New Zealand economic performance

National’s five-point plan

Michael Reddell National Party, New Zealand economic performance, pandemic

At the end of my post yesterday morning I noted briefly

Of course, if Labour’s approach is bad, at least (being the government) it is on the table.  It is now less than two months until voting starts and we have no idea what National’s approach might be, but no reason to suppose it would be materially different or better.

Within a couple of hours we had a plan from National, or at least what Todd Muller describes as “the framework for the party’s Plan to create more jobs and a better economy”.   Just like the Prime Minister, he has a five-point plan, outlined in a speech given in Christchurch yesterday.   If you want the potted version there is even a one-page graphic.

graphic nat

I was no more impressed than with Muller’s previous speech, although at least he has dropped the (historically ill-grounded) paeans to Michael Joseph Savage.   There still seems to be a great deal of me-too-ism about it: we’ll be just like Labour only more competent.   If he has values and a political philosophy, they seem to bear little or no relationship to those the National Party was built on.    It is the sort of speech any (losing) centrist Labour Party leader could have given.

It is explicitly an economic speech, but there was no obvious economic framework, no sign that he or his advisers had thought hard about what has ailed the New Zealand economy for a long time, about how National might fix it, and how that might tie together with the immediate recovery needs (having been accused by one commenter yesterday of being an “armchair theorist”, here was my post-Covid note on such issues).

Anyway, to step through the speech.  First, there was the flawed framing.

According to the Reserve Bank, New Zealand faces its worst economic downturn for 160 years. I don’t think the magnitude of that has yet sunk in to the public or the media. That’s partly because, these past few weeks, everyone has quite rightly been more preoccupied with the shambles at the border and in our quarantine centres. But, if the Reserve Bank is to be believed, ahead of us lies the greatest economic and jobs crisis that anyone in this room has ever known.

Even though the fall in the GDP in the month of April was absolutely huge –  could we have measured it, perhaps 40 per cent –  no one supposes that what lies ahead is worse than New Zealand’s experience of the Great Depression.   Most likely, what we face is something more like, perhaps a bit worse than, the severity of the late 80s and early 90s.  That’s quite bad enough.

And a scale of loss and dislocation that National, at least in this framework speech, appears to have no answer for.

Thus, we learn that they are quite happy with macro policy as it stands and don’t appear to think the Reserve Bank needs to be doing anything more (than the little they have done so far).  And we get rather florid rhetoric on fiscal policy, supported by (it appears) nothing.

Since the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the economic and political debate in New Zealand has tended to be on the quantity of borrowing or debt repayment each year. These remain critically important. Getting back to fiscal surplus and then paying down debt to 20 per cent of GDP is necessary, not least because New Zealand will inevitably confront another natural, economic or health disaster in the next couple of decades or beyond. But just as important is to focus on the quality of spending.

Labour forecasts net core debt will reach 53.6 per cent of GDP in 2024 under their policies. That’s an eye-wateringly high level. We will work hard to try to keep it lower than that, which would put New Zealand in a better position to recover. But of far greater longer-term importance is that Labour projects that under its policies, but with a far stronger economic environment than we face today, net core debt will still be as high as 42 per cent by 2034. That means Labour intends a mere 11 per cent reduction in net core debt, over a decade. At that rate, we will not get back to the safe 20 per cent mark until perhaps the mid-2050s.

National does not regard Labour’s attitude as anything like prudent. It would leave an enormous debt, not so much to our children but to our grandchildren. And it would leave our children and grandchildren – and also ourselves – profoundly vulnerable were the global economic and strategic outlook anything other blissful for three successive decades. Covid-19, the trade war between the US and China and this city’s recent history all say that is not a safe bet.

There aren’t many specifics there but Muller is clear that National would be spending less (not necessarily a lot less, but less) than Labour, so that source of support for a faster demand recovery is apparently off the table.   He plays up the debt numbers but never mentions the large assets (NZSF) on the other side, which mean that even the peak debt numbers would last year have put us among the less indebted half of the OECD.  He never engages at all with the possibility that lower long-term interest rates might –  just might –  make a higher long-term debt ratio sensible.  And, of course, there is no hint of when he expects to get back to 20 per cent of GDP, or on what sort of path.

(To be clear, I am not a fan of high levels of public debt, but on a proper measure we’d peak at around 40 per cent of GDP even on this government’s numbers.  And like most rhetorical fiscal hawks in the current context, he offers no other path for a prompt return to full employment).

And then, of course, there is the question of how seriously to take the talk of future fiscal restraint. There was this, for example,

Let me tell you what that means in practice. In 2020/21 and 2021/22, my Government will not be scared of investing more in retraining, if we are confident it will genuinely improve productivity, lower unemployment, increase the tax take, reduce the cost of welfare and improve wellbeing over the following decade. My Government will not be scared of investing over the next decade more in the first 1000 days of life, if we are confident it will improve outcomes from the school system for a generation. Similarly, social housing and mental health. Nor will my Government be afraid of investing more in roads and public transport, if we are confident they will still be improving New Zealand’s productivity 50 or 100 years hence. And my Government will not be afraid to invest more in water storage or carbon-replacement technologies, if they will support higher living standards and greater wellbeing on an even longer timeframe.

It would be surprising if a public transport project now were boosting productivity 100 years hence, but you are left wondering what Muller wouldn’t be spending on.

Now, to be fair, he tells us there will be a series of major speeches outlining details of the five point plan.   But the gist –  what was in yesterday’s speech –  wasn’t encouraging,   Of their headings

Responsible Economic Management consisted of nothing but rhetoric.  We can probably all agree that quality of spending matters, but there is little in National’s track record suggesting they’ve done much better on that in the past (just different specific waste) and –  more importantly –  no clue as to why we’d think they’d better in future.  Labour has been spraying money at favoured entities in recent weeks, but which ones (specifically) is National opposing?

Delivering infrastructure had this promise

Before the end of this month, I will announce the biggest infrastructure package in this country’s history. It will include roads, rail, public transport, hospitals, schools and water.

My heart sank somewhat.  A new and different Think Big? But lets see the specifics.

Muller boasts of delivery, but wasn’t it the previous National government that put in place the contracting structure for Transmission Gully.  And I’m always a bit surprised at National using the Christchurch repair and rebuild process as a plus.

Reskilling and retraining our workers is flavour of the day (it was a big part of the PM’s speech the other day too), this time with rhetoric about capturing something called the “Creativity Wave” in the 2020s.    But from a party offering no more macro stimulus to demand (see above), uninterested in our high real exchange rate, and (previously) opposed to fees-free it all has the feel of rhetoric and displacing headline unemployment figures at present.   When there are jobs on offer, firms and individuals tend to invest in the skill development required.

A Greener, Smarter Future may be good political rhetoric, or the sort most Labour ministers could have delivered, but seems about as empty.   This section concludes thus

National’s vision is of a post-Covid economy that is greener, smarter and better than the one we had before.

Sounds fine, but what (specifically) is the government’s role in getting there, and what is National proposing to do to give us some hope of achieving all this environmental stuff while also reversing the decades-long decline in relative productivity?  Nothing was on offer in this speech.

And finally, there was

Building Stronger Communities.  I’m sure Muller is genuine about some of this, but what of this gratuitous line

Every community needs strong community institutions to maintain and enhance their social capital. Many of those institutions were damaged a generation ago, and I don’t believe they have been repaired.

Another opportunity for Muller to have a go at the reforms instituted by the 4th Labour government and by his own mentor and former boss Jim Bolger?  So the decline of churches, sport clubs, Scouts and Guides, marriage and so on is down the evil reforms of the 80s and 90s is it?  If so, which of those reforms does he think specifically contributed and which is he proposing to undo?    Of course, the answer to the latter question is “none of them”.  It is just shallow opportunistic political rhetoric.

I don’t really disagree with Muller that

our opponent doesn’t believe in having a plan, hasn’t delivered on her promises, and has a track record of failure across the board.

But when he claims

Ladies and Gentlemen, in the end, I have a very simple message for you and all New Zealanders this election campaign: National has a plan to rebuild our communities and our economy, to get Kiwis back to work and to deal with the economic and jobs crisis.

There was nothing at all in the speech to lead any reasonable observer to think it was so.   Perhaps those future “major speeches” will give us something concrete, as part of a serious well-thought-out strategy that links the immediate challenges with the longer-term deep-seated problems in the New Zealand economy.  But on what we’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t be optimistic about that.

 

Small economies

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity, Productivity Commission

The Productivity Commission last week released a report done for them by David Skilling on “frontier firms”.  That is the topic of the Commission’s latest inquiry, handed to them by the Minister of Finance.  Personally, I reckon the topic is mis-specified and will tend to drive people to focus on symptoms more than causes, but I’ll come back to that in more detail at some point.

Skilling was formerly Executive Director of the former (somewhat centre-left) New Zealand Institute and these days runs a consultancy, based in the Netherlands, with a focus on small advanced economies.  I’m a bit under the weather today so in this post, I wanted to touch on only two points from his report.

The first was to draw attention to footnote 10

10 The one policy foundation setting that I identify as having had a meaningful impact on New Zealand’s productivity performance and the development of frontier firms is with respect to immigration (or more precisely, the absence of a strategic migration policy).  The substantial net migration inflows that New Zealand has received over the past 25 years has been a strong source of support for headline GDP growth, but has created a series of distortions and pressures in the New Zealand economy: infrastructure and cost pressures, greater residential real estate demand (with implications for allocation of investment capital), downward wage pressure that deters business investment, as well as upward exchange rate pressure.  An explicit immigration policy that was focused on quality and filling skills gaps, with lower gross inflows, would create a more supportive environment for higher levels of international engagement by New Zealand firms (although the transmission mechanism to outcomes is more indirect than those discussed in the body of this paper).

There isn’t much about policy that I agree with Skilling on  –  and find it strange that in a 30 page report with an emphasis on the tradables sector, this is the only mention of the exchange rate –  but, as you can imagine, I agree with much of that.

And the second was about this chart

Forbes 2000

of which he observes

This seems to be the case in small advanced economies also.  One of the striking characteristics of successful small advanced economies is their reliance on large firms, with a disproportionate representation of small economy MNCs in measures such as the Forbes Global 2000 (Exhibit 6).

I wasn’t particularly familiar with this listing, so went and had a look.  But I also had a look at a wider range of countries.  For his paper, Skilling uses the IMF classification of advanced economies, focusing on those with a population under 20 million.   However, that grouping leaves out the central and eastern European countries (the Baltics, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia) that are both OECD and EU members, and which are either catching or already overtaking New Zealand in terms of labour productivity (all but Hungary have had faster productivity growth than New Zealand since, say, 2007 – just prior to the last recession).

I’m not really going to dispute what I take to be one of Skilling’s propositions, that a successful New Zealand would probably see more large and internationally successful firms.   Nonetheless, it is perhaps worth noting a few things:

  • the Forbes listing is of public companies.  That’s fine; it is what it is.  But the implied market capitalisation of Fonterra makes it large enough that were it be tomorrow transformed fully into a listed company, it would almost certainly make the list (five Greek banks, with a combined market cap less than Fonterra make the list).  If anything, Skilling is too kind about Fonterra –  which has woefully underperformed the marketing pitches of 20 years ago –  but big and international it still is,
  • while we are the only advanced country in Skilling’s chart not to have a company in the list, none of the Baltics nor Slovenia nor Slovakia has an entrant either.   The Czech Republic and Hungary (both about twice our population) have one and two  respectively, in the Czech case a power company that appears to have a market capitalisation not much larger than that of Meridien,
  • Iceland and Luxembourg are both small successful advanced countries; the former has no entrants on the Forbes list, and the latter quite a few (more per million than any of the countries shown).
  • Portugal and Greece are not that successful small advanced countries, and both have several entrants on the list.

I guess A2 and Xero are increasingly not New Zealand companies, but appear large enough that they could well have shown up on a listing like this.

There are always going to be pitfalls in any illustrative indicator –  this one simply happened to catch my eye –  but if I agree with Skilling that it makes sense to pay attention to other small advanced economies in trying to make sense of the New Zealand story (and of our constraints and policy options), starting from where we are now, it is probably at least as useful to think about the central and eastern European countries –  and Israel, which does quite well on various of Skilling’s indicators but has productivity very similar to ours –  as the more traditional western European ones.

queen 4

.

Two recent contributions

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, pandemic

For anyone interested, here is the link to my discussion with Prof Steve Keen on Jim Mora’s show on Radio New Zealand yesterday morning.    Despite the RNZ headline, the trans-Tasman travel “bubble” idea wasn’t any sort of focus, although Keen and I have quite different views on the issue beyond the very short-term.  The thrust of my policy prescription post-Covid is outward to the entire world as much as we can, on the basis that there is no credible alternative path to a more productive and prosperous future.  Keen, by contrast, favours a future in which New Zealand and Australia together trade as little as possible with the rest of the world.   It seemed like a pretty bleak future to me, but at least he was honest enough to acknowledge that his preferrred path is one in which as nations we would be materially poorer in future, for the environment.

Sadly, the discussion did not get to Keen’s “modern debt jubilee” proposal that I discussed in a post last week.

The Small States and the New Security Environment (SSANSE) project is a collaboration of university researchers in a number of countries, including (in New Zealand) Canterbury University’s Anne-Marie Brady.   Here in New Zealand, the initiative seems to encourage research and debate on a wider range of issues than the programme title itself might imply, and they have a page of contributions on a range of policy issues from quite a range of authors, under the heading “Pop-up Think Tank“.  Anne-Marie has launched what she calls a Commission for a Post-Covid Future, and invited various people to contribute short papers.

As her tweet says, mine is apparently the first such paper to be released, in an abbreviated form on The Spinoff this morning.  (The fuller version should eventually be on the SSANSE site, but here it is as well

Rebuilding New Zealand’s shattered economy post-Covid

(UPDATE: More nicely formatted on the SSANSE site here)

From the first page

post-covid 1

and from the body

post-covid 2

Macro policy has a big part in getting back to full employment

post-covid 3

And longer-term, there are bits my friends from the market-oriented right will like

post-covid 4

and a bit many of them will deplore

post covid 5

ending this way

post covid 6

For anyone doubting that “we haven’t done well” bit in the last few lines, I refer you to the charts in my post on Saturday.

Oh, and the allusion to the once-upon-a-time campaign promise to “restore New Zealand’s shattered economy” was conscious and deliberate.  They had good intentions too, even did some useful reforms, but they wouldn’t embrace the outward-oriented market-led approach that the situation really demanded.  In many respects, our starting position now is quite a bit worse than it was then.

 

 

New Zealand: the foreign trade failure

Michael Reddell Exports, New Zealand economic performance, pandemic, Trade

To have listened to Winston Peters’ speech in Parliament the other day –  which wasn’t all as bad as the media reporting had led me to believe – or the joint Herald op-ed from the New Zealand, UK, Australian, and Singaporean trade ministers, you might have supposed that New Zealand’s was some great foreign trade “success story”.  I put it in quote marks because of course Winston Peters –  our Foreign Minister –  seems to want to undo some of that alleged “success”, seeking “far greater autonomy for New Zealand”.  Here is the full relevant quote

Now, New Zealand First is resolved that our future economy will have these features about it, because they’ve learnt something. One: far greater autonomy for New Zealand. In short, if we can grow it or make it at near competitive prices, then we will grow it or make it, use it or export it, rather than use valuable offshore funds importing it.

Some mix of mercantilism  (more exports good for their own sake) and insulationism (less international trade all round).

And here was a key quote from the article by David Parker and his peers

We are four independent trading nations who have derived success by operating globally. Almost two-thirds of Britain’s economy is made up of trade. One in five Australian jobs is trade related. In New Zealand that number is one in four. Nearly two-thirds of Singapore’s GDP is generated by external demand.

Success story? That would be the country that has spent 70 years slipping, sporadically but decisively (never really interrupted) down the OECD productivity league tables.  Productivity growth, after all, being the main basis for improved material living standards, and for many non-material options.

Here is foreign trade as a per cent of GDP (average of imports and exports) for each OECD country for the latest calendar year the OECD has data for (mostly 2019).

foreign trade as % of GDP

I use foreign trade (imports and exports) to make the point that, for a whole economy, we mostly export to import (some of vice versa as well).  But we are also fourth to bottom if one looks as exports alone.

Perhaps you think that doesn’t really matter much; after all, much richer Australia and the United States have lower trade shares than us.  Unfortunately for that story, larger countries tend to do a lot less foreign trade (as a share of GDP) than smaller ones –   there simply are lots more home markets for firms in the US – and even Australia has a population five times our size.

Ah, but we opened up our economy decades ago –  all that stuff Winston Peters lamented much of –  and we’ve signed all those trade agreements ministers and officials like to boast about.  Surely, then, we trade more heavily than we used to, surely we’ve improved our relative performance?

foreign trade since 1970

But no.    New Zealand’s foreign trade now is a bit less (share of GDP) than it was in 1980, and if we started behind the other small countries, we’ve lagged further behind, especially this century.

And since the OECD only has data for all countries since 1995 here is the NZ vs small countries comparison just since 1995.

foreign trade since 95

I suppose at least the gap hasn’t widened further in the last five or six years.

And then people (reasonably) point out that in some countries –  notably in Europe –  there is a lot of cross-border trade in partly-assembled products.  That is a plus for those countries, whose firms really can gain by specialisation in specific aspects of a production chain, but it does inflate the gross foreign trade numbers.

Fortunately, the OECD has developed indicators of the amount of domestic value-added in each country’s exports  (there is a range of other indicators in the value-added database as well, but here I’m just going to fall back on exports).  In some (particularly central European) countries only just over 50 per cent of gross exports represent domestic value-added.  In New Zealand (and Australia and the US) that share is close to 90 per cent.

So how does domestic value-added in exports look as a share of GDP across the OECD countries (these data are available only with quite a lag, so the latest numbers are for 2016)?

value added exports

It lifts New Zealand slightly up the league table, but all the countries below us have much larger populations –  and domestic markets –  than we do.  By contrast, all the countries to the right of the chart are small (or in the Dutch case just a bit above small).  And of the small countries – 12 million or fewer people (from where there is a step up to the Netherlands) our population is pretty close to the median.

dom value add and popn

It isn’t the tightest relationship in the world –  there is a lot else going on –  but the point that small countries tend to export (and import) more is pretty clear.  And New Zealand –  red dot –  stands out well below the line.

Our trade performance has been –  is –  woeful.  We simply don’t export (or import) much for a country as small as we are. In fact, not many countries –  even very large ones –  export/import less than we do as a share of GDP.

So the self-congratulatory lines that David Parker (and MFAT officials, and a succession of previous National trade ministers) run is deeply flawed.  But at least, in some sense, their hearts are in the right place, seeming to recognise that a more outward-oriented New Zealand is the only sustainable path to much greater prosperity.  From Winston Peters, on the other hand, the idea that we should be importing even less –  in a small country that already imports the fourth lowest share of GDP in the entire OECD –  is just headshakingly bad.

(If perhaps not quite as bad as Steve Keen who proposes that New Zealand and Australia are ideally placed to be some sort of long-term “trade bubble” –  doing as little as possible, even beyond Covid –  with the rest of the world, as if we’ll suddenly become a major market for coal, LNG, and iron ore and they will suddenly become a leading market for dairy, lamb, and export education.)

 

On “ancient history” (the last business cycle)

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

One very slight side-benefit to the savage collapse in economic activity that began a little over a month ago is that we now know, with a great degree of certainty, when the last business cycle ended.  In the quarterly series that we mostly rely on in New Zealand the peak will have been the December quarter of 2019.

The nice thing about knowing when the cycle ended is that we can then look at the full cycle and see how things went over that full period, encompassing the previous recession and recovery and more recent years of relative normality.  And we can compare the most recent business cycles with the previous couple.   In time, we will be able to do some useful comparisons with other countries and see how our business cycle compared with those of other advanced countries, but it will take a while for all the relevant data to turn up in OECD databases, so this post is almost all about New Zealand.

If we use as the basis for dating business cycles the period from peak to peak in real GDP –  which seems reasonable for New Zealand, absent a business cycle dating committee –  the last cycle ran from 2007q4, the previous peak just prior to the domestic recession and global crisis, to 2019q4.   That is a fairly long growth phase for New Zealand.  It was interrupted by a “double-dip recession” in the second half of 2010, but people tend to discount such dips for these purposes because GDP had not yet got back to pre-recession levels before that modest setback took place.

What of earlier periods?  The official quarterly New Zealand GDP series only go back to 1987, and official quarterly population series only starts at the beginning of 1991.  So here I am going to focus on comparisons only with the cycle that ran from 1990q4 to 1997q3, and the cycle from 1997q3 to 2007 q4 –  so all peak-to-peak comparisons.

(It is worth noting here that there will be revisions to the data for several years to come, probably most substantially after the annual national accounts for the year to March 2020 are produced at the end of the year –  coronavirus permitting.  But there is no obvious reason at this point to suppose the GDP numbers are biased one way or the other.)

Here is average annual growth in real per capita income for the three full business cycles.

Cycle GDP pc

Allowing for terms of trade effects improves the picture for both the 97 to 07 cycle and the most recent one, but doesn’t do much to close the gap between the two: the latest cycle just wasn’t that good.

What about productivity?  You’ll recall that my preferred labour productivity measure is real GDP per hour worked, in this case using both measures of GDP (production and expenditure) and both measures of hours (HLFS and QES).  Here is the same chart for that series.

cycle GDP phw

As it happens the average rate of productivity growth for the last five years was even lower than for the full cycle.   And this in an economy starting (a) so far behind the OECD leaders, and (b) therefore less affected by any slowdown in productivity growth at thre frontiers.

What about foreign trade?  Our ministers and officials like to talk up our commitment to open trade and all the special trade deals they like negotiating.

But here are exports and imports as a per cent of GDP.

cycle foreign trade

Highly successful economies tend to be ones that, for their size, export and import a lot.  We don’t.  (It isn’t a great starting point for a time when quite a bit of trade is going to be disrupted by the coronavirus, perhaps for several years to come.)

The poor overseas trade performance may have something to do with whatever mix of factors delivered us such a high real exchange rate.

cycle real TWI

I couldn’t help myself and did take a quick look at how other OECD countries had done on the headline growth numbers, in per capita terms.  Here are the top ten OECD countries

Avg ann % growth in real GDP per capita: 2007q7-2019q4
Poland                                           3.4
Lithuania                                      2.8
Korea                                             2.4
Hungary                                        2.1
Slovak Republic                          1.9
Latvia                                            1.7
Estonia                                          1.6
Israel                                             1.5
Chile                                              1.4
Czech Republic                            1.3

Every one of those countries started the business cycle well behind the productivity leaders, and gained ground relative to those countries over the 12 years.

On this particular metric –  real GDP per capita –  we didn’t do too badly, in that we more or less matched the performance of one of the leaders (the US), which had been at the epicentre of the crisis at the time of the last recession.   There isn’t cross-country comparative data for productivity growth for the full period yet,  but –  using annual data –  for the eleven years to 2018, our productivity growth lagged behind most of the OECD leaders, including the United States.  For us, the gaps to the leaders –  opening out for 60 years or more now –  have just kept widening further.

Sadly, whether in the latest speech from the Minister of Finance or what little we’ve seen from the Opposition, there is nothing to suggest any major party contesting this year’s election is going to offer an alternative that might make a real difference for the better.  Amid the coronavirus implosion I’m guessing productivity failures won’t even get much attention this election.  But they should, and any serious recovery plan should go hand in hand with a strategy that has some credible chance of finally beginning to reverse decades of failure.  Turning inwards and looking more heavily to the state is most unlikely to be such an answer.

National’s economic plan

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

I’d seen a few underwhelmed comments on the speech by Simon Bridges earlier in the week, “National’s economic plan for 2020”.   But just possibly some of those critics had missed some real gems, that might signal an Opposition party really serious about addressing New Zealand’s longrunning economic failures. For anyone wanting the short version, there was nothing of that sort.

I was quite critical of Bridges’s speech to the National Party conference last July

But, for all the almost ritualised mentions in Simon Bridges’s speech of the importance of a strong economy (even the Prime Minister mouths those sorts of line from time to time), there was nothing –  not a word –  to suggest that he recognises that the biggest obstacle to higher material living standards (whether in the form of cancer care or other public or private goods and services) is the woeful productivity record that successive governments –  led only by National and Labour –  have presided over.    There is plenty of talk about cyclical issues, but nothing about the structural failures, and nothing about what National might do that would conceivably make a real difference in reversing that performance.

Sure, it wasn’t primarily a speech about economics, but there has been nothing from Bridges or his colleagues elsewhere, and no hint of a recognition here, that much-improved productivity performance is the only sustainable path to much better material living standards.  And not a hint of a recognition that these failures were already well apparent in the government in which he served (latterly as Minister of Economic Development) –  and if you think politicians never make such acknowledgements then (and in fairness to Bridges) I should point out that in his brief speech at the start of the conference he did acknowledge that National hadn’t done that well on housing (“but we weren’t Phil Twyford”).

But I was a bit more positive about the economic policy discussion document released a month or so later.

Quite a few of things National is proposing look sensible. The general direction looks sensible.   The rhetoric is better than it was –  although, by itself, such rhetoric is cheap, and is the sort of thing most Oppositions for 25 years have eventually come round to saying.  But the scale of the policy response they are talking about is simply incommensurate to the scale of the problem (much of the policy mix they are suggesting is carrying on a broad approach they adopted in government, and productivity growth was very disappointing then).  For New Zealand average labour productivity to match that in top-tier OECD countries would require a 60 per cent lift from where we are.    That is simply huge.  Huge problems are rarely successfully answered with small changes (even a succession of them).

And so my challenge to National is along the lines of that the rhetoric is great, and I hope it reflects a shared sense that New Zealand’s long-term economic performance really is deeply disappointing, and has not sustainably improved –  relative to other advanced countries –  for any prolonged period for many decades now.  As they say, that has real implications for us, our children and our grandchildren, for the material living standards –  and public and private services –  we can achieve for the population as a whole.

But if you are serious, and you really mean what you say – all those good quotes I posted earlier –  you need to keep thinking harder, digging deeply, consulting broadly and testing and evaluating the proposals and analysis put to you.   Great ambitions need to be matched by excellent analysis, courageous policy, and skilful management of the political challenges.   Perhaps for many in the National caucus, winning the next election is all that matter, but I’d urge the party, and its members, not to focus on the small ambitions, but on the really big challenge that, successfully confronted, would so much transform New Zealand for the better, for almost all New Zealanders.

That was six months ago,  The election is now only seven months away, and if the speech earlier this week wasn’t intended to set out too many details (specific tax rate changes etc), if there was any sign at all that they were serious about more than just gettingback into office, it should be showing through by now, reflecting some sort of integrated story –  and telling that story –  about what has gone wrong, what needs to be done quite differently, and how National under the leadership of Mr Bridges proposed to set about doing it.   But no.

So what does he have to say?

It is pretty much all cyclical stuff.

The first page is pretty much a boilerplate recitation of the woes and challenges of the wider world, and there isn’t anything very much to disagree with.    Then we get this

Our commodity prices are high and our terms of trade are near the best they have ever been. From our primary sector through to our technology and innovative sectors, New Zealand should be booming and the envy of the world.

Perhaps there is a small amount to such a story on a cyclical basis, but no one in their right mind would envy our structural performance, among advanced economies, at any time this century (arguably, for most of the previous half-century either).

I’m not going to disagree with much of the shorter-term stuff

Because Jacinda Ardern’s Government has failed to deliver on its promises, has piled on the tax, cost and red tape, made things more uncertain domestically at a time of global uncertainty, and as a result New Zealand has become a country of lost opportunities.

They [people] deserve a government that does what it says it will, that delivers with certainty and removes barriers and burdens like tax, cost and red tape.

But then it starts getting a bit odd.

We have slipped to the seventh lowest GDP per capita growth in the OECD. We are behind countries like Chile, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Spain and even Greece.

Which is a rather odd list to be anguished about, seeing as all those eight countries have lower per capita GDP than we do (Spain is very close).  In conventional analysis of such things, one might reasonably expect (and hope) that poorer countries will grow faster than rich countries so that, over time, economic performance converges.    Oh, and Greece was coming off the back of probably the most savage economic downturn in the advanced world in almost a century, so it would be a surprise –  nay, a worry –  if they did not eventually begin to limp back towards full employment.

So, really strange list of countries, but it is certainly a fair point that seventh lowest per capita GDP growth in the OECD is pretty bad.    Unfortunately it has become par for the course.  For the whole period since 1970, we’ve had the third lowest growth in real per capita GDP in the OECD (small sample of countries for which there is data for the whole period).    There is complete data for the whole OECD membership since 1995, and over that period –  after all the reforms we did, but also period presided over by both National and Labour governments – we were 11th worst (out of 36 OECD countries).

And on productivity growth –  real GDP per hour worked – the only secure underpinning for long-term improvements in living standards, we’ve been 7th worst in the entire OECD over that whole period since 1995.

We’ve been doing poorly, mostly drifting backwards, relative to other advanced countries for a long time.     And if one year’s growth –  thrown around by all sorts of things, including measurement challenges (who knows how our latest annual growth rate will finally be measured, or ranked against those of other countries, when all revisions are in several years hence) makes for short-term political headlines, it is mostly a distraction from the real long-term failures.    A deliberate one one might suggest.

I couldn’t exactly replicate the Bridges claim that we were 7th worst in per capita growth –  I’m sure it is so on some or other series, but the ones I happened to check gave slightly different results.   I’m assuming he was using annual data, for which the most recent numbers are of course 2018 –  quite a lot (good and ill) has happened since then. I also checked the OECD quarterly seasonally adjusted per capita data, and as happens can offer a factoid Bridges might like: in the two years to September 2019 (latest official data, and covering the full period of this government) New Zealand’s per capita GDP growth shows as being 11th worst in the OECD, while for the previous three years (final term of the National government) we were 14th best –  ie actually better than the median OECD country.

But…..productivity.  Have I mentioned productivity?  (Bridges didn’t)   Over that whole five year period, our labour productivity was fifth worst in the OECD.   That was National’s failure, and it is Labour’s failure.  It would now take a 67 per cent lift in average New Zealand labour productivity to match average productivity in the leading OECD group (a bunch of north European countries and the US).

Now, in fairness to Bridges, there is one vestigial reference to such gaps

In comparison, if our GDP per capita were as good as Australia’s, the average Kiwi would be 35 per cent richer.

By my reckoning that is more like the productivity gap than the GDP per capita gap, but either way it is a big number.   No narrower now that it was –  wider on the productivity measure –  before the last recession.

Bridges goes on

That doesn’t happen by accident, it doesn’t take a country the size of Australia to achieve it. It happens when you have a strong economy focussed on you. Led by a competent government with a track record of delivering.

As Economic Development Minister and Associate Finance Minister, I saw how real this is.

Except that the gaps didn’t narrow then either, and all he goes on to enumerate is a series of either modest cyclical points or wholly rhetorical ones

It’s about getting up in the morning and seeing New Zealand ambitious and confident about itself again.

National’s response

National’s focus is simple and resolute.

  1. We will keep taxes and red tape low and grow incomes to help with your cost of living
  2. We will be responsible managers of the economy
  3. We will focus on growing the economy for all
  4. We will invest more in core public services like health and education
  5. Finally, we will create more jobs and opportunities for all New Zealanders

Except for the first half of item 1, Labour could – probably did – trot out exactly the same list in 2017.

He then gets a little more specific

To do this, today I am announcing five key measures that I want the sixth National Government’s first term to be measured by. They are things that matter to Kiwis because they impact us in our everyday lives.

  1. New Zealand’s economic growth is back to at least three per cent per annum.
  2. New Zealand’s growth rate per person is in the top half of the OECD
  3. We are reducing the after-tax income gap with Australia
  4. More New Zealanders feel they can reach their potential at home, rather than overseas
  5. We have revived business confidence so that businesses feel like they can take more risks and create opportunities for you and your family

Nothing very wrong with that I guess, but not much ambition either –  nothing about the level of GDP for example.   Nothing about productivity, and –  re the final point – business investment was really rather subdued under the previous government as well.

How will this be done?

Over the next few months I will be announcing our comprehensive Economic Plan.

The five major planks to it are five packages on:

  1. Tax relief
  2. Regulation reduction
  3. Infrastructure
  4. Small Business
  5. Families

Details to come, to be sure, but it is hard to believe it will amount to much, beyond a bit of political product differentiation, and (no doubt) a few useful steps at the margin.     If you plan to spend more, and keep the budget more or less in balance, for example, there is hardly room for game-changing tax reform.     And if I really quite like this

We have already promised to cut red tape and regulation. We will light a regulations bonfire in our first six months of government, and cut two regulations for every new one we create.

it isn’t much different to what National always says in Opposition, which never amounts to very much in government.  Why will this time be different?  Did Bridges have a reputation as a reforming liberaliser when he was a Cabinet minister?

The speech goes on with some soft-soap stuff that I won’t trouble you with.   And then we get to the conclusion

National’s view is that the 2020s should be New Zealand’s decade.

Which sounds good, but there is nothing in the speech suggesting thought, ideas, plans, ambition commensurate with the scale of that challenge.   It is really just a promise to manage a bit more compentently –  not an unworthy goal necessarily, but just part of keeping our ongoing relative decline tidy.   Ours kids deserve better.

Then there is this sentenc.  I read it first yesterday and read it again today and it still makes no sense –  or, most generously, just repeats itself in saying nothing.

Our ambition as a country can never be too great for what we need to achieve.

The decades of economic failure just keep on mounting up, on watches overseen by both National and Labour.  The scale of the failure –  the extent to which relative material living standards here have slipped away – is huge.  But while Bridges –  just like Ardern, or Key, or Clark, or Shipley –  might like to leave the impression they might finally be the one to wave a magic wand, all the evidence is that they (a) they don’t really care, and (b) have no serious ideas about what went wrong and no serious interest in knowing, or doing, what it might take to really turn this country’s economic future around.

If, perhaps, none of that is a surprise, I suppose we should simply be “grateful” that Bridges’s speech, just a few months out from the election, makes that indifference utterly clear.

 

 

Product market regulation

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Regulation

Writing yesterday about the Productivity Commission’s draft report on why firms don’t invest more (in “technology”), prompted me to take a look at the OECD’s Product Market Regulation (PMR) indicators.    In the OECD’s own words

The economy-wide PMR indicators measure the regulatory barriers to firm entry and competition in a broad range of key policy areas, ranging from licensing and public procurement, to governance of SOEs, price controls, evaluation of new and existing regulations, and foreign trade.

There is both a summary economywide indicator (the focus here) and a range of detailed component indicators and sectoral indicators.   As always with cross-country attempts to assess policy, the indicator(s) won’t be perfect, but such indicators can still shed some light on differences across advanced economies and across time –  the OECD has published the data every five years starting in 1998.

Here are rankings for 1998.  (On this measure, the lower the score the less burdensome -or whatever your descriptor – the product market regulation is.)

PMR 1998

In the wake of those numbers, when people talked about the productivity performance in New Zealand you’d often here something like “well, our business regulation is less burdensome than almost anywhere in the OECD” so (among the optimists) gains will follow or (among those less sanguine) whatever the big issues are they seem unlikely to be those relating to product market regulation.   A few years on we were still 2nd (in 2003) or 3rd (in 2008).

But by 2013 we were only ranked fifth.  Perhaps not disastrous, but some slippage evident.  And here are the 2018 numbers, fairly newly released (data for two countries still not there) assessing things as they stood on 1 January 2018.

pmr 2018

That is now a pretty unambiguous drop back in the rankings.   And three former Communist countries now beat us, with another two just slightly behind.

And it isn’t as if New Zealand has just been improving a bit more slowly than the rest of the OECD.  Here is the absolute score for New Zealand and for the median OECD country (no material differences if I used just the subset of countries for which there is a score on all five dates).

PMR 3

We’ve gone backwards, in absolute terms, since 2008.

I get quite a few comments whenever I write about productivity, suggesting that the web of regulation has been more constraining and all-encompassing over the years.  I have a fair amount of sympathy with many of those comments, even while doubting that such regulations will explain much of our poor productivity performance.   But in the PMR indicator we score poorly in a quite different area of government involvement.

The OECD publishes the data broken out into two “high-level indicators”.  One is “Barriers to domestic and foreign entry” and the other is “Distortions induced by [direct] state involvement.   Here is how we did in 2018 on the first of those.

PMR 4

Not too bad I suppose –  5th equal, and very close to the couple of countries just above us.

But here is the other high-level indicator

PMR 5

In turn, there are four sub-components to public ownership bit of this high-level series, and on each of them we score less well than the median OECD country.

PMR 6

On the “involvement in business operations” sub-components of the “distortions induced by [direct] state involvement high-level indicator we are the OECD median on one, and do a little than the median on the other two.

Of the other sub-components in the overall indicator, there were six where New Zealand scored materially differently than the median OECD country: three better, three worse.  Of the “worse” ones, only six countries score worse than New Zealand, and on the FDI one (and I know the interpretation is contentious) we score worst of all: none look like the sorts of areas a small economy, with persistent current deficits, should aim to score poorly.

New Zealand Worse
Assessment of impact of regulations on competition
Complexity of regulatory procedures
Barriers to FDI
New Zealand Better
Admin requirements on new companies
Barriers in service sectors
Treatment of foreign suppliers

One could go playing around in the relevant spreadsheets (economywide, and the additional sectoral ones) at great length.  Perhaps I will come to them in another post next week.

One can also debate just how much regulatory and state intervention poor scores really matter in terms of overall economic performance.  It is no doubt easy to point to any of the sub-components and find some highly successful country scoring poorly.  But when you are starting as far behind the leaders as New Zealand now is, then even if regulation and state control issues –  of the sort captured here –  aren’t the key factors, if we are serious about improving productivity we should be doing whatever we can wherever we can to provide a more facilitative climate for firms to prosper on their merits.

UPDATE: An OECD economist, in comments below, has helpfully drawn my attention to some methodological changes in the 2018 PMR which mean that scores cannot be compared (reliably) across time (the 1998 to 2013 ones should work, but there is a discontinuity to 2018).   I think her comments leave most of this post looking okay (the relative rankings should still be meaningful, and the identification of where we now do poorly) but one should be a little cautious about the time series chart (noting, however, that the trends I was highlighting were already apparent by 2013).

A speech from the new Secretary to the Treasury

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Treasury

Early last month the new Secretary to the Treasury, Caralee McLiesh, gave her first on-the-record speech in the new role.    The Treasury was a bit slow to release the text, but it is now available here.     It wasn’t a long speech, but it was to a fairly geeky audience –  the Government Economics Network’s annual conference – most of whom wouldn’t yet have seen much of the new Secretary.  With not much else to go on yet, it seems reasonable to look at what she said for any indications of whether/how The Treasury is changing for the better under new leadership.

I’ve been uneasy about the new Secretary for several reasons:

  • first, because she isn’t a New Zealander and has no background or experience in New Zealand issues or people, no domestic networks, and (most probably) little in-depth understanding of the idiosyncrasies of New Zealand, including its longrunning economic underperformance, and
  • second, because she has no work experience in a national economic agency/ministry, dealing with national economic issues (financial crises, monetary policy, exchange rates, immigration, trade, or even very much exposure to fiscal or tax policies), and yet is now the principal economic adviser to our government (itself light on economic expertise or experience).

On the other hand, she has some fairly good academic qualifications and may well be quite capable as the sort of generic public service manager favoured by the current State Services Commissioner.   Whether she can bring to the table more than that –  and New Zealand economic policy, and The Treasury (weakened over the previous 10-15 years) needs more than that –  remains to be seen.

The topic for the GEN Conference was “the role of regional and urban development in lifting living standards”. It is fair to say that my response to the title was along the lines of “there is no such role”, but it was still going to be interesting to see how the Secretary chose to respond to the topic, and perhaps to nest any specific insights on regional/urban issues in an understanding of the much bigger national productivity failings.

Of course, there are distinct limits to what serving senior public servants can and can’t say.  One could argue they mostly shouldn’t be doing public speeches –  their job is primarily to advise ministers, not to spin government PR (or to explicitly challenge it).  But successive Secretarys have chosen to give speeches.

Here is McLiesh running spin for the government

The theme of today’s conference is how well-performing regions and cities can contribute to our wellbeing and raise living standards for all. Those of you familiar with the Government’s Economic Plan will know that the Government has identified ‘strong and revitalised regions’ as one of the key economic shifts it is working towards. And work on government’s urban growth agenda and resource management reforms is well underway.  So this is a significant and substantial topic for New Zealand.

She, if no one else, I guess has to take the government seriously, at least in public, when it says it has a (30 year) Economic Plan.

But in the rest of speech there really wasn’t much substance.  There was the best part of two pages recounting the Living Standards Framework – in text that is fine, but which offers nothing fresh.  At least it ended with a reminder that economic performance matters

The Treasury always has an important role to play in advising government on how to lift economic productivity and performance, and this remains a core part of our LSF thinking. A roomful of economists doesn’t need to be told, but I will say it anyway, that high living standards depend on strong economic performance, and that markets that operate well – and I emphasise, “well” – can, and do, powerfully lift living standards. They enable people to participate in labour markets, earn higher incomes, and apply those incomes towards whatever wellbeing means for them. The story of development is basically a story about investment in the institutions and mechanisms that enable people to flourish in deep and complex markets – that is, to grow.

But really that should be “motherhood and apple pie” stuff to an audience of economists.  And sadly, there hasn’t been much sign of rigorous or systematic advice on lifting productivity and economic performance in recent years.

She moves on to highlight that there are regional differences across New Zealand.  There is quite a nice graphic drawing on OECD data, but she conveniently omits to highlight that (according to the graphic) not one New Zealand region has incomes in the top third of OECD country regions.  Productivity is a huge failing in New Zealand, and that failing just isn’t region-specific.  If anything, the gap between highest and lowest income regions within New Zealand is unusually small by OECD standards.

And thus when the speech says

Regions may contribute more to national economic development if we can tap unrealised economic potential.  A policy approach that emphasises strengthening regional comparative advantage means we may be able to lift national economic performance rather than just shifting economic activity around the country.

it has the feel of someone who is stuck with the Provincial Growth Fund, rather than someone who has thought hard about New Zealand (and what does that counteractual –  “just shifting economic activity around the country” – mean: who has been doing that?)

The next paragraph isn’t any better

There can be a role for government in helping communities to identify strengths and opportunities or strengthening local governance. There can be a role in working across agencies, local authorities, local people, and the private sector to coordinate and facilitate private investment. Or in investing in infrastructure where this directly unlocks economic opportunities. And can we do more to coordinate between social interventions and economic opportunities to ensure these approaches are complementary?

I guess bureaucrats would like to think so, but is there any evidence of governments being able to specifically catalyse regional economic development in a useful and sustainable long-term way, other than by getting the overall national policy settings right, and understanding the national failings?

There are some strange observations

More than a third of New Zealanders live in Auckland, a city with house prices vastly in excess of the marginal cost of supply.

But house prices aren’t “vastly in excess of the marginal cost of supply”, rather national and local regulatory policies have driven the marginal cost of supply –  especially the land component –  well above where it would otherwise be, so that there is no huge gain on offer to people developing new houses.

It was encouraging to see the Secretary allude to Auckland’s longer-term economic underperformance

Between 2000 and 2018 our national population grew by 26 percent, but all of the above-average population growth has been from the Bay of Plenty northwards, with Auckland the fastest growing at 37 percent. Contrast that with population growth of 7 percent in Southland, 5 percent in Gisborne and 4 percent on the West Coast.

This population growth is despite the fact that Auckland’s GDP has grown at only 82 percent of the national average in the 2000 to 2018 period.  In contrast, GDP growth was well above the national average in every region of the South Island, while Bay of Plenty and Northland had above-average growth too.

But there isn’t much sign that she or her department have thought hard about a compelling narrative that explains what has gone on.  Instead we get this rather confused paragraph

Other cities and regions may have plenty of available land.  However, they will need to improve their quality of business and quality of life attributes too if they are to significantly ease pressure in Auckland. And worldwide we see that agglomeration into major cities continues despite congestion and high property prices. Clearly, both employers and employees often see better long-term prospects in these major cities, despite efforts to develop other regions.

In both New Zealand and Australia, we certainly see more people in major cities, but little evidence of the vaunted productivity gains from continued concentration of people in these places.  Natural-resource-based economies tend to be like that, but there is no hint of that as an issue in the Secretary’s story.

And from there the speech heads downhill again

Central government has created more capability through urban growth functions in HUD, and appointing senior regional officials to lead engagement and coordinate government across regions.

Of course lifting wellbeing across the regions is not just up to central government, which is why we see more partnering with local government and regional economic development agencies over recent years to develop action plans.

Lots of busy bureaucrats, lots of meetings for ministers and officials to open and attend, but not much sign of any understanding of quite why the overall economy has performed so poorly over so long (when almost all the tools of economic policy are controlled at the central government level).

Of the final page, I could commend her sense of humour, including this old Tom Scott cartoon (if memory serves from back in the late 80s or early 90s)

scott

But then it is straight back to the self-congratulatory stuff

In closing, I want to acknowledge that being an economist working in public policy is incredibly rewarding, but it can also be challenging. We are a community of professionals that sometimes has to be loud to be heard. When people want the comfort of policy that is simple, certain, and swift, we can find ourselves the sometimes uncomfortable voice of technical rigour, nuance, and realism.

I guess that it might have been music to the ears of some in the audience.  But we don’t –  or shouldn’t –  hire senior public servants to tell people (including ministers) what they want to hear.   Sadly, there has been little consistent sign of The Treasury offering that “uncomfortable voice of technical rigour, nuance, and realism” in recent years, especially on these big-picture economic performance failings.  They seem to have been content to just go along, to maintain access (perhaps) by not addressing the hard issues, and playing distraction with the fluffy stuff while the economic prospects – the living standards prospects –  of New Zealanders, regional or urban, drifted further behind.

It is still early days for McLiesh.   I have heard a few positive things about the new Secretary, including hints of renewed emphasis on rigour. I hope this particular speech isn’t a foretaste of the standard we can expect, but that the Treasury really does begin asking the hard questions, doing robust analysis, not simply going along with conventional political verities (eg regional development).   Perhaps there isn’t a political demand for such advice and analysis –  are there any politicians who really care? – but shouldn’t stop The Treasury being a voice, perhaps at times crying in the wilderness, pointing to how things might be such better here.  As a hint, regional economic development agencies aren’t likely to be any substantive part of the answer.

 

Business investment and SNZ

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Statistics, Uncategorized

The calendar says it is summer, but “summer” seems to have bypassed Wellington.  We’ve been back for 10 days and on not one of them has it been warm enough for a swim.  Right now, my phone says it is warmer in Waiouru than in Wellington.  And so, between driving lessons for my son, I’m still pottering in the national accounts data released late last year, although this will be the last such post for now.

At the end of November, I ran a post here on investment and capital stocks, drawing on the annual national accounts data released a few days earlier.  One of the central charts was this one

What about business investment?   SNZ don’t release a series for this –  but they could, and it is frustrating that they don’t –  so this chart uses a series derived by subtracting from total investment general government and residential investment spending.  It is a proxy, but a pretty common one.

bus investment to marc 19

Business investment as a share of GDP has been edging up, but it is still miles below the average for, say, 1993 to 2008, a period when, for example, population growth averaged quite a lot lower than it is now.  All else equal, more rapid population growth should tend to be associated with higher rates of business investment (more people need more machines, offices, computers, or whatever).

So common is this proxy for business investment that for a long time it was how the OECD was doing things, including in cross-country comparisons where New Zealand mostly did poorly.    Note that none of this approximation would be necessary if Statistics New Zealand routinely published a business investment series.  There is no obvious reason for them not to do so –  no individual institution confidentiality is being protected (as an example of one reason SNZ sometimes advance for non-publication).

My working assumption has long been that government-owned business operations designed to make a profit (notably SOEs) were not being included in “general government”.    I didn’t just make up that assumption; it is a standard delineation advanced by the OECD themselves.  Here is their own definition

Definition:
General government accounts are consolidated central, state and local government accounts, social security funds and non-market non-profit institutions controlled and mainly financed by government units.

In other words, “general government” would include government types of activities, including things –  even semi-commercial things –  mainly funded by government units (whether large losses, or direct subsidies or whatever).   Core government ministries would count.  State schools would count as part of “general government”, but fully private schools would not.  And nor, on the standard interpretation would the investment of New Zealand SOEs (required to aim to generate profits for the Crown) or fully market-oriented trading companies that might happen to have a majority Crown shareholding.    Such trading companies are mostly funded by their customers (and private debt markets) not by the Crown.

But it turns out that this isn’t how SNZ has actually been doing things in New Zealand, at least as regards the “sector of ownership” data I’ve used (and which the OECD has typically used for New Zealand).

I learned this because of a pro-active outreach by an SNZ analyst, to whom I’m very grateful.  This analyst emailed me noting that he had enjoyed my posts on the annual national accounts, but…

In that post you include a chart showing general government investment as a share of GDP. It appears that for your analysis you have utilised the sector of ownership and market group breakdown of our GFKF data, combining both market and non-market activities of entities with central or local government ownership. I wanted to make you aware that this includes state owned enterprises – market orientated units with government ownership. As a result your government investment figures will include, for example, Air New Zealand’s investment in aircraft and electricity units with government ownership.

I suppose it makes sense when one thinks about it (Air NZ and most of the electricity companies are majority government owned, and SNZ confirmed that they do not pro-rate).

As it happens, help was at hand.  The SNZ analyst went on

An alternative source for general government investment data is our institutional sector accounts which include GFKF for each institutional sector.  In recent years we have adopted a new sector classification – Statistical Classification for Institutional Sectors (SCIS) – to give more visibility to the roles of the various sectors in the economy. SCIS sector 3 (General government) GFKF is held under the series SNEA.S3NP5100S300C0 . We are currently expanding the range of sectoral National Accounts that we regularly compile and disseminate on both an annual and quarterly basis.

The following chart compares the sector of ownership basis with the SCIS basis for general government investment as a share of GDP.

poole 1

This then goes on to impact the presentation of business investment as you have calculated it:

poole 2

What are the implications?  “True” general government investment is lower than in the chart I’d shown (the blue line in the first SNZ chart).  But it also marks even more stark how stable the share of GDP devoted to general government investment has been (over 20+ years) despite big swings over that period in the rate of population growth).

On the other hand, business investment as a share of GDP is higher (over all of history) than I have been showing it.  But the extent of the recovery in business investment is even more muted than I had been suggesting.  Despite rapid rates of population growth, business investment in the most recent year was little higher than it was 6-8 years ago, and not that far above the lows seen in the 1991 and 2008/09 recessions.

The helpful SNZ analyst went on to note that SNZ could do things better.

I acknowledge your point that we can improve our presentation of investment data. We are looking at what we can do to improve this, particularly in giving more prominence to the government and business investment dimensions that your post highlights. We do want to support a consistent basis for the monitoring of government and business investment. Our development work to expand our sector based accounts will support this and allow us to improve both our annual and quarterly presentation. Note that the institutional sector accounts have a shorter time series available, but as we work through this we will consider extending the length of the SCIS based GFKF time series.

A quarterly “business investment” series should be treated as a matter of some priority.

The other aspect of my proxy that had bothered me a little over the years was the possibility of an overlap between residential investment and general government investment.  If the government itself was having houses built that should, in principle, show up in both.  I could, therefore, be double-counting my deductions.  I was less worried in years gone by –  the government itself wasn’t having many houses built –  but the current government has talked of large increases in the state house building programme.

SNZ’s analyst suggested I didn’t need to bother.

Apart from needing to make a choice over how to define general government investment as discussed above, the proxy you are using for business investment seems fit for purpose in the interim.

  • There is very little overlap between residential building investment and government investment, so subtracting both from the total is not doubling up on the subtraction much.
  • We represent households ownership of investment properties through separate institutional units to the households themselves. These units are classified to SCIS class 121 (non-corporate business enterprises). There is not a lot of business sector investment in residential property outside of this SCIS class, so subtracting all residential investment in your proxy is fit for purpose.

And yet I was still a little uneasy and went back to him

Thanks too for confirming that there is little overlap between residential building investment and government investment.  That had been my clear impression in the past –  and I know the OECD has done “business investment’ indicators the same way I was doing them –  but had been a little uneasy that with building of state houses ramping up again the overlap might be increasing.  If there still isn’t much overlap is that because (say) the construction only moves into Crown ownership when it is completed?

To which he responded

With regards to your question about the state housing ramp-up and whether that is causing the overlap between government (sector of ownership) investment and residential investment to be increasing… conceptually we should be capturing the state housing under government ownership. This is below our published level, and I’d want to look into the data sources and methodology used before being confident in the quality of the government residential investment data. But based on what I can see, Government residential investment does look to be a small share (typically around 1-2%) of total residential building investment, and there is not a clear trend of change in the share over the last 15 years. The values involved are not large enough to alter your interpretation of business investment in the way that you have derived it.

I was still a bit uneasy –  1-2 per cent didn’t really seem to square with talk of thousands more state houses –  but would have left it for then.  Except that the SNZ analyst came back again

A colleague has reminded me of our building consents release in February (https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/40-year-high-for-home-consents-issued-to-government) where we said:

Home consents issued to central government agencies reached a 40-year high in the year ended December 2018, Stats NZ said today.

Central government agencies, including Housing New Zealand, were granted consent for 1,999 new homes in 2018, which is the highest number since the year ended November 1978 when 2,105 were consented.

“There has been significant increases in new home consents issued to central government agencies in the last few years, with levels approaching those last seen in the 1970s,” construction statistics manager Melissa McKenzie said.

However, private owners (including developers) accounted for 94 percent of the 32,996 new homes consented in the year ended December 2018.

Partnerships between the government and private developers to build new homes may not be reflected in the central government numbers as the results depend on who was listed as the owner on the consent form.

Now, the building consents data then forms the basis for the compilation of our building activity statistics, through a combination of survey sampling and modelling. There is a lag between consent and building activity. So the timing is uncertain, but we should expect the higher consents to flow through to increased building activity. As the last paragraph notes, there are some practical aspects that may impact on the quality of the sector to which the building activity is assigned.

The building activity statistics are a key data source for our residential investment statistics in the National Accounts, but I’d want to look into the National Accounts methodology more to understand whether there are any other aspects impacting the quality of the government residential investment data.

So there seem to be a few problems to be sorted out at the SNZ end, leaving users of the overall investment data –  and particularly anyone looking for a timely business investment proxy –  somewhat at sea.   It probably isn’t a significant issue for making sense of the last decade or two, but if the state is going to be a bigger player in having houses built for it the data for the coming years will be murky indeed.

Unless, that is, Statistics New Zealand treats as a matter of priority the generation and publication of a timely “business investment” series.  They are only agency that can do so, that has access to the breakdown of which government-owned entities are investing, and what proportion of residential building activity is for government.

I guess this is just one among many areas where we see the results of SNZ not really being adequately funded, over many years, to do core business (even as they have funding for extraneous purposes, notably the collation of wellbeing indicators, some sensible, some barmy).   There aren’t many votes in properly funding such core activities, but it doesn’t make them less important.

I really do appreciate the pro-active amd helpful approach of SNZ’s analyst.  I hope his managers are receptive to the need to improve the quality of the investment data SNZ is publishing.

And the bottom line?  So far as we can tell, business investment has remained very weak, and quite inconsistent with what one might have expected in the face of the unexpected surge in the population over the last five years.  Firms, presumably, have not seen many profitable opportunities.

Decomposing the NZ economy…and Australia’s

Michael Reddell Australia, Exchange rate, New Zealand economic performance, Uncategorized

Continuing on with updating my regular charts in light of the national accounts revisions released last month, I got to the one distinguishing (indicatively) between real growth in the tradables and non-tradables sectors of the economy.    Recall that for these purposes the primary sector (agriculture, forestry, fishing, and mining) and the manufacturing sector count as tradable, together with exports of services.  The rest of GDP is classed, loosely, as non-tradables.   As I’ve noted in an earlier post

The idea is to split out those sectors which face international competition from those that don’t.     It is no more than an indicator, and people often like to point out the components of “non-tradables” where, at least in principle, there is international competition.   But as a rough and ready indicator, it serves its purpose.   It was first developed by a visiting IMF mission about 15 years ago to help illustrate how one might think about the impact of a lift in the real exchange rate.

Here is the latest version of the chart, with both series expressed in per capita terms.

T and NT to sept 19

In per capita terms, there has been no growth at all in (this indicator of) the tradables sector since about 2002.   That is 17 years now.  The economy is increasingly concentrated in the non-tradables sector, the bits (generally) not very exposed to international competition.

One can –  people do –  quibble about adding up these components, so here is a chart of the individual components of the tradables sector measure.    It starts from mid-2002, when the tradables aggregate first got to around the current level.

T and NT components NZ to sept 19

None of these sectors has done particularly well,  The best performer –  oft-cited hope of the future –  services has averaged per capita growth of 0.6 per cent annum.  The mining sector is smaller than it was, and agriculture, forestry and fishing (taken together) has managed no per capita growth since 2012.

Perhaps there is no connection at all between this performance and developments in the real exchange rate

OECD ULC RER 2020

but I doubt many detached observers would think so.

It can get a little repetitive making the point, so this time I decided to put together –  for the first time in some years – the comparable charts for Australia.

Here is the aggregate chart for Australia

Aus T and NT to sept 19

Australia’s tradables sector had also gone more or less sideways for a while, but no longer.     Here is how the two countries’ tradables sectors look like on the same chart.

T and NT tradables

The 1990s were pretty good for the tradables sectors of both countries.  And although Australia has again been performing better in the last few years, even that growth is slower than Australia experienced in the 1990s.  As for New Zealand….well, no growth at all.

Here, for completeness, are the non-tradables sectors of the two countries.

NT components

Our non-tradables sector has been growing a bit faster than Australia’s in recent years.  That looks to be mostly because we’ve had a period of faster population growth –  rapid population growth tends to require more resources devoted to non-tradables sectors (notably construction).

nz and aus popn growth

And what about the breakdown of Australia’s tradables sector?

Aus T components

It is very different from the New Zealand picture in almost every respect.    The mining line didn’t surprise me –  it was the story I expected to be telling –  but the others did, including the continued strong growth of services exports.  Back in 2014 and 2015 it looked as though something similar was happening on both sides of the Tasman, but no longer: services exports here (per capita) have simply stagnated again.

New Zealand and Australia have both enjoyed pretty strong terms of trade in the last couple of decades (Australia’s more volatile than ours).  But over the decades, New Zealand average productivity (real GDP per hour worked) has kept dropping further behind Australia’s –  roughly 42 per cent ahead of us now, compared to about 25 per cent in 1970.   And yet OECD data suggest our real exchange rate has risen relative to Australia’s over that half-century.

aus nz RER

It isn’t that much of a rise –  around 15 per cent –  but the longer-term economic fundamentals pointed in the direction of a fall at least that large.      Policymakers here have, unwittingly (although that isn’t much of an excuse after all this time) delivered a climate –  a combination of factors –  that mean it is very difficult for the tradables sector to grow much in New Zealand.     Unless that changes it is difficult to envisage New Zealand not continuing to slip further behind, not just Australia but other advanced countries as well.

If the government were at all serious about responding to the productivity failings, these are sorts of imbalances they’d be instructing the Productivity Commission to investigate and make sense of.