It's the demand, stupid! The role of weak demand on productivity growth

I couldn't resist the title.

Last week I was invited to give a short talk on what I thought was the most pressing policy issue facing the world economy today.

So I presented the findings from a very interesting paper entitled "Explaining Slower Productivity Growth: The Role of Weak Demand Growth" by Someshwar Rao and Jiang Li.

The paper examines the link between demand and productivity growth in both Canada and OECD countries. This issue has been an interest of mine ever since I read these lines in a book by Alan Blinder several years ago:

Economic slack...discourages business investment because companies that cannot sell their wares see little reason to expand their capacity. In consequence, the nation gradually acquires a smaller, older, and less efficient capital stock. 

[A]lthough the state of the national is far from the only factor, who doubts that a booming economy provides a better atmosphere for inventiveness, innovation, and entrepreneurs than a stagnant one? As the cliché says, a rising tide raises all boats...From 1962 to 1973, our generally healthy economy experienced only one mild recession, an average unemployment rate of 4.7 percent, and productivity growth that averaged a brisk 2.6 percent per annum. [Between 1974 and the mid-1980s] the economy [was] frequently...out of sorts. We...suffered through two long recessions and one short one, with an average unemployment rate of 7.3 percent and a paltry average productivity growth rate of 1 percent. This association of high unemployment with low productivity growth is no coincidence. 

Surveying these concomitants of high unemployment -- lack of upward mobility for workers, sluggish investment, lackluster productivity growth -- suggests an ironic conclusion: the best way to practice supply-side economics may be to run the economy at peak levels of demand. (1986:36).

This still makes lots of sense to me.

Verdoorn's Law

During my talk I described the paper as lending support to the well-known findings of economist Petrus J. Verdoorn, who several decades ago published research showing a positive relationship between labour productivity growth and real output growth.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have discussed this since it led to a number of questions on Verdoorn and his research, which shifted the focus away from the paper and the real purpose of my talk, which was to drive home the point that there is considerable evidence that productivity growth shouldn't be viewed as solely a supply-side phenomenon.

Specifically, the paper supports the -- in my opinion, common sense -- view that a slowdown in domestic and external demand is detrimental to growth in labour productivity, real incomes and economic activity because of the negative impact of weaker demand on scale and scope of economies, formation of physical and human capital, innovation and entrepreneurial activity.

Here are the paper's main findings:

Our major findings is that 93 percent of the fall in average labour productivity growth between 1981-2000 and 2000-2012 can be attributed to the drop in real GDP growth between the two periods...In addition, our new empirical research shows that a slowdown in growth of domestic and external demand also impacts negatively some of the key drivers of productivity growth, such as, gross fixed capital formation, M&E investment (including ICTs) and R&D spending, thus leading to lower trend labour productivity. (2013:14)

I concluded my presentation by discussing some of the policy implications outlined by the paper's authors. At this point, I was hoping my comments would get the attention of the government policy analysts and economists in the audience.

First, I suggested that it would be prudent for governments to ensure that deficit and debt reduction measures are gradual in nature so that their negative impact on domestic demand would not be excessive.

Then, I explained that it's always a good idea for governments to spend on productivity-enhancing public investment, even during a period of economic slowdown, as it contributes to both today's demand as well as future productivity growth.

References

Blinder, A., Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, (Mass: Perseus Books)

Rao, Someshwar and Jiang Li, "Explaining Slower Productivity Growth: The Role of Weak Demand Growth", International Productivity Monitor, Spring 2013.

Anthony Atkinson on the public debt and intergenerational equity

It's been a long time since my last post. Much of my spare time has been spent reading and thinking about the best way to think about the economy. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that it's the big picture that matters.

Take the question of the public debt. Much of the discussion in the popular press relating to the national debt focuses on the liabilities of the government and actuarial concerns (dealing with "how to pay it off"), but it rarely discusses the link between public debt and private wealth, wealth distribution and intergenerational equity.

Anthony Atkinson, I believe, summarized it best here:

Much of the rhetoric of fiscal consolidation is concerned with the national debt as a burden on future generations [...] One lesson of the public economics literature on the national debt is that we have to look at the full picture. We pass on to the next generations:

• national debt, 
• state pension liabilities, 
• public financial assets, 
• public infrastructure and real wealth, 
• private wealth, 
• state of the environment, and
• stocks of natural resources.

We need to look at the overall balance sheet, where assets as well as liabilities are taken into account. This does not mean that the position is a healthy one. If we consider the difference between the assets of the state and the national debt, expressed as a percentage of the total national wealth, then in the 1950s the net worth of the [UK] state was negative, but it was becoming less negative, and turned positive in the 1960s [...]

The direction of change since the 1970s has however been in the wrong direction [...] In effect the process of privatisation, with the proceeds used largely to fund tax cuts, transferred wealth from the state to the personal sector. We saw that it was at the end of the 1970s that personal wealth began to rise faster than income. The worsening of the public balance sheet is the other side. Personal wealth has risen faster than national wealth since the 1970s because, in effect, assets have been transferred from the public to the private sector. We are passing on more privately to the next generation but less publicly.

Reversing this pattern can be achieved not only by reducing the national debt, but also by increasing public assets.

Now, to say that more wealth is being passed on privately rather than publicly does not mean that it's being passed on equitably.

For instance, when the government sells-off public sector assets such as parks and decommissioned military bases, the government can use the proceeds to pay down the debt, but the assets get transferred to the purchasers of those assets in the private sector, who, most of the time, don't have the same class and socio-economic profile as that of the whole population (i.e., the former "owners" of those assets).

So here's the bottom line: paying down the debt by selling off public assets to the financial interests has contributed immensely to the wealth inequality that is being discussed these days.

And the corollary to this statement is that there's still lots of wealth "out there" that could be used for public purposes and has the potential to be passed on to future generation in a more equitable manner. It hasn't disappeared, it's just changed hands.

Reference

Atkinson, A.B., "Public economics in an age of austerity", January 12, 2012

Moving past the 90 percent threshold: Focusing on growth

Now that the proposition of a 90 percent threshold (of public debt-to-GDP above which countries' economic growth would significantly slow) associated with the work of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff has been refuted, it's important that the debate now turn to the critical issue of how best to achieve growth moving forward.

On this point, one important aspect to keep in mind is that the uses toward which public debt is directed and the composition of public debt tend to have a significant impact on a country's economic growth.

A recent study by the IMF entitled "Public Debt and Growth" appears to support this view. The study, which examined the public debt dynamics in over 30 countries, found that, although the elasticity of growth with respect to public debt is -0.02, the elasticity of other variables that positively impacts growth offsets this number. For instance, as Iyanatul Islam has noted, the study shows that the elasticity of growth to initial years of schooling is above 2.0.

In other words, it's quite likely that public debt directed toward productive uses has the effect of supporting growth by cancelling out some of the negative effects associated with high public debt that impede growth.

These are the sort of issues policymakers should be discussing moving forward. I think it would go a long way to help us get out of the economic doldrums we're facing today.

Reference

Manmohan and Jaejoon, Public Debt and Growth, IMF, July 2010