Despite the mounting pain of ‘austerity’, opposition parties across Europe find it hard to swing voters’ opinion behind alternative, pro-growth policies. That’s mainly because any ‘Plan B’ would require an initial rise in public borrowing. This is difficult to acknowledge: it’s a bit like telling a hitch-hiker you’ll drive them from Birmingham to London, and setting off towards Glasgow. But evading the issue can make the policy look even less credible, as Labour Party leaders discovered just before May’s local elections.
The idea that we can borrow more and end up with less debt is not the Alice-in-Wonderland approach that critics keep claiming. It’s actually the central lesson of modern macroeconomics. So its portrayal as muddled thinking, or strategically self-defeating, is as much a failure of the economics profession as of the political opposition.
‘Spending to save’ is a well-established aspect of present policy. From the Portas Pilots for regenerating Britain’s high streets to the “campaign costing £18,000 which is expected to raise at least £25,000” in the small-print of charity cold callers, it’s normal to incur higher costs now in order to get bigger rewards later. When correctly judged, these changes more than pay for themselves. So no-one thinks it mad to install solar panels or pay more for a hybrid car.
Borrowing to reduce debt is no less logical. It simply recognises that existing debt was incurred on the expectation of a growing economy. The gross domestic product (GDP) has to expand in order for the debt-to-GDP ratio (which determines its sustainability) to decline. If the government borrows more at a time when GDP is stagnant, unemployment high and the costs of borrowing very low, then the further rise in debt will be outpaced by the subsequent growth of GDP. When national output and incomes rise, debt can then be paid back out of the larger tax base. The substantial ‘multiplier effect’ from public deficits in recessionary times is now recognised in almost all economic assessments, including those of top economists at the International Monetary Fund – which therefore also accept the converse, that trying to reduce the deficit in recessionary times will actually deepen the debt problem by worsening the GDP decline.
Reversing the rules
To be fair to George Osborne, and other finance ministers who stick to the micro-economic logic that deficit reduction will lead to debt reduction, the goalposts haven’t just shifted since austerity started. They’ve been moved to the other end of the field. The prevailing belief among economists after the 2008 financial crisis was that even if public borrowing had a ‘multiplier’ effect on GDP in normal times, this broke down when governments were already ‘over-borrowed’. Once the public debt reached 90% of GDP, any further increase undermined the growth of GDP rather than promoting it. At that point, failure to arrest public borrowing – by reducing state expenditure and/or raising taxes – could lead to disaster, with the debt: GDP ratio spiralling upwards into national default.
The calculation behind that 90 per cent limit has now been shown to be seriously flawed. That may eventually prove fortunate for Osborne, and European counterparts on a similar track, since their lengthening delays before re-balancing the budget mean that public debts previously on course to peak below 90 per cent of GDP could end up going above it.
But even before the calculation errors came to light, it was not clear that high public debt was the cause of stagnation. UK experience strongly points towards its being the consequence. The banking collapses which caused a one-off jump in public debt also arrested the growth of GDP, causing a further cyclical rise in the budget deficit. The solution was to allow that cyclical rise in order to rekindle the growth of GDP – not to try reversing the deficit before such growth had resumed.
Before they recognised its inaccuracy, economists tried to explain the apparent association between early deficit reduction and faster GDP growth with a story of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction.’ Public spending cuts (which most have always preferred to tax increases) would release resources to the private sector, which would immediately invest and employ more, spurred by the lower interest rates made possible by lower public borrowing. Contraction was, indeed, expansionary for small countries that implemented it ahead of the rest: so the two Baltic republics (Estonia and Latvia) that savagely reduced their public spending and public wagebill in 2009-10 now have the EU’s fastest-growing economies, and are embraced by the Eurozone while others struggle to avoid being thrown out.
But for larger economies, which embarked on fiscal contraction simultaneously, the results have been disastrous. Italy is now scarcely governable, Spain’s unemployment rate has reached 27 per cent (and 57 per cent for young people); and the UK has avoided a sharp rise in unemployment only by forcing people into unproductive jobs that increasingly fail to pay a living wage, forcing the government into ever larger employment subsidies.
Opposition parties’ problem is that theirs is a ‘might-have-been’ policy. If they had won the previous election and borrowed more then, they would have generated growth, and public debt would now be lower. No-one can be sure that increased borrowing after the next election will be similarly successful in shrinking the subsequent deficits and bringing debt down. It depends on how bad things get as a result of contractionary experiments now under way.
Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at The Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world, part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.
The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.
Cartoon by Catherine Pain