The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has long been averse to references to a “natural rate of unemployment” or its cognate a “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (NAIRU).  It started decades ago, when the unemployment rate was still very high, emerging from the structural reforms and disinflation efforts of the late 80s.  We didn’t want to lay ourselves open to charges, eg from Jim Anderton, that we regarded unemployment as natural or inevitable, or were indifferent to it, let alone that we were in some sense targeting a high rate of unemployment.   Such a criticism would have had little or no analytical foundation –  we and most mainstream economists held that a NAIRU or “natural” rate of unemployment was influenced largely by labour market regulation, welfare provisions, demographics, and other structural aspects (eg rate of turnover in the labour market) that were quite independent of monetary policy.  But the risk was about politics not economics, and every election there were parties looking to change the Reserve Bank Act.  And so we never referrred to NAIRUs if we could avoid it –  which we almost always could –  preferring to focus discussions of excess capacity etc on (equally unobservable) concepts such as the output gap.  In our formal models of the economy, a NAIRU or a long-run natural rate could be found lurking, but it made little difference to anything (inflation forecasts ran off output gap estimates and forecasts, not unemployment gaps).

Other central banks do things a bit differently, perhaps partly because in some cases (notably Australia and the US) there is explicit reference to employment/unemployment in monetary policy mandates those central banks are working to.   In a recent article, the Reserve Bank of Australia observed that

“When updating the economic forecasts each quarter, Bank staff use the latest estimate of the NAIRU as an input into the forecasts for inflation and wage growth”

It may not make their monetary policy decisions consistently any better than those here, but it is a difference in forecasting approach, and in how the RBA is prepared to talk about the contribution of unemployment gaps (as one indicator of excess capacity) to changes in the inflation rate.

I’ve been arguing for some years –  first inside the Bank, and more recently outside –  that our Reserve Bank put too little emphasis (basically none) on unemployment gaps (between the actual unemployment rates and the best estimate of a NAIRU).  It has been the only central bank in the advanced world to start two tightening cycles since 2009, only to have to reverse both, and I had noted that this outcome (the reversals) wasn’t that surprising when for years the unemployment rate had been above any plausible estimate of the NAIRU.   The Bank sought to fob off criticisms like this with a new higher-tech indicator of labour market capacity (LUCI) –  touted by the Deputy Governor in a speech, used in MPSs etc – only for that indicator to end badly and quietly disappear.

But since the change of government  –  a government promising to add an explicit employment dimension to the Bank’s monetary policy objective (now only 12 days to go til the new Governor and we still haven’t seen the new PTA version) –  there has been some pressure for the Bank to be a bit more explicit about how it sees, and thinks about, excess capacity in the labour market, including through a NAIRU lens.  In last month’s Monetary Policy Statement, they told us their point estimate of the NAIRU (4.7 per cent) and in the subsequent press conference, the Governors told us about the confidence bands around those estimates.  All this was referenced to an as-yet-unpublished staff research paper (which still seems an odd inversion – senior management touting the results before the research has had any external scrutiny).

Last week, the research paper was published.  Like all RB research paper it carries a disclaimer that the views are not necessarily those of the Reserve Bank, but given the sensitivity of the issue, and the reliance on the paper at the MPS press conference, it seems safe to assume that the paper contains nothing that current management is unhappy with.  What the new Governor will make of it only time will tell.

There was interesting material on the very first page, where the authors talk about the role of monetary policy.

The focus of monetary policy is to minimise fluctuations in cyclical unemployment, as indicated by the gap between the unemployment rate and the NAIRU, while also maintaining its objective of price stability.

I would very much agree.  In fact, that way of stating the goal of monetary policy isn’t far from the sort of wording I suggested be used in the amended Reserve Bank Act. Active discretionary monetary policy exists for economic stabilisation purposes, subject to a price stability constraint.  But the words are very different from what one has typically seen from the Reserve Bank over the years (including, for example, in their Briefing to the Incoming Minister late last year).

But the focus of the research paper isn’t on policy, but on estimation.  The authors use a couple of different techniques to estimate time-varying NAIRUs.   Since the NAIRU isn’t directly observable, it needs to be backed-out of the other observable data (on, eg, inflation, wages, unemployment, inflation expectations) and there are various ways to do that.   The authors draw a distinction between a “natural rate of unemployment” and the NAIRU: the former, conceptually is slower moving (in response to changes in structural fundamentals –  regulation, demographics etc), while the NAIRU can be more cyclical but tends back over time to the longer-term natural rate.  I’m not myself convinced the distinction is that important –  and may actually be harmful rhetorically –  but here I’m mostly just reporting what the Bank has done.

The first set of estimates of the NAIRU are done using a Phillips curve, in which wage or price inflation is a function of inflation expectations, the gap between the NAIRU and the unemployment rate, and some near-term supply shocks (eg oil price shocks).  Here is their chart showing the three variants the estimate, and the average of those variants.

Perhaps it might trouble you (as it does me) but the authors never mention that their current estimates of the New Zealand NAIRU, using this (pretty common) approach, are that it has been increasing for the last few years.    Frankly, it doesn’t seem very likely that the “true” NAIRU has been increasing –  there hadn’t been an increase in labour market regulation, the welfare system hadn’t been becoming more generous, and demographic factors (a rising share of older workers) have been tending to lower the NAIRU.

As it happens, the authors have some other estimates, this time derived from a small structural model of the economy.

Even on this, rather more variable, measure, the current central estimate of the NAIRU is a bit higher than the authors estimate it was in 2014.    But the rather bigger concern is probably the extent to which over 2008 to 2015, the estimated NAIRU on this model seems to jump around so much with the actual unemployment rate.   Again, the authors offer no thoughts on why this is, or why the pattern looks different than what we observed in the first half of their sample.  Is there a suggestion that the model has trouble explaining inflation with the variables it uses, and thus all the work is being done by implicitly assuming that what can’t otherwise be explained must be down to the (unobserved) NAIRU changing?   Without more supporting analysis I just don’t find it persuasive that the NAIRU suddenly shot up so much in 2008/09.   For what it is worth, however, do note that the actual unemployment rate was well above the NAIRU (beyond those grey confidence bands) for years.

Here is what the picture looks like when both sets of estimates are shown on the same chart.

On one measure, the NAIRU fell during the 08/09 recession, and on the other it rose sharply.  On one measure the NAIRU has been steadily rising for several years, while on the other it has been jerkily falling.  No doubt the Bank would like you to focus on the end-point, when the two sets of estimates are very close, but the chart does have a bit of a “a stopped clock is right twice a day” look to it.   When the historical estimates coincide it seems to be more by chance than anything else, with no sign of any consistent convergence.

I noted the end-point, where the two estimates are roughly the same.  But end-points are a significant problem for estimating these sorts of time-varying variables.  The authors note that in passing but, somewhat surprisingly, they give us no sense of how material those revisions can be, and have been in the past.  I went back to the authors and asked

I presume you’ve done real-time estimates for earlier periods, and then checked how  –  if at all –  the addition of the more recent data alters the estimates of the NAIRU for those earlier periods, but if so do you have any comments on how significant an issue it is?

To which their response was

An assessment of the real-time properties of the NAIRU and the implied unemployment gap was beyond the scope of our paper.

Which seems like quite a glaring omission, if these sorts of model-based estimates of a time-varying NAIRU are expected to play any role in forecasting, or in articulating the policy story (as the Governors did in February).

As it happens, the Reserve Bank of Australia published a piece on estimating NAIRUs etc last year.  As a Bulletin article it is a very accessible treatment of the issue.   The author used the (reduced form) Phillips curve models (of the sort our Reserve Bank used in the first chart above).

The solid black line is the current estimate of Australia’s NAIRU over the whole of history.  But the coloured lines show the “real-time” estimates at various points in the past. In 1997 for example (pink line) they thought the NAIRU was increasing much more –  and thus there was less excess labour market capacity –  than they now think (or, their model now estimates) was the case.  In 2009 there was a stark difference in the other direction.  Using this model, the RBA would have materially underestimated how tight the labour market actually was.

It would be surprising if a comparable New Zealand picture looked much different, but it would be nice if the Reserve Bank authors would show us the results.   These end-point problems don’t mean that the model estimates are useless, but rather that they are much more useful for identifying historical NAIRUs (valuable for all sorts of research) than for getting a good fix on what is going on right now (the immediate policy problem).    That is true of many estimates of output gaps, core inflation (eg the RB sectoral core measure) and so on.

Having said that, at least the Australian estimates suggest that Australia’s NAIRU has been pretty steadily falling for the last 20 years or so, with only small cyclical dislocations.  Quite why the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s Phillips curve models suggest our NAIRU has been rising –  when demographics and welfare changes typically point the other way –  would be worth some further examination, reflection, and commentary (especially if Governors are going to cite these estimates as more or less official).

Comparing the two articles, I noticed that the RBA had used a measure of core inflation –  their favoured measure, the trimmed mean –  for their Phillips curve estimates, while the RBNZ authors had used headline CPI inflation (ex GST).  Given all the noise in the latter series – eg changes in taxes and government charges –  I wondered why the authors didn’t use, say, the sectoral factor model estimate of core inflation (the Reserve Bank’s favoured measure).  It would be interesting to know whether the NAIRU results for the last half decade (when core inflation has been very stable) would be materially different.  It might also be worth thinking about using a different wages variable. The authors use the headline LCI measure, as a proxy for unit labour costs. But we have actual measures of unit labour costs (at least for the measured sector), and the authors could also think about using, say, the LCI analytical adjusted series and then adjusting that for growth in real GDP per hour worked (a series that has itself been revised quite a bit in the last year).  No model estimate is going to be perfect, but there does seem to be some way to go in refining/reporting analysis research in this area.

I have argued previously that the Reserve Bank should be required to report its estimates of the NAIRU, and offer commentary in the MPS on the contribution monetary policy is making to closing any unemployment gaps.   I’d have no problem with the Bank publishing these sorts of model estimates, but I’d have in mind primarily something a bit more like the Federal Reserve projections, in which the members of the (new, forthcoming) statutory Monetary Policy Committee would be required to publish their own estimates of the long-run sustainable rate of unemployment that they expect the actual unemployment rate would converge to (absent new shocks or structural changes).  The individual estimates are combined and reported as a range.  No doubt those individual estimates will have been informed by various different models, but in the end they represent best policymaker judgement, not the unadorned result of a single model (end-point) problems and all.

And finally, the Reserve Bank (aided and abetted by the Board) has always refused to concede it made a mistake with its (eventually reversed) tightening cycle of 2014 –  sold, when they started out, as the beginning of 200 basis points of increases.  The absence of any emphasis on the unemployment rate, or unemployment gaps, was part of what got them into trouble.  In the latest research paper there is a chart comparing the Bank’s current estimates of the NAIRU (see above) with their current estimates of the output gap.

The tightening cycle was being foreshadowed in 2013, it was implemented in 2014, it was maintained well into 2015.  And through that entire period, their unemployment gap estimates were outside the range of the output gap estimates.

We don’t have their real-time estimates of the unemployment gap, but we do have their real-time output gap estimates.  They might now reckon that the output gap in mid 2014 (blue line) was still about -1 per cent but in the June 2014 MPS they thought it was more like +1.5 per cent.

The failure to give anything like adequate weight to the direct indicators of excess capacity from the labour market (ie the unemployment rate and estimates of the NAIRU) looks –  as it felt internally at the time – to have contributed materially to the 2014 policy mistake.

(In this post, I’m not weighing into the specific question of what exactly the level of the NAIRU is right now, and the Bank does emphasise that there are confidence bands around its specific estimates, but I’m aware that is also possible to produce estimates in which the current NAIRU would be 4 per cent or even below.)

The Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Statement (Graeme Wheeler’s second to last) will be out on Thursday.  I’m not in the market economists’ game of trying to tell you what the Bank will do and say (although no one expects they will do anything concrete with the OCR this time).  I’m more interested in questions around what they should do.  In time, what they should do, they usually will do.  But sometimes not until they’ve tried the alternatives.

I wrote about last month’s CPI data a few weeks ago, concluding that there had been a welcome, and expected, increase in core inflation (it is what typically happens if inflation is below target and the OCR is cut fairly substantially) but that

With the unemployment rate still above estimates of the NAIRU, and most indicators of inflation suggesting that core is probably (a) still below target, and (b) not picking up very rapidly, it certainly isn’t time for hawkish talk about near-term OCR increases.

Not everyone agrees of course.  I noticed the BNZ’s economic commentary yesterday which opened with this confident assertion

There is no excuse for the cash rate to be just 1.75% in New Zealand.

I don’t think I’m unduly caricaturing their record to say that, for at least the last decade, the BNZ economics team has never seen an OCR increase they didn’t like, even –  or perhaps especially –  those which had to be quickly reversed.  But mindful that in the story of the boy who cried wolf, the wolf eventually did come, I thought it was worth having a look at the latest wave of data.  Last week, we got the full quarterly set of labour market data (HLFS, QES, and LCI), and the Reserve Bank’s quarterly expectations survey.  To cut a long story short, it doesn’t alter my view.

Take the expectations survey first.   The headline story was one in which the two year ahead expectations of the inflation rate (of a sample of moderately informed observers –  including me) rose quite materially, and now stand at 2.17 per cent (up from around 1.65 per cent in each quarter last year).

This measure of expectations isn’t typically very volatile, but it is typically somewhat responsive to changes in headline CPI inflation.  We’ve just had quite a large change in headline inflation, so some increase in the expectations measure shouldn’t be surprising. It certainly shouldn’t be concerning.  After all, ideally, the Reserve Bank wants people to believe, and act as if they believe, that on average over time CPI inflation will average around 2 per cent –  the mid-point of the target range, and the explicit focus of the current (but about to expire) PTA.

In fact, no one really knows whether this survey measure captures how people actually think and behave in real transactions in the goods, labour and financial markets.   It might be as good a proxy as we have, but (a) we don’t know, and (b) it still might not be good at all.  Glancing at the time series, there is a tendency for falls and rise to be at least partly reversed quite quickly.

But if inflation expectations are really in some sort of 2 to 2.2 per cent range, I’d welcome that.  With repeated increase in tobacco excises –  not some underlying economic process –  there is a reasonable case, in terms of the PTA, that headline inflation should average a little higher than the mid-point, and than “true” core inflation.  Only if inflation expectations were to rise further from here might I start to get a little disquieted.

In trying to make sense of the inflation expectations numbers, one thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the Labour Party’s monetary policy release.   There was a quite a bit of focus last month on their pledge to add some sort of employment objective to the Reserve Bank Act, and concerned expressed in some quarters that that could lead to higher inflation over time.   If it was a factor, you’d presumably have to take the probability of Labour leading a new government (call it a coin toss at present?) and multiply that by the probability that the change in regime (and perhaps the sort of people a new government might appoint) would make a material difference over time.  I have no evidence one way or the other, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a small effect of this sort.   (My own two year ahead expectation in the survey was 1.5 per cent –  around the current rate of inflation in the Bank’s preferred sectoral factor model).

Not many commentators seem to pay much attention to the rest of the expectations survey, even though its strength is partly the range of macro questions that are asked (although I’ve suggested some modifications to the Bank in their review of the survey).

Take GDP for example. There is no sign of respondents expecting real growth to accelerate.  Two years out they expect annual real GDP growth of 2.6 per cent – down on the previous quarter, but not far from the average response over the last couple of years.    But the survey also asks for quarterly GDP predictions for the next couple of quarters, and year-ahead predictions.   That enables one to derive an implied six monthly growth rate for the second half of the coming year.  Here is the gap between the expected growth rates for the first six months and the second six months, going back to just prior to the 2008/09 recession.

As we headed into the recession there was a lot of expectation of a strong rebound.  Even up to around 2012, respondents expected growth to accelerate.   For the last few years they haven’t expected any acceleration, and now the expect it to slow.  To be specific, respondents expect 1.6 per cent total growth in the first half of this year, slowing to 1.2 per cent in the second half of this year.     We don’t know quite why –  perhaps they expect immigration numbers to slow –  but it doesn’t speak of a sense that things are getting away on the Reserve Bank.   Similarly, two years out respondents expected that the unemployment rate would still be 4.9 per cent.

Perhaps these respondents will be proved wrong –  they often are, forecasting is like that –  but at the moment it doesn’t look like an imminent risk of core inflation rising much further, or to levels that might prove problematic for a flexible inflation targeter focused on medium-term inflation outcomes around 2 per cent.

What of the actual labour market data?   We have some problems at present because of the breaks in various HLFS series that occurred when the revised survey questions were put in place last year.  I’m still staggered they could have made these changes without running the two sets of questions in parallel for perhaps a year, to allow robust adjustments to be made for the discontinuities.   HLFS hours worked measures, employment measures, and probably participation rate measures all seem to have been affected to some extent.   We are pretty safe in saying that the number of people employed in New Zealand did not grow by 5.7 per cent last year (as the HLFS suggests).

What of the simplest headline number, the unemployment rate?   There isn’t much doubt that the unemployment rate has been falling over the last few years.  It is what one should expect after a serious recession, and with the stimulus to demand provided by low interest rates and large migration inflows (given that immigration typically adds more to demand in the short-term than it does to supply, thus tending to lower unemployment and use up spare resources in the whole economy).

But what should be somewhat disconcerting is that the unemployment rate has (a) gone largely nowhere in the last year, and (b) is still well above pre-recession levels (unlike the situation in many other advanced countries with their own monetary policies).   In the prevous boom, the unemployment rate got down to around 4.9 per cent as early as the start of 2003.     The picture isn’t much different if one looks at the broader (not seasonally adjusted) SNZ underutilisation measure.

There still appears to be some progress in using up spare capacity in the labour market, but not very much at all.

What about the rate of job growth.  Fortunately, we have two measures: the (currently hard-to-read) HLFS household survey measure of numbers of people employed, and the QES (partial) survey of employers asking how many jobs are filled.   Unsurprisingly, the trend in the two series are usually pretty similar, even if there is a fair bit of quarter to quarter volatility.

Since we know there are problems in the HLFS, and the QES doesn’t look to be doing something odd, perhaps we are safest in assuming that the number of jobs has been growing at an annual rate of around 2.5 to 3 per cent.   That isn’t bad at all. But SNZ also estimates that the working age population has been growing at around 2.7 per cent per annum.  No wonder the unemployment rate is only inching down.

One can do a similar picture for the annual growth rates in the two (HLFS and QES) hours worked series.

It was pretty clear that there was around a 2 per cent lift in HLFS hours worked from last June, just on account of the new survey questions.  It seems safer to assume that total hours worked across the economy might have grown by around 3 per cent in the last year.   That is faster than the growth in the working age population, pointing to some increase in effective utilisation, but not a dramatic one.  For what it is worth, in the latest releases, the two hours measures were both quite weak in the March quarter.

(And remember that nothing in the expectations survey data suggested pressures were likely to intensify from here.)

And what of wages?    There is a variety of measures.  The QES measure is quite volatile –  there are issues of changing composition –  and I don’t put much weight on it.  But for what it is worth, average hourly earnings rose 1.6 per cent in the last year on this measure, around the lowest rate of increase seen for decades.    The Labour Cost Index measures should get more focus (but have some challenges of their own).

Perhaps there is some sign of a possible pick-up in the analytical unadjusted series (which doesn’t try to correct – inadequately –  for productivity changes) but it is a moderately volatile series, and the most recent rate of increase is still below the peak in the last little apparent pick-up a year or two back.

A common response is “ah, but what about the lags?”.  But as we’ve shown, there is little sign of any material tightening occurring in the overall labour market, no sign of expectations that that is about to change, and so little reason to expect much different wage inflation outcomes over the next couple of years from what we’ve seen in the last couple.  At best, there might be some slight pick-up in wage inflation (especially if the increase in inflation expectations is real), but any pick-up is going to be from rates of increase that have, over the last couple of years, been consistent with disconcertingly low rates of core inflation.

So where does it all leave me?  Mostly content that an OCR around 1.75 per cent now is broadly consistent with core inflation not falling further, and perhaps continuing to settle back where it should be –  around 2 per cent.   Of course, there is a huge range of imponderables, domestic and foreign, so no one should be very confident of anything much beyond that.   But it is worth bearing in mind that the unexpectedly strong net migration over the last few years has been a significant source of stimulus to overall domestic demand (including demand for labour).  In the face of typically too-tight monetary policy, it is part of why the unemployment rate finally started gradually coming down again after 2012.

Whatever happens to the cyclical state of the Australian economy, the National government is already putting in place immigration policy changes that should be expected to lead to some reduction in the net inflow of non-citizens, and two of the main opposition parties are campaigning on promises of much sharper reductions than that.   If such policy changes come to pass then, all else equal, the OCR will need to be set lower than otherwise.  It isn’t something that Graeme Wheeler can or should actively factor into this week’s OCR decision, but it may well be something the acting Governor needs to think hard about (if any decisions he makes are in fact lawful) after the election.