a world of free trade, there is less one can do such as raising tariffs, import controls and so on. The trend in international political economy is actually tending toward reducing tariffs which makes the problem even worse. Subsidies to exporters can be provided but these lead to cries of foul at WTO. Even if subsidies are given to exporters, they are limited by how well they can compete with big firms in international markets. When this happens for everyone – such as at present – an international political economy game happens where muddled policy makers try to discuss something but in the end vow to continue free trade policies. Or they play games such as beggar-my-neighbour. Whatever said, a nation’s success crucially depends on how their producers do in international markets.

Back to stocks and flows. In real life things get more complicated and interesting. A nation may receive a lot of payments from abroad – even if its trade balance is worsening because of direct investments made in the past etc. Residents hold stock market securities abroad and these may make a killing – so analysing this becomes even more interesting! So high holding gains of assets held abroad may be sufficient to prevent net indebtedness from rising even if the current account balance is high. So there is an interesting dynamics here but finally, the current account balance wins over revaluations.

The example is motivated by one given in Wynne Godley and Francis Cripps’ book Macroeconomics.

The Beggar-My-Neighbour Game

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How did Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians (such as Joan Robinson, Richard Kahn, Nicholas Kaldor and Wynne Godley) think the world economy works?

A few important principles relevant here and of course not exhaustive:

First, real demand, output and employment is determined by the fiscal and monetary policies of the government with the former having a more solid impact on demand. Second, fiscal policy has constraints due to the capacity to produce, and inflation. High inflation – although also influenced by demand – needs to to tackled by direct political means as it is also (highly) dependent on costs. Third, economies have a balance-of-payments constraint and a nation’s success depends crucially on how its producers perform in international markets.

For neoclassical economists and their cousins, world demand and output is determined by the supply-side. It is fantasized that with economic scarcity (as if!) utility and profit maximising behaviour of economic agents will lead to the most efficient allocation of resources and attempts to regulate trade will only make everyone worse-off. The amount of resources is “given” and interference with markets only leads to a lower output for that “given” amount of resources. Fiscal policy is neutral – although it is conceded by them that it can have positive short-term effect. Over the long run, fiscal policy is strictly neutral in this view. The prescription is for the government to balance the budget – sooner the better, and for monetary policy to either “control” the stock of monetary aggregates and/or for interest rate to return to some vaguely defined normal. Further, at an international level, the free trade ideology is imposed on nations because it is thought that it will lead to a convergence of incomes and living standards and full employment.

For example the WTO page on tariffs says:

Customs duties on merchandise imports are called tariffs. Tariffs give a price advantage to locally-produced goods over similar goods which are imported, and they raise revenues for governments. One result of the Uruguay Round was countries’ commitments to cut tariffs and to “bind” their customs duty rates to levels which are difficult to raise. The current negotiations under the Doha Agenda continue efforts in that direction in agriculture and non-agricultural market access.

Unfortunately, free trade, has the opposite effect. Rather than leading to any convergence, it leads to some nations gaining more success and others failing. As Nicholas Kaldor said, “success breeds further success and failure begets more failure.”

How does this operate? A government which wishes its nation to grow faster can put up fiscal policy but sooner or later will be faced with a balance of payments because of the adverse effect on trade and rising indebtedness to foreigners. This constraint shows up as troubles in the foreign exchange markets. This constraint is strongest for a nation whose currency is fixed irrevocably (such as the Euro Area nations) but also is also strong for nations whose currencies are pegged and freely floating.

Now, a nation which has good exports sees good economic expansion via the “export multiplier”. Imports on the other hand are “leakages”. Let us think of a Nation X with a higher propensity to import. Faced with higher imports, X may try to use fiscal contraction to further contract demand and hence imports. This has negative ripples throughout the world as a whole. Exporters to X will see a lower demand for their products – even if they maintain market shares. Via lower multiplier than otherwise, this leads to a lower demand than otherwise in the rest of the world. This again has a contractionary effect on X because of lower exports again leading to a lower demand in the rest of the world than otherwise and so on. So fiscal expansion and investment are good for the world as a whole but free trade is damaging. This is not to deny the benefits of globalization but a world with free trade will be worse-off than with a system of regulated trade which will have higher output, income and world trade since allows more space for fiscal policy and via an accelerator process, allows investment to expand faster.

Now, till recently the United States was acting as the “demander of the last resort” because of its huge imports. Faced with a high balance of payments deficit (in the current account), the United States neither wants to be in this position nor is going to expand domestic demand. It is as if the engine of growth has been cut off.

Faced with so many constraints, nations try to play the beggar-my-neighbour game. Unfortunately this game is also played by the creditor nations. The phrase was first introduced by Joan Robinson in a 1937 article titled Beggar-My-Neighbour Remedies For Unemployment. This excerpt is from beginning of the article:

For any one country an increase in the balance of trade is equivalent to an increase in investment and normally leads (given the level of home investment) to an increase in employment.1 An expansion of export industries, or of home industries rival to imports, causes a primary increase in employment, while the expenditure of additional incomes earned in these industries leads, in so far as it falls upon home-produced goods, to a secondary increase in employment. But an increase in employment brought about in this way is of a totally different nature from an increase due to home investment. For an increase in home investment brings about a net increase in employment for the world as a whole, while an increase in the balance of trade of one country at best leaves the level of employment for the world as a whole unaffected.2 A decline in the imports of one country is a decline in the exports or other countries, and the balance of trade for the world as a whole is always equal to zero.3

In times of general unemployment a game of beggar-my-neighbour is played between the nations, each one endeavouring to throw a larger share of the burden upon the others. As soon as one succeeds in increasing its trade balance at the expense of the rest, others retaliate, and the total volume of international trade sinks continuously, relatively to the total volume of world activity. Political, strategic and sentimental considerations add fuel to the fire, and the flames of economic nationalism blaze ever higher and higher.

In the process not only is the efficiency of world production impaired by the sacrifice of international division of labour, but the total of world activity is also likely to be reduced. For while an increase in the balance of trade of one country creates a situation in which its home rate of interest tends to fall, the corresponding reduction in the balances of the rest tends to raise their rates of interest, and owing to the apprehensive and cautious tradition which dominates the policy or monetary authorities, they are chronically more inclined to foster a rise in the rate of interest when the balance of trade is reduced than to permit a fall when it is increased. The beggar-my-neighbour game is therefore likely to be accompanied by a rise in the rate of interest for the world as a whole and consequently by a decline in world activity.

The principal devices by which the balance of trade can be increased are (1) exchange depreciation, (2) reductions in wages (which may take the form of increasing hours ot work at the same weekly wage), (3) subsidies to exports and (4) restriction of imports by means of tariffs and quotas. To borrow a trope from Mr. D. H. Robertson, there are four suits in the pack, and a trick can be taken by playing a higher card out of any suit.

1 See below, p. 159, note, for an exceptional case. [Note on p. 159: When the foreign demand is inelastic a tax on exports (as in Germany in 1922) or restriction of output (as in many raw-material-producing countries in recent years) will increase the balance of trade, while at the same time reducing the amount of employment in the export industries, and increasing the ratio of profits to wages in them. In these circumstances, therefore, an induced increase in the balance of trade may be accomoanied bv no increase, or even a decrease, in the level of employment.]

2 Unless it happens that the Multiplier is higher than the average for the world in the country whose balance increases.

3 The visible balances of all countries normally add up to a negative figure, since exports are reckoned f.o.b. and imports c.i.f. But this is compensated by a corresponding item in the invisible account, representing shipping and handling costs.