Savings and investment

Michael Reddell Savings

Pottering in the IMF WEO database yesterday, I found myself looking at savings and investment trends.  Here is chart for advanced countries as a group, with the data expressed as a percentage of GDP.

adv country savings and investment

In some ways, it is quite a remarkable chart –  remarkable for what isn’t there.  Over the entire period I’ve shown –  2000 to (estimates for) 2018 – the gap between the aggregate savings rate and the aggregate investment rate has only twice exceeded 1 per cent of GDP.    The measures for the world as a whole –  where savings and investment have to equal each other, if correctly measured –  isn’t much less variable.  It is almost as if the advanced world countries just trade with and borrow from or lend to each other.   For what it’s worth, both investment and savings rates –  the former specially –  are now lower than they were in 2007.   That probably isn’t too surprising, given demographic trends and weak productivity growth.

And, of course, the aggregate chart covers a huge amount of variation in individual country experiences.   2007 was the peak of the last boom.   Here is a chart, by country, of the change in the gap between savings and investment rates from 2007 to 2018.

chg in s and i

Broadly speaking, current account deficits and surpluses have narrowed in advanced countries (eg Singapore’s surplus has shrunk a lot, and Latvia’s deficits have shrunk).  But, as the first chart shows, almost all that adjustment looks to have occurred within the advanced country grouping.  As it happens, New Zealand is the median country on this chart.

Of course, it isn’t so different in the rest of the world taken together –  the IMF’s class of emerging markets and developing countries.  Here is the aggregate savings and investment chart for that large group of countries.

s and i emerging

There was a big increase in both savings and investment shares in the 2000s, and if anything the aggregate investment share –  already far higher than in the advanced world –  still appears to have been trending upwards more recently.    (The picture isn’t much different if one simply looks at Asia –  often the focus of discussions about big imbalances.)

In the emerging/deveoping country group, there has been a bit more variability in the gap between savings and investment rates –  or at least there was in the peak boom years prior to 2008 –  but both at the start of the period and at the end, just like advanced countries as a group, emerging and developing countries as a group are basically financing all their own investment.  Again, there is huge variability in individual countries’ experiences –  China comes to mind, but so too do places like Argentina and Turkey.  But in aggregate –  and despite all the talk –  the advanced world finances itself and the emerging/developing world does the same.

I’m sure there are learned articles around on this issue (which I don’t have time today to try to track down) but it isn’t at all what (very) simple theory would have predicted.  There isn’t any simple obvious reason why savings and investment patterns should have tracked so closely within these aggregate groupings of countries, and yet not between individual countries.  It wasn’t, for example, how things were between the advanced and emerging economies in the late 19th century.  But it has been for the last couple of decades, and IMF projections don’t suggest they expect any change in the next five years.

I might try to dig out some articles addressing the issue, give it some more thought, and perhaps write another post down the track trying to better understand this pattern.

Falls in business confidence: 2000 and 2018

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance

There have been numerous articles in recent days about the fall in business confidence, as reflected in various survey measures.  What, if anything, is it telling us?  Why is it happening?  What might turn the situation around, and so on?  Both sides of politics have a strong interest in their own particular interpretation.   On the one hand, general business confidence has tended to be weaker relative to actual outcomes under Labour than under National-led governments (if so, the falls might tell us nothing that we don’t already know –  that we have a Labour-led government).  And, on the other hand, (so the argument goes) the government is doing and saying quite a few things that many in the business community genuinely regard as inimical to growth, and thus it should be no surprise that sentiment is weaker now, and with it future growth prospects –  for those who particularly want to gild the lily, especially relative to the stellar performance allegedly achieved in the later years of the previous government.   As regular readers know, I treat that latter bit as laughable: productivity growth being almost non-existent, the relative size of the tradables sector having shrunk, business investment having been weak, and so on.  Oh, and the housing situation got even worse.

(The IMF Board –  whose assessment of New Zealand just dropped into my inbox – must be firmly of the “business just don’t like Labour” school, but then their assessment of the past, present, and future seems laughably detached from reality.  Believe that assessment, and you’ll believe that – at least in per capita terms –  things get even better from here, building on the “economic expansion with notable momentum” of the last half-dozen years.)

I’m not going to try to put myself in the minds of those answering these surveys but there seem plenty of reason to be rather pessimistic on the outlook from here.   Some –  perhaps many –  are the responsibility of our government, but others are not.     The global environment looks shakier than it has at least since the height of the euro crisis in 2012, with significant fragilities evident all over the place: in the euro-area itself, the ever-increasing uncertainty around Brexit, pressures in various large emerging market economies, rising US-driven trade tensions, the legacy of a debt-fuelled boom in China, and so on.   And against that backdrop, few countries have much fiscal or monetary space to respond vigorously when the next downturn comes.   Recognition of that is beginning to seep into general consciousness.

And it isn’t as if things have been going particularly well over the last couple of years.  This chart shows GDP per capita growth, with the horizontal bars marking successive 18 months periods.

gdp pc to mar 18

Perhaps the most recent weakness will end up getting revised away, but at the moment there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason to expect that.   There has been little or no productivity growth, and very weak per capita income growth.  It can take time for awareness of that sort of thing to take hold, especially in an election campaign session when National (party garnering the most business votes) was trying to tell a very upbeat story.

Perhaps not unrelatedly, the biggest proximate boost to growth in recent years has been house-building activity (related to earthquakes and the unexpected surge in the population).

res i to june 18

How plausible is it to expect any sort of repeat of the last few years?  Not very, I’d have said, both because the population pressure is beginning to ease, existing house price inflation seems to be stabilising (for now anyway) and the government has, despite fine words buried deep in the manifesto, done nothing to fix up the urban land market.  If anything, housebuilding activity is likely to fall back somewhat in the next few years, and housebuilding typically plays a key proximate role in explaining short-term economic fluctuations.

Perhaps business investment could take its place.  But consider:

  • investment spending, other than on housing, is now 2 percentage points of GDP lower than it was at the previous peak (mid 2000s),
  • the exchange rate, while have weakened a bit, is still in the range it has fluctuated within for the last 7 or 8 years,
  • plenty of policy initiatives don’t look terribly conducive to encouraging more business investment:
    • sustained and large increases in minimum wages (even if there is some spending to replace labour)
    • concerns, fair or not, about other labour relations law changes,
    • scrapping new oil and gas exploration licences,
    • the uncertainty engendered by the shocking policy process used to make that decision, and  (not mentioned in any other article I’ve seen)
    • the government’s net-zero carbon emissions target, which their own consultative document (and their own independent consultants’ numbers) suggest will act as a material drag on the economy for several decades to come, if pursued with the sort of zeal key ministers at times suggest. (Of course, the previous government’s target would also have acted as a drag, but (a) many thought they weren’t entirely serious about it, and (b) the marginal costs of pushing further into this territory can be expected to increase quite substantially).
    • the considerable uncertainties engendered by these targets (since few policy parameters, including expected carbon prices are remotely clear).
  • if one wanted to focus on individuals, one might also feel uneasy that none of the top 4 ministers in the government command any confidence that they instinctively understand –  or care greatly –  what makes for a high-performing economy.   Several of that top tier simply seem out of their depth, and few of the rest command much respect either.  (I was no fan of the previous government but –  rightly or not –  business took a different view of Steven Joyce, Bill English, and John Key.)

I have also been interested in the comparisons with the “winter of discontent” that followed the election of the Labour-Alliance in late 1999.  Some of that experience is quite nicely covered in this piece although I think the author is rather too optimistic about the current situation.  As he notes, the level and tone of commentary on this new government is nothing like as vociferous as what greeted the incoming 1999 government (complete with plans to raise taxes, repeal and reform the Employment Contracts Act, repealing ACC privatisation, and installing Jim Anderton –  opponent of most of the 80s reforms –  as deputy Prime Minister).  It hadn’t been that long since the polarising reform phase had ended.  And while Michael Cullen was much more able than Grant Robertson, his acerbic tone –  and all too obvious revelling in his own intelligence –  only enhanced the tensions.

It was a tough period.  Here is the chart of quarterly GDP growth (not per capita –  annual population growth then was around 0.6 per cent).

real gdp 00

GDP growth averaged zero for a year –  before rebounding quite strongly.   Some of that slowdown –  which I don’t think we ever fully understood at the Reserve Bank –  may have been a direct response to the change of government and proposed new policies.   But it was far from being the only factor.  It was still relatively early days in the recovery after the 1998 recession –  so there was still lots of unutilised capacity –  but there had been a big surge in investment during 1999 (even though a change of government was widely expected).  At the time, two factors that seemed to play a part were the Y2K effect –  every firm and its dog was devoting lots of resources to ensuring systems were robust –  and building associated with the defence of the America’s Cup in Auckland in early 2000.  Both were time-limited, and the relevant dates were very close to each other.    Whatever the reason –  and, as I say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a particularly compelling analysis of that specific period –  there was a (quite unexpected) slowdown in activity, and in particular in investment spending.   Perhaps  –  well, quite probably –  higher interest rates played a role –  we raised the OCR by 200 basis points in six months from November 1999, none of it because of the change of government.  It was our first go at actually adjusting official interest rates –  the OCR was only introduced in early 1999 –  and with hindsight, they do seem like rather aggressive moves.

One factor that did play quite a large role then was the exchange rate, which fell very sharply in 1999 and 2000.    Some vocal critics wanted to pin the blame on the change of government (expected and actual) –  I recall one particularly strident Reserve Bank Board member bending my ear about the point at the time.  But that story was simply wrong.  Here is a chart of the BIS measures of the exchange rate for New Zealand, Australia, and the US.

bis exch rates 00

The New Zealand and Australian exchange rates were basically tracking each other, with no obvious role for a “new left-wing government” effect.   What was going on?  Well, two things.  First, and probably most importantly, although New Zealand was raising interest rates, so was the US, and indeed until now this was the only period since deregulation when our interest rates had matched those of the US.  And, secondly, this was the era of “new economy” vs “old economy” –  the NASDAQ peak in the dotcom boom peaked in March 2000, and capital was flowing towards these perceived new opportunities and away from “old economies” like Australia and New Zealand.   That period proved quite shortlived, and by the start of 2001 the Fed was cutting interest rates and the US itself had entered a mild recession (not mirrored in either New Zealand or Australia).

Which brings me back to the observation earlier that –  politics aside, and the pressure from one news cycle to the next –  the current situation should be more concerning.  There was a pause in growth then, of the sort we haven’t seen yet this time, but:

  • the previous episode came early in a recovery phase not late,
  • it came at a time when population pressures were quite weak, and there was a reasonable chance of an acceleration (as happened a year or two later),
  • the global environment looks less promising (despite the dotcom bust in the US, much of Asia was recovering strongly after the crisis/recession of 1998),
  • productivity growth over the previous few years had been reasonably good in th late 1990s,
  • there were some specific, time-limited, factors that can be pointed to, contributing to the pause back then,
  • whatever you think of the policies Labour brought in the 1999/2000, in terms of creating additional uncertainty and an additional drag of prospective growth well into the future, they were as nothing as compared to the implication of a net-zero emissions target,

and perhaps the biggest difference of them all is the real exchange rate.  The current level is about 30 per cent higher than it was in 2000, and it had fallen a long way to get to those 2000 levels (and not on heightened risk concerns etc).  Those falls created a credible prospect of new business investment in the tradables sectors.  There is nothing comparable now, and we’ve probably exhausted the limits of domestic demand (especially residential investment) as a support for headline GDP growth.

One could add to the mix that if anything goes wrong, sourced here or abroad, there isn’t much capacity for macrostablisation policy to respond.  Yes, the OCR could be cut –  and probably already should have been, given the persistent undershoot of the target (another difference to 2000) –  but the Bank is likely to be increasingly uneasy the further it cuts from here, and on its own estimates can’t cut more than about 250 basis points in total.   And whatever the merits (or otherwise) of the 20 per cent debt target, it will come under new pressure in any downturn, and the (market and business) pressures to stick to it will only intensify in that climate –  “show us your mettle, minister” will be the watchword.

 

Still plumbing new depths

Michael Reddell Reserve Bank Act reforms, Reserve Bank Board

I know they shouldn’t, but the Reserve Bank still seems to have endless capacity to surprise, and not in a good way.  Another example turned up yesterday, when someone sent me a link to a Bloomberg story about a speech the chair of the board of the Reserve Bank, Neil Quigley, is giving today.

This is how the Waikato Institute of Directors bills the speech

Governance and decision-making at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand

The government has announced a review of the Reserve Bank Act focussing on governance and decision-making issues.  Key decisions in Phase 1 of the review have been announced, and Phase 2 is about to begin.  The key issues in the review relate to the move from the current “single decision-maker” model to a committee structure, and to changes in the role of the board of directors resulting from this.  The presentation will outline the unique role of the Reserve Bank Board under the current Act, the challenges of operating in this framework, and the ways in which the board’s role and powers are likely to change following the review of the Act.

Significant reforms are coming, which we haven’t seen the text of yet, and nor do we know anything about how those holding statutory positions expect to operate in the new world.

If you stump up $65 you could attend and find out more, unless that is you were part of the media.

Quigley declined a request for media to attend, an institute spokeswoman said.

There is also no sign that the Bank or the Board plans to release the text of Quigley’s speech.   And this time I largely agree with comments quoted in the article from Shamubeel Eaqub.

“There’s this great promise from Adrian Orr that things will change, and certainly he has been more engaged and more open, but in terms of the culture of the board and the organization it seems like very slow progress,” said Shamubeel Eaqub… “When it’s an issue as important as this, we would expect at least a speech to be available to the media.”

But he is probably going a bit easy on the Governor. The Governor can’t actually tell the Board chair what to do, but there can be little doubt that this particular speaking engagement and the (non)communications strategy around it will have been agreed jointly by the Governor and the Board chair.   After all, it is par for the course; pretty standard practice in all but one respect.

That one respect is that it is highly unusual for the chair of the Reserve Bank Board to be giving a speech in his capacity as chair at all.  Perhaps it has happened before, but I’m not aware of such occasions. In fact, it was concern that chairs would want to speak publicly that led to the misguided decision in 1989 to legislate to make the Governor chair of the Board, even though the Board’s primary role was to hold the Governor to account.  It took almost 15 years to fix that mistake.

The Board chair generally doesn’t speak at all –  and successive ones have repeatedly refused media comment on all sorts of issues – except through the bland Governor-covering Board Annual Reports.  In the 15 years these reports have been published, there has never been a single critical word about the Bank or the Governor: either they walk on water and simply never ever make mistakes, or the Board itself is essentially useless.  As I’ve argued previously, my interpretation is the latter one.  This same Board couldn’t bring itself even to criticise Graeme Wheeler for his wildly inappropriate attempts to silence the BNZ’s chief economist, and Quigley’s predecessor was positively egging Wheeler on in his public denunciation of a person who drew attention to what was shown to be a leak of an OCR announcement.

In this case, it appears that Quigely would not even front up himself and explain why he won’t (a) allow media to attend and report his speech, and (b) release his text or any relevant slides.  Instead, the acting head of communications at the Reserve Bank was wheeled out to defend the Board chair.  He didn’t do a particularly compelling job.

“Members of the Institute of Directors and their paying guests will not be privy to information from Professor Quigley that is not already in the public sphere,” said Angus Barclay, acting head of communications at the RBNZ. The bank gives presentations to private audiences because “the presence of news media at an event alters the nature of the discussion” and may dissuade guests from participating “in a two-way experience,” he said, speaking on Quigley’s behalf.

It seems highly unlikely that Quigley will say nothing that is not already public.  He is billed as talking about

the challenges of operating in this framework, and the ways in which the board’s role and powers are likely to change following the review of the Act.

Well, we’ve never heard anything from the Board or the chair about the challenges in the existing framework (as it affects the Board and its role), there is very little in the material released so far on how the Board expects things might change in future, and anything that is in the public domain isn’t from the horse’s mouth –  the people actually paid to do the monitoring, accountability, and reporting role.

And Barclay (for Quigley) undermines his own argument in the second part of that extract.  If selected members of a favoured audience are able to ask questions of a public official, and get answers from them, about pending reforms it seems almost certain that they will receive angles or emphases that aren’t available to the rest of us.   Even the argument that the presence of the media changes the character of the forum seems flawed.  The event could, for example, have been run on Chatham House rules grounds –  common enough in many fora, dealing with many, often sensitive, issues –  allowing the reporting of Quigley’s comments, and the reporting of questions from the floor, but not the identification of the questioner. (It was, for example, how the consultation session I attended at Treasury a few months ago on Reserve Bank reform issues operated –  one at which, as I’ve reported before, none of the attendees had any time for the Bank’s Board). It is hard to see how the nature of the function would be changed –  certainly not for the worse –  by adopting that sort of model.  Perhaps as importantly, despite the talk of a “two-way experience”, this isn’t billed as some sort of consultative session, but as an address from a public official holding a statutory office.     But even if it was such a “consultation”, (a) this is a powerful public agency we are dealing with, and (b) it is still no excuse for not releasing the text (it isn’t as if this is material the speaker has covered in similar addresses 100 times previously).

Barclay/Quigley then proceed to dig an even deeper hole for themselves.

Asked how banning media from tomorrow’s event squares with the bank’s stated communication aims, Barclay said: “Professor Quigley will communicate directly with a group of people who will be better informed after the event than they were at the start. That fits very well with our strategy to communicate more widely.”

The word ‘smart aleck” springs to mind.    Even more people would be better informed if Neil Quigley’s text was released, and if media representatives could attend and report his speech.   As it is, I’ve now lodged an Official Information Act request for the text, any slides, and in event that he is speaking without text or slides a summary of his presentation.  Since the material is being provided to some members of the public, there can be no credible grounds for withholding it from others.

One announced change coming in the new legislation is that in future the Board chair will be appointed directly by the Minister, to help make clearer that the Board works for the Minister and the public, not for the Governor, the Bank, or a quiet life for themselves.  Changing the chair would be a good and salutary step for the Minister of Finance to take, if that is he is at all serious about a more open and accountable central bank.  Better still would be to rethink, and dump the Board from its current role completely.

I guess shouldn’t really be surprised at this attitude from the Reserve Bank Board.  This is an entity that doesn’t even do the basics of its job tolerably well.  There is no serious scrutiny of the Governor –  certainly none that ever sees the light of day – there was complicitly in what was almost certainly an unlawful appointment of an “acting Governor” last year, there are no conflict of interest provisions in the Board’s code of conduct,  and –  as I’ve documented previously –  the Board has been in flagrant breach of the requirements of the Public Records Act.  Oh, and they aid and abet some pretty egregious financial sector misconduct (of which this particular case is only one example) –  appointing (and being able to remove at will) half the trustees of the Bank’s troubled superannuation scheme, and being required to approve any rule changes.  The Board members are probably all individually decent people (and I used to have a good relationship with Quigley) but they have taken far too many wrong turnings, and no longer serve a useful public purpose (protecting and promoting the Governor isn’t such a purpose).

Finally, as a reminder of how better, more open, central banks do things, here is a screenshot from the Reserve Bank of Australia’s 2018 speeches page.

rba speeches

A range of speakers, and where possible provision not just of the text but of a webcast, so that audiences can see where the speaker may have departed from the text, but can also see and hear questions and answers –  new material which, in New Zealand terms, is official information.   It just seems to be a standard condition of having an RBA speaker.  There is no reason why a similar approach could not be adopted here, both for the Bank itself (eg the potentially market sensitive post-MPS addresses, to which only favoured invitees among bank customers have access) and by the Board.    When senior officials speak, the default standard expectations should be public access, and open reporting.

If they are vaguely serious about being a government known for “open government” –  and there is little real sign of it so far – it must about time the Minister of Finance and the Minister responsible for open government to have a word with the Governor and the Board chair about what it means.  One can debate the merits of (say) pro-active release of Cabinet papers (something I generally favour) but there should be no debate about speeches by officials being made routinely available.  The Bank, and the Board, are falling well short of any sort of open government standard.  Perhaps some journalist could ask one or other Minister about this case, if only to get them on record washing their hands of any responsibility.

 

 

Inflation bonds and breakevens

Michael Reddell inflation, Interest rates

I spent a large chunk of Friday interviewing funds managers.  In the course of our conversations, talk turned to the yields on government inflation-indexed bonds (a sensible asset for funds offering indexed pensions) relative to the yields on conventional government bonds.  There are a lot more inflation-indexed government bonds on issue now than there used to be, and I was encouraged to learn that, as a result, bid-ask spreads are also tighter.

The gap between nominal and indexed bond yields is what is known as the “breakeven” inflation rate –  the actual inflation rate that, over the life of the respective bonds, would generate the same return whether one was holding indexed or nominal bonds.   It can be seen as a proxy for market inflation expectations.

As regular readers know, one of my favourite charts is this one, showing the gap between those yields in New Zealand for the last few years.

IIB breakevens June 18

10 years from now is June 2028, so something nearer the average of the two series is at present a reasonable fix on a 10 year inflation breakeven for New Zealand.  But whichever series you use, the numbers have been consistently well below 2 per cent for several years now.  By contrast, at the start of the chart, it looks as though 10 year inflation breakevens were around 2 per cent (10 years ahead then was 2024, so the blue line was the more relevant comparator).

You might expect that a chart like this one would bother the Reserve Bank (paid to keep inflation around 2 per cent).  Instead, they simply ignore it.   Their statements repeatedly claim that inflation expectations are securely anchored at 2 per cent, relying on surveys of a handful of economists.  They simply ignore the indications from market prices.

It isn’t as if what we see in New Zealand is normal.   Here is the chart of US 10 year breakevens for the same period.

US breakevens jun 18

At something a little above 2 per cent, US breakevens are around the US inflation target (expressed in terms of the private consumption deflator, rather than the CPI-  which the bonds are indexed to).

What about other countries?  Courtesy of Fisher Funds, here are a couple of charts.  First the 10 year breakevens for the last year or so.

global breakevens

“DE” here is Germany.  As Fisher noted to us, it seemed a little anomalous that New Zealand 10 year breakevens are lower than those in Germany (although the German economy is one of the stronger in Europe, and they have no domestic monetary policy).

And here are the 20 year breakevens

20 year breakevens

BEI 2035 and BEI 2040 are New Zealand.   I’ve always tended to discount the UK numbers, because of the different tax treatment of indexed bonds there, but both the US and Australian breakevens look a lot closer to the respective inflation targets (2.5 per cent in the case of Australia) than is the case here.

One of the fund managers we talked to on Friday made a throwaway comment about people simply looking at the last headline CPI number.    Maybe, but annual headline CPI inflation in New Zealand for the last six years has averaged 1.0 per cent.   The Reserve Bank’s favoured core measure has averaged 1.4 per cent over the same period.  And the Reserve Bank has never reached the limits of conventional monetary policy (the OCR hasn’t gone lower than 1.75 per cent) – inflation could have been higher had they chosen differently.  It might not be irrational for investors to treat the track record of the last several years as a reasonable pointer to the period ahead.  After all, the last six years has been a period with a strong terms of trade, and sustained (albeit moderate) growth.    Even if, as all the fund managers we talked to suggested, we are now in a “late cycle” phase when inflation might be expected to pick up, “late cycle” phases tend to come just before the end of the cycle.  There will be downturns in the next 10 or 20 years.

What of other possible explanations for these now persistently narrow New Zealand inflation breakevens?  In years gone by there was almost no liquidity in the indexed-bond market (for a long time there was but a single indexed bond).  All else equal, that might mean investors demanding a higher yield to hold the indexed bond (relative to a conventional bond), narrowing the observed breakevens relative to “true” market expectations of future inflation.

But if it was true once, it must be a less important story now.  There are four indexed bonds on issue, each with principal of several billion dollars.  As I noted earlier, if bid-ask spreads are still wider than those (a) on nominal bonds, and (b) on indexed bonds in say the US, they are tighter than they used to be.  It isn’t an attractive instrument for high frequency trading, but these are multi-month, even multi-year, trends we are looking at.

The other possible story I heard a while ago was the suggestion that the government had glutted the market by issuing too many indexed bonds.    It had an air of plausibility about it.  It isn’t as if there are many natural holders of these instruments –  there are no indexed bond mutual funds in New Zealand, they don’t count as a separate asset class in many mandates, and so on.  Then again, in a low yield (and yield hungry) global environment, these instruments offer a pretty juicy yield (the government has a AAA or AA+ credit rating, and its 2040 indexed bonds are offering just over 2 per cent real –  there isn’t much around to match that combination).  Here is the 10 year indexed bond yield chart (again from Fishers –  ignore the UK again).

real 10 year yields

Over the last few years, this is the proportion of New Zealand government bond sales that have been in the form of indexed bonds.

indexed bond share

About 24 per cent of New Zealand government bonds on issue are currently inflation-indexed.

I’m not sure how that compares generally with other countries, but in the UK –  long a keen issuer of inflation indexed government bonds – the share is also about a quarter.  The British also appear to be winding back their issuance –  to 21 per cent of new sales this year.  According to a  FT story from earlier this year

Robert Stheeman, chief executive of the UK’s Debt Management Office, said that “no other country regularly issues a quarter of its debt in inflation-linked bonds”, which “gives us pause for thought”. In contrast Italy — the continent’s largest issuer of inflation-linked bonds — raises just 13 per cent of its debt in this way, according to figures from the DMO.

It may well have been prudent then for our own government to have wound back its issuance plans for index-linked bonds.  But that news has now been out since the Budget last month, and there is still no sign that 10 year breakevens are more than about 1.5 per  cent –  still well short of the 2 per cent inflation target, that was recently reaffirmed by the new government.

There is an OCR review announcement later this week.  We don’t get much analysis in a one page press release, but as the Governor mulls his decision, and his communications, and looks towards the next full Monetary Policy Statement, it might be worth him inviting his staff to (a) produce, and (b) publish any analysis they have, as to why we should not take these indications from market prices as a sign that inflation expectations are not really anywhere close to the 2 per cent the Bank regularly claims.  Perhaps there is a good compelling alternative story. If so, it would be nice of them to tell us.  But given the actual track record of inflation, it would be a bit surprising if breakevens persistently below 2 per cent were not telling us something about market expectations (right or wrong) of inflation.

Putting a price on the hair shirt

Michael Reddell Emissions reduction, Emissions targets

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the government’s consultative document on its proposal to target net-zero emissions by 2050, and particularly the commissioned modelling NZIER had undertaken on the likely consequences of each of several options for future real GDP.    As the consultative document itself put it

The analysis by NZIER suggests that GDP will continue to grow but will be in the range of 10 per cent to 22 per cent less in 2050, compared with taking no further action on climate change.

Those are breathtakingly large numbers (future GDP gains) for a government to simply propose walking away from.  As one comparison, high end estimates of the GDP gains from preferential trade agreements (such as CPTPP or the proposed new one with the EU) tend to be about 1 per cent each.

A couple of days ago NZIER’s final report itself was released, making it a bit easier to make sense of the reported modelling results.    There is a great deal of detail (the report is 90 pages), a considerable number of (necessary and inevitable) caveats, as well as quite a bit of editorial advocacy for their client’s wishes.

The centrepiece remains this table which I ran in the earlier post.

emissions NZIER

From reading the final report, and a few exchanges with NZIER, they would encourage people to focus on the final three columns.   In those scenarios, relative to the baseline (the first column, which is built from The Treasury’s longer-term economic projections/assumptions), the net-zero target sees productivity growth fall quite substantially, such that average annual GDP growth falls by 0.3 percentage points.  Over 33 years, that cumulates to a sacrifice of about 10 per cent of GDP  (real GDP –  per capita, since the population assumptions don’t change – in 2050 is about 10 per cent lower than it otherwise would be).     These are serious numbers: 10 per cent of today’s GDP is about $28 billion.  And the loss isn’t just for one year.  Depending on various possible assumptions, the cumulative loss the next generation would experience could easily be a couple of hundred billion dollars (in today’s dollars).

(Perhaps encouraged by their client) NZIER try to play down these numbers a bit by encouraging people to focus only on the difference between the third to last and last columns.  They argue that the 50 per cent net reduction is already government policy, and so the relevant metric is the marginal additional losses from moving to net zero.   But, of course, actual policies to deliver the previous government’s own vapourware objective (the 50 per cent reduction by 2050) aren’t in place, and that target itself is not binding in any real sense.

Some readers might think that a 10 per cent loss of future GDP isn’t too bad –  big as it is. it certainly isn’t as large as the 22 per cent loss referred to in that quote above.

But the 10 per cent of GDP annual cost by 2050 (the final scenario in the final column of the table) relies on some really rather optimistic assumptions  (and assumptions they all are, as is clearly identified in the NZIER report).

First, they assume quite a lot of technological innovation in some sectors that might be most exposed to a higher carbon price.  For example, it is assumed that by 2030 methane vaccine is readily available, commercially viable, and widely used, which would reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent.  It is also assumed that global demand for dairy and sheep/beef products falls quite substantially (even though, all else equal, this would make New Zealand poorer, it would make farmers more ready to shift away from emitting-animals).  It is also assumed that much faster improvements in energy efficiency are achieved and that (without subsidies or regulation) electric vehicles make up 95 per cent all light vehicles on the road in 2050 and 50 per cent of all heavy vehicles.

No doubt a much higher carbon price (globally) would encourage additional R&D in affected sectors, and so some of these innovations may well occur.  But in my earlier post, I described these assumptions as assistance from the “magic fairy”, because while it is probably fine to assume that big changes in relative prices, imposed by governments, will foster innovation to economise on what is being taxed more heavily, it is unreasonable to assume –  as is done here –  no offset in the rest of the economy.   On these assumptions (presumably developed jointly by MfE and NZIER) a government-driven huge change in the structure of the economy (driven away from the market baseline) is a net positive source of new economic innovation.  It doesn’t seem very likely.  It isn’t at all obvious what precedents could be cited in support of such an assumption.  On that basis, for example, putting on import licensing and exchange controls after 1938 might have been hugely positive for business innovation in New Zealand.   Enthusiasts at the time probably hoped so, but the typical reading of the evidence would suggest not.

In the consultation document these “assume innovation” scenarios were all described solely as technological innovations (as described above –  and the text is reproduced in my earlier posts).  But what becomes clear, and quite explicit, in the full NZIER report is that much of what is going on in these “assume innovation” scenarios is in fact different assumptions about increased sequestration of emissions by a permanent increase in land used for forestry.  The model can’t cope with generating increased afforestation endogenously, and so assumptions have simply had to be imposed.

In the net-zero scenario (far right column), so much additional sequestration is assumed that the authors state that it would require a 140 per cent increase in the land area devoted to forestry (a really big increase, and the baseline presumably includes not just plantation forest but forests in, eg, national parks).  The big step up in the assumed forestation between the 75% and net-zero columns is the reason why the GDP growth rates are the same in the two scenarios.

It does seem reasonable to suppose that a much higher carbon price (and in the NZIER modelling, the carbon prices goes very high on some scenarios) there will be changes in land use in favour of forestry.  But here again, the magic fairy is at work.

We assume that additional forestry planting does not materially reduce the amount of productive land available for other uses. This could be seen as assuming that additional planting occurs on scrub land, rather than substituting for sheep and beef or dairy land.
If afforestation occurs on productive land, the economic costs of imposing emissions targets will increase, as the productive capacity of the agricultural and horticultural industries will decrease, which will also have negative flow-on effects for downstream primary processing industries.

In other words, NZIER is assuming that a big change in relative prices (the carbon price) makes economic a whole lot of resource that has not hitherto been used for anything much.  I’m sure there is such land – a considerable portion probably Maori land, with all the issues around title/collateral that make it difficult to use  – but is it reasonable to assume that all, or even most, of the land newly devoted to forests will be land that wasn’t previously being used for anything?  Why, for example, wouldn’t one assume that land that has been converted from forestry to dairying in recent decades (eg much between Taupo and Tokoroa, and Taupo and Rotorua) be among the first that would be converted back to forestry?  If so, as NZIER acknowledges, there will be additional real economic losses.

As in the Productivity Commission’s draft report, this NZIER modelling makes no allowance for the possibility of a lower population growth rate (by lowering our annual immigration approvals targets).  It is quite an extraordinary omission, given the cross-country data I’ve shown previously illustrating (the rather obvious point) that more people tends to mean more emissions.  If they are your own people, there isn’t much governments can do about it, but in New Zealand a large (and increasing) part of trend population increase is about discretionary immigration policy.

One would need to have NZIER rerun their models to get really good estimates (and since they ran and published sensitivities on a variety of other alternative assumptions, there is no good reason not to have done so as regards population growth –  although no doubt to have done so would have been unwelcome at MfE and in the Minister’s office).  But since the increased afforestation assumptions are a bit like a free lunch (raise the carbon price, and a whole lot of previously unused land is brought into play, sequestering carbon emissions), one can get a sense of what a difference a similar free lunch assumption might make.  Lowering the projected population growth by 0.7 per cent per annum (the difference lowering residence approvals from 45000 to 15000 per annum would make) would reduce expected future emissions enormously, without needing the see the carbon price driven sky-high.  Perhaps then a net-zero target –  on this definition – might really be feasible with a 10 per cent sacrifice of annual GDP per capita, or perhaps even something a bit smaller.

However, even then there are areas where the NZIER numbers are underdone if the government is really serious about a true net-zero goal.  I checked the Labour Party’s and Green Party’s climate change policies, and the net-zero goal is there in a pretty stark and unqualified way.  There is no suggestion that they are only interested in net-zero emissions on some UN definition –  and fair enough, for them this is a moral cause, not a bureaucratic one.

But what isn’t always appreciated among the wider public is that emissions associated with international aviation, real and substantial as they are, are not included in the UNFCCC (UN framework convention on climate change) definitions (neither is international shipping).   This wasn’t because of any high science.

The international aviation and shipping sectors are not included in the recent Paris Agreement, which was negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The precedent for excluding these sectors from global climate agreements was set in 1998, when both sectors were excluded from national targets established under the Kyoto Protocol. This was largely due to a lack of agreement on how emissions should be attributed to particular States.

From the planet’s perspective, it doesn’t appear to matter whether the emissions comes from your car, or from Air New Zealand’s aeroplane.  In the UNFCCC numbers –  the base NZIER uses for their modelling –  it does.  But if you “care about the planet”, and want to give a strong “moral lead”, in the way the governing parties claim to, surely you need to offset international aviations as well.   Domestic aviation is included in the ETS – so I learned, New Zealand was among the first to do so –  but not international aviation.

There was a government document published on this issue a couple of years ago.  As it points out, at present the numbers aren’t unduly large

Domestic aviation accounts for 1.1 percent of New Zealand’s total emissions.

and international emissions are about 2.5 times domestic

aviation 1

International tourism has been booming since then.   And here are Ministry of Transport projections.

aviation 2

Even if we take the middle two lines, international aviation emissions would almost double by 2050.

Remember too that fuel costs are a very large proportion of airline operating costs (especially for long-haul operations) and that tourism spending is quite price-sensitive (you might be determined to take a holiday, but price affects location choice).  If the government is really serious about a moral crusade for net-zero they can’t but include international aviation in the framework (and in the goal) –  and if others were to follow their moral lead, the industry will have to have been included globally by 2050.  And what will that do to the viability of our international tourism industry –  almost everywhere is closer for almost everyone than New Zealand is, and we don’t have many unique offerings?   Given a choice between taking your electric vehicle to the Croatian coast or flying to New Zealand, the economics won’t favour New Zealand.

In other words, if the government is serious about a genuine net-zero target, they really need to start factoring in international aviation emissions, especially as these are set to rise absolutely and (especially) as a share of total emissions.  Perhaps they can just assume into existence some more forests, at no cost to other production, but it would seem highly risky to just do so.

For all these reasons, the 10 per cent sacrifice (a deliberately chosen act) of annual GDP estimated by NZIER seems to be very much at the low end of the plausible range, especially if they are serious about offsetting all emissions, not just ones that international convention negotiators happened to agree on.  The 22 per cent number comes from MfE and NZIER and doesn’t seem implausible.  Of course, any modelling, and any estimates, are inevitably highly imprecise.  Something could turn up to set all these costs at naught, but it would seem rash –  to say the very least –  to set out upon such a journey in the idle hope that something will turn up, and if not well –  never mind –  our children will simply be up to a quarter worse off than otherwise.    Productivity growth in New Zealand hasn’t been rapid in recent decades, but lopping a quarter off future incomes would be the equivalent today of simply giving up all the economic gains (in real GDP per hour worked) of the last 20 years.  Simply breathtaking.   And meanwhile people lament child poverty concerns, constraints on the health system, and so on.   Productivity is about new possibilities.  Are we really happy to give up such possibilities for the next few decades?

There is a lot of other interesting stuff in the NZIER report, but I wanted to end with the chart on the estimated distributional impact.   In my previous post, I quoted the MfE text

Our modelling suggests the households that are in the lowest 20 per cent bracket for income may be more than twice as affected, on a relative basis, than those households with an average income.

Which is quite bad enough. But it is all the more stark when you see the chart in the NZIER report, drawn from some work done for them by Infometrics  (in this chart they are looking only at the additional estimated losses from moving from the 50 per cent target to a net-zero target).

emissions distribution

Specifically, people in the bottom two income quintiles will be hit six times as hard as people in the top quintile.    Like MfE in the consultation document, NZIER rush to the client’s defence and suggest that redistribution policies could alleviate this.   You wouldn’t thought that sort of advocacy was their role –  having been commissioned to do modelling –  but more importantly, they should know as well as anyone that when governments adopt policies to materially shrink the economy, it is even harder than usual to persuade voters in the upper quintiles to agree to give up even more to mitigate the losses the worst off are exposed to.   Redistribution tends to win more favour when everyone is getting better off.

Has any government anywhere ever consulted on policy objectives that, if seriously pursued could cut future GDP per capita by anything from –  on their own numbers –  10 to 22 per cent?  If so, I can’t imagine when.  It is a huge price to propose for what seems to be mostly a moral crusade –  hence the title about pricing the hair shirt.  If you doubt that interpretation, check out Labour climate change policy.

New Zealand must do its part, along with the rest of the world, in reducing climate pollution. It is not good enough to say we are too small to matter – most countries individually could claim the same. We must take our share in the effort however small, just as we did when dealing with CFCs, or opposing apartheid, or fighting fascism. Kiwis are not shirkers. 

Opposing apartheid will have cost almost nothing to New Zealand GDP (albeit some utility losses for some rugby supporters) –  same goes no doubt for opposing French nuclear testing in the Pacific.  And I’ve never seen any large estimates for the cost of dealing with CFCs.

What of the World War Two comparison?  I alluded to it in the my earlier post observing

Wars, of course, come at a very considerable cost –  and sometimes are worth fighting –  but again, I doubt any democracy (or perhaps even any tyranny) ever entered a war thinking that as a result of doing so they would be so much poorer 30 years on.  

Awful as wars are –  and with staggering losses of life in some countries –  there is simply no way that any of the Anglo countries, that voluntarily entered the war to resist Hitler, were 10 per cent poorer, let alone 22 per cent poorer, thirty years on as a result.

Perhaps there is a legitimate moral cause at work here, but the government is inviting citizens to offer up a fearsome price –  in lost incomes and opportunities –  all while refusing to even consider the lowest cost option for substantially reducing the volume of emissions in New Zealand.   For a country that has done so badly as regard productivity, under successive governments over many decades, it seems breathtakingly reckless.  It seems all the weirder to be proposing to take some global moral lead in a country where, as even the IPCC reports have noted, there are both gains (eg better crop yields in many areas) and losses apparently on offer from rising global temperatures.

 

A puzzling government economic target

Michael Reddell Productivity

An occasional reader pointed out to me a government economic target that I wasn’t aware of.   Late last year, Communications Minister Clare Curran announced that

“The Chief Technology Officer will be responsible for preparing and overseeing a national digital architecture, or roadmap, for the next five to ten years,” Ms Curran says.

“This Government intends to close the digital divides by 2020, and to make ICT the second largest contributor to GDP by 2025.

At least one tech firm seems to think that goal is in the coalition agreement, although I couldn’t see it there.

There doesn’t seem to be much around on this goal, which is perhaps not surprising as it doesn’t seem a particularly realistic or well thought-through goal.  There are no obvious definitions or compators.    Would such an outcome even be desirable?  How would we know?

But I did find this chart in an MBIE report from last year, using data that isn’t readily available to the public.

ICT mbie

Which looks like a reasonable aount of activity, except of course that GDP in 2015 was $230 billion. so these ICT sectors in total account for about 4 per cent of GDP.

The OECD doesn’t seem to have data for all member countries, but I found this chart.

OECD ICT

New Zealand’s ICT share doesn’t seem out of line with (although perhaps a bit less than) the median OECD country.

But then I went to Infoshare to look at the breakdown of GDP by production sector.  These are the sectors that were bigger than MBIE’s ICT number in the year to March 2016 (which presumably aligns most closely with the 2015 data they quote).

GDP in year ending March 2016
Construction 15,290
Wholesale Trade 12,691
Retail Trade 11,057
Transport, Postal and Warehousing 12,377
Financial and Insurance Services 14,604
Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services 18,021
Owner-Occupied Property Operation (National Accounts Only) 16,429
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services 19,935
Education and Training 11,436
Health Care and Social Assistance 15,095

Which industries, I wondered, did the government envisage being displaced by the ICT sector?  For example, the government also seemed to be aiming to build a lot more houses, and encouraging more people into education and training.   Which industry do you expect will still be ahead of ICT by 2025 (only seven years away now)?

And how realistic is any of this anyway?   That MBIE chart above looks quite impressive at first glance.  But as a share of total GDP, those ICT subsectors in total did not change from 2007 to 2015.   What policy changes, already announced or in the works, are likely to transform the prospects of these sub-sectors in just a few years?

In a post last year, I pointed to some other indicators of how these technology sectors just haven’t been growing to anything like the extent the boosters would like us to believe (although of course there are individual firm success stories).   Sadly, of course, that is really the story of our tradables sector as a whole –  which has managed no per capita growth at all this century.

UPDATE: From some digging around it appears that the government’s target, championed by Clare Curran is even flakier than I imagined.  Apparently at a recent select committee hearing she claimed that the technology sector was New Zealand’s third largest exporter and that she hoped it would become the “second largest contributor to the economy”.   This “third largest exporter” claim appears to come from last year’s TIN report (critiqued here), where the total foreign sales of NZ-owned tech firms are treated as New Zealand exports (for comparisons with official export data of other sectors).  As I noted in my critique, this is a nonsense claim: much of the value in many of these foreign sales is generated abroad (eg both F&P companies have large manufacturing operations abroad).  In their 2017 ICT report, MBIE talk of ICT exports of around $1 billion per annum (about 0.3 per cent of GDP).    As I showed in my earlier post, tech-like services exports as a share of GDP has barely changed this century (and the profitability of New Zealand firms operating abroad also seemed pretty weak).

To put the numbers in perspective, here is an extract from a recent SNZ table

Total exports
By top 30 categories
Year ended March
Commodity / service Exports (fob)
2017 2018
NZ$(million) % of total NZ$(million) % of total
Milk powder, butter, and cheese  11,547  16.5  14,174  18.2
Business and other personal travel  10,012  14.3  10,879  14.0
Meat and edible offal  5,983  8.5  6,797  8.7
Logs, wood, and wood articles  4,133  5.9  4,828  6.2
Education travel  3,547  5.1  4,025  5.2
Fruit  2,758  3.9  2,648  3.4
Air transport  2,158  3.1  2,451  3.1
Wine  1,627  2.3  1,723  2.2
Mechanical machinery and equipment  1,596  2.3  1,683  2.2
Fish, crustaceans, and molluscs  1,586  2.3  1,619  2.1
Preparations of milk, cereals, flour, and starch  1,213  1.7  1,558  2.0
Miscellaneous edible preparations  1,162  1.7  1,305  1.7
Aluminium and aluminium articles  982  1.4  1,152  1.5
Electrical machinery and equipment  999  1.4  1,071  1.4
Casein and caseinates  826  1.2  904  1.2
Optical, medical, and measuring equipment  829  1.2  873  1.1
Wood pulp and waste paper  721  1.0  858  1.1
Telecommunications, computer, and information services  875  1.2  848  1.1

A new reform for Wellington’s mayor

Michael Reddell Wellington

Wellington residents –  at least those still buying a hardcopy newspaper –  woke on Thursday to find that the shrunken Dominion-Post newspaper had given itself a temporary Maori masthead, and an apparently permanent change of name, to something that looks as though it might be the longest newspaper name anywhere in world.

I guess private businesses can do whatever they want to try to boost sales –  or in the case of newspapers, temporarily stem the decline.  And given that pundits offer odds on how much longer daily hardcopy newspapers will survive, I don’t suppose this particular marketing effort will be with us for long.  In today’s paper, they claim to have been flooded with messages of support, but in the letters to the editor, the only letter in favour was an over-long (and thus abridged) effort from the head of the Maori language commission.

What was perhaps considerably more questionable is the way the newspaper and its proprietors launched their new name to coincide with, and explicitly to celebrate, Wellington City Council’s own new Maori language policy.   Since one role of newspapers used to be to provide scrutiny and criticism of those in power, I guess we can’t expect any such scrutiny of this particular act of culture war and virtue-signalling.

Wellington City Council is a beacon of awfulness, pursuing political visions and cultural agendas that (a) aren’t really any business of local councils, and (b) seem to be a substitute for doing the basics well.    As I’ve noted here before, there are smallish things like the Island Bay cycleway –  millions and millions of dollars on something ugly, and largely useless, which the residents (a clear majority) have indicated strongly that they don’t want.  There are staggering sums wasted on convention centres, film museums, and saving an old Town Hall, and rather smaller sums (so far) devoted to plans to tip tens of millions in to help pay to extend Wellington airport runway.  And then there is a scandal of house and urban land prices.  Perhaps Wellington City Council is no worse than most other councils on this score (all are reprehensible) –  in a city with abundant land, the council is determined it won’t be used, and instead want to compel future generations to live on top of each other (often literally), while delivering house and land prices that are simply unaffordable to most.     It is like some San Francisco model (on a smaller and poorer scale), pricing out ordinary people, and in a city with some big captive businesses (central government).   Life might be sweet for the middle-aged liberal elite; shame about anyone else.

The Council’s latest initiative –  approved unanimously on Thursday –  was the new Maori language policy, aiming to make Wellington “a te reo Maori city” by 2040.   Which is puzzling –  except for the culture war/virtue-signalling angle –  given how scarce people of Maori descent/identity actually are in Wellington city (and likely to remain so, given the housing/land use policies which increasingly crowd-out lower income people –  a group Maori are overrepresented in).

If one ranks all the territorial local authorities by the percentage of the population identifying as Maori in the 2013 census, the top 10 TLAs (mostly central North Island, plus Far North and the Chatham Islands) averaged 46.3 per cent Maori.  The bottom 10 TLAs in 2013  –  all in the South Island –  averaged 6.6 per cent Maori.  Wellington City was 7.6 per cent Maori, just a touch ahead of Dunedin.

What compounds the oddity is that Wellington is one of only two TLAs in the entire country with a far larger Asian population (“Asian” of course encompassing a whole range of quite different ethnicities) than the Maori population.

Per cent of population identifying as…. (2013 Census)
Maori Asian
Auckland 10.1 21.7
Wellington city 7.6 14.9

It seems likely that the relative share of the different Asian ethnicities will have increased further in this year’s Census.

The Council claims that their goal is that the city should become a “bilingual capital”, with the aim of “making te reo a core part of Wellington’s identity by ensuring it is widely seen, heard, and spokem in the capital”.

All of which, frankly, seems highly unlikely, given the demographics, aided and abetted by the Council’s own housing and land use policies.    It isn’t, say, like Wales where efforts to save the language actually involve a language that was the heritage of most of the current residents.

Not that it stops Justin Lester and his crew of councillors.   In future, new streets will preferentially be given Maori names and (whatever this means) they plan on  “incorporating te reo in its decisionmaking processes and functions” (when roughly one in 14 residents identifies as Maori).     Some place names in the council precinct are being given Maori names now –  there was talk of the heart of the city being renamed, but the stark windswept Civic Square is barely used most of the year.   Already, the annual civic fireworks display has been shifted from Guy Fawkes to Matariki –  a “festival” barely anyone had heard of even 20 years ago.  Fortunately, councils don’t get to decide public holidays, but Mr Lester is also calling for Queen’s Birthday to be scrapped as a public holiday in favour of the same pseudo-festival Matariki (an occasion which appears to be observed mostly by taxpayer and ratepayer funded entities –  my in-box is awash with newsletters from schools proposing that I attend such events).

These people seem to be embarrassed by their own heritage (almost all the councillors appear to be of predominantly Anglo or Celtic descent).   I’m pretty sure that even in secular Wellington the churchgoing share of the population is roughly equal to the Maori share (with some overlap of course), but I can’t recall the last time the council was championing Easter celebrations to anything like the extent they champion Matariki (and nor would I want them to –  it simply isn’t the role of a council (roads and drains and rubbish –  oh, and land use)).  And while the Mayor is no doubt embarrassed that New Zealand is a constitutional monarchy, it is –  with clear public support at present.   Even civic heritage is for the chop: the lagoon down on the waterfront was named for decades for an eminent former mayor (not one of my particular political sympathies) but now the councillors –  but probably no one one much else –  want to call it Whairepo Lagoon.  But no doubt Mr Lester and his team will feel better for it, having (as he puts it) provided a lead for New Zealand –  including most of the rest of New Zealand where Maori actually largely live.

I’ve another idea for Mr Lester and his bunch of culture warriors.  Guess who Wellington is named for?  The dreadful old Tory, the Duke of Wellington –  former soldier and Prime Minister of Britain and its empire of which we are now apparently supposed to be ashamed.  He might have beaten Napoleon, but what’s that to anyone now, here?   The Wellington City Council’s buildings are on Victoria Street (yes, she the Queen-Empress) and Wakefield St  (Edward Gibbon, master colonial expansionist –  who spent time in prison for abducting an heiress).   Lambton Quay is named for chairman of the New Zealand Company, Cuba and Tory streets for two of the first ships carrying settlers and the bacillus of western culture to Wellington.  And so on.

I hesitate to mention it lest I give someone an idea, but this particular virus is already afoot elsewhere, with a story recently about people calling for name changes in Levin, Hamilton, and Gisborne (although, to be honest, and notwithstanding the history, I have some sympathy in respect of Poverty Bay).  But why stop there?  Surely the culture warrior left must be embarrassed to live in a country with places named for

Lord Auckland

Lord Nelson  (with streets named for Hardy, Victory and Trafalgar)

Sir Charles Napier  (“The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed”)

Lord Palmerston (twice over)

and when our third largest city is named for an Oxford college, itself named (with such uncomfortable particularity) for the Messiah, when a southern city’s name celebrates Scotland and its leading role in the empire, and when Hastings surely evokes memories of militarism and conquest,

then surely it is past time for reform.  Lets just junk our heritage –  the roots that built one of the better societies on earth (amid all its flaws) –  for some expensive feel-good campaign.

Or perhaps the Council could refocus and actually make Wellington an affordable city, for Europeans, Maori, Pacific people, Asians and whoever else chooses to live here.  It really isn’t so hard –  except of course that it runs head on into the planners’ mentality that pervades our local government.  They know best…..and we’ll suffer it.

 

 

 

Economic coercion PRC-style

Michael Reddell China

The great fear that seems to pervade official circles in New Zealand (bureaucratic and political) is “what could China do to us if ever our government upset Beijing”, whether that involved speaking out forcefully against PRC military expansionism, doing something about Jian Yang, meeting highly-respected pro-democracy leaders from Hong Kong, pushing back against PRC control over local Chinese-language media, or whatever.

No one supposes any threat is military in nature.  What seems to worry people is the possible economic cost.      Governments led by both major parties have retailed (and perhaps believe) the nonsense that somehow New Zealand was “saved” by the PRC in the last recession, or that our alleged prosperity (no productivity growth in the last five years, and the shrinking relative size of our export sector) owes much to the good graces of the butchers of Beijing  If Xi Jinping should once avert his glance, our economy would be imperilled.   It is never openly stated quite that explicitly, and perhaps even the more thoughtful believers would use more-moderate language, but you get the gist.

All self-respect is long gone by this point.  Generally, if you find yourself over-exposed to someone else (some person, some business, some country), and especially one of questionable character, the prudent thing to do is to gradually reduce your exposure, diversify your risks, and regain your (perceived) freedom to act in accord with your values.    But when it comes to the PRC, prevailing opinion –  ministerial speeches, taxpayer-funded lobby groups, and so on –  seems to be that we should double-down, increasing our exposure to a country that they know to be an international thug and bully.  Thus, for example, our commitment to the geopolitical vision represented in the PRC Belt and Road Initiative, a scheme now being actively promoted with your own taxpayer dollars.

This mental model ignores a whole bunch of relevant points:

  • mostly, individual countries make their own success and their medium-term prosperity does not depend on the fortunes or favours of a single other country, no matter how large.   We (and Australia for that matter) were rich –  further up international league tables –  when China was mired in its own self-destructive behaviours,
  • the share of New Zealand GDP represented by trade with the PRC isn’t especially large by international standards, and
  • much of what we do sell is relatively homogeneous products traded on world markets.

(None of which is to downplay the risks to the world economy and New Zealand if something were to go seriously wrong in the PRC economy –  something I wrote about several years ago when still at the Reserve Bank ( Discussion note 2014 what if China slowed sharply ) most of which still seems valid – but that is a different issue, where the New Zealand government’s political stance towards the PRC is largely irrelevant.)

I’m also not attempting to minimise the PRC’s willingness or ability to play the bully-boy and attempt to exert coercion over New Zealand should our government ever find within itself a modicum of courage and self-respect.   These are people who play rough: with tens of millions of their own people dead at the regime’s hands, a whole province these days functioning much as an open air concentration camp, why stop at the odd sovereign independent country?  They haven’t.

Earlier this week, a US think-tank, the Centre for a New American Security, released a fascinating study on China’s Use of Coercive Economic Measures. The think-tank appears to be quite well-regarded, and has among its senior figures various people who served in the Obama administration.   The study appears to be a pretty careful description and assessment of the way the PRC has attempted to use economic coercion on a serious of democracies over the last decade, and to draw some lessons from those experiences.

They looked at seven such episodes:

  • a 2010-2012 episode in which the PRC halted rare earth exports to Japan (at the time, China accounted for 97 per cent of world production) over a specific incident related to the Japan/PRC dispute over the Senkaku islands,
  • the PRC’s measures against Norway (concentrated on salmon exports) over 2010-2016 after the (private) Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo,
  • the PRC’s use of additional quarantine controls on the Philippines from 2012 to 2016, throttling agricultural exports (especially bananas), over the Philippines defence of its South China Seas claims, including those later upheld under the Law of the Sea by an international tribunal,
  • PRC attempts to coerce South Korea in 2016/17, with the intent of encouraging South Korea to reverse permission for deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system,
  • the PRC’s attempt to punish Mongolia for hosting a 2016 visit by the Dalai Lama,
  • pressure around the 2016 Taiwan elections, in which the PRC objected to the winning party and acted to cut back tourist numbers, and
  • the current pressure being exerted on Australia, via warnings to overseas students (and, although this study doesn’t mention them, delays in clearance of eg wine imports from Australia).

This isn’t the sort of thing normal countries do.

(The study also touches on the PRC pressure on Iran and North Korea, episodes which, while interesting, are a bit different from those involving democracies.)

 

There are other examples, including direct coercion on companies, and some telling snippets about the general approach

During the Hu Jintao era [when, as a whole, the PRC was less assertive than it has become under Xi Jinping], meetings between a head of state or head of government and the Dalai Lama led, on average, to a reduction of exports to China of between 8.1 percent and 16.9 percent. Trade subsequently recovered during the second year after the visit.

I haven’t got space to go into all these episodes in detail (all the material is there on pages 42 to 49 of the report), but there are a number of interesting points that emerge:

  • the clever targeting of politically salient sectors.  The coercive measures were rarely applied to sectors directly related to the issue that was directly bothering the PRC, but rather where they thought they could get leverage  (the Norwegian example was an extreme case, given that the initial “offence” wasn’t even done by the government,
  • coercive measures are rarely officially announced, allowing plausible deniability, and also calibration of any escalation and de-escalation,
  • measures are rarely applied in sectors where coercion could directly hurt PRC entities themselves.   As the authors note of the Korea example, there were 43 retaliatory measures taken by the PRC, estimated to have knocked 0.4 per cent off Korean GDP last year, but “Beijing made sure not to target Korean sectors where economic retaliation might harm China’s own supply chain” (thus, China still imports 65 per cent of its semiconductors),
  • where possible, the coercive measures involve restrictions not amenable to complaints to the WTO (where the PRC loses such complaints it has altered its behaviour to comply).  Tourism has been an obvious example, and perhaps the foreign students case in Australia.  More generally, “China typically imposes
    economic costs through informal measures such as selective implementation of domestic regulations, including stepped-up customs inspections or sanitary checks,
    and uses extralegal measures such as employing state media to encourage popular boycotts and having government officials directly put informal pressure on specific
    companies.”
  • in many cases –  but not always –  China wins (at least in the short-term) and the targeted countries adjust, often in a rather craven way.   Those that yielded did so in the face of rather limited overall economic costs (but large concentrated costs in a few sectors).

As an example of the victories, here is the report on Norway

Finally, China has achieved symbolic victories even when the practical impacts of coercive economic measures appear to be limited. For example, after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, China retaliated by banning imports of Norwegian salmon. The import ban appears to have had little real-world impact, as Norway found alternative markets and appears to have routed fish to China via third countries.  Yet, as part of restoring normal relations with Beijing in 2016, Norway nonetheless issued a public statement acknowledging China’s “sovereignty” and “core interests” while Beijing hoped that Oslo had “deeply reflected” on how it had harmed mutual trust.

There were limits even then

Initially, China also requested a secret “nonpaper” with a more strongly worded apology, but then-Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg denied the request as at odds with Norwegian foreign policy.

But reality was craven enough

In its rapprochement with Norway, China achieved both its deterrent and public apology objectives. In 2014, Norwegian officials declined to meet the Dalai Lama. When the two countries normalized relations in 2016, China obtained a formal, public apology. Norway acknowledged China’s “sovereignty” and “core interests,” while Beijing hoped that Oslo had “deeply reflected” on how it had harmed mutual trust.  The salmon trade resumed. Upon Liu’s death in July 2017, Norway’s more muted statement compared to its European neighbors’, could be viewed as a sign of the continuing deterrent value of the Chinese policy A few weeks later, the countries revealed progress in their free-trade agreement negotiations.

Between coercion and inducements (stick and carrot), the Philippines government greatly softened its stance around the South China Sea.

Of Mongolia –  84 per cent of whose exports went to the PRC –  the authors note

After initially standing up to Chinese coercive measures, Mongolian leaders eventually relented. As part of the rapprochement between Ulaanbaatar and Beijing, Mongolian leaders, like Norway, offered a public apology.  They expressed regret for the invitation and emphasized that they would no longer host the Dalai Lama during the government’s term. Chinese leaders said they hoped that Mongolia had taken the lesson of not interfering in China’s “core interests” to heart.

South Korea went ahead with the THAAD deployment, and any concessions seem to have been modest and face-saving more than substantive.

South Korea eventually relented to Chinese pressure in October 2017 by issuing a list of assurances, the “three no’s,” on further missile deployment and military alliance with the United States. Korea officials argued that these assurances were a reiteration of long-standing policy, suggesting the advantages China can gain from informal measures that give it flexible off-ramps from economic pressure rather than tying it to specific—and falsifiable— results.  Additionally, though China did welcome the development, it still urged Korea to “follow through” on its statement and did not lift the pressure as quickly as it has in other cases of coercion. As of February 2018, more than four months after the rapprochement, tourism was still 42 percent lower than the previous year and Lotte still had not received relief from the regulatory pressure.

In the Japanese case, strong international support (EU and US) combined with WTO remedies meant the PRC didn’t win –  although domestic political imperatives may well have been served by stirring up anti-Japanese popular sentiment.

The specific pressure on Taiwan around the 2016 election doesn’t appear to have “worked” but is presumably still just part of the long-term PRC goal to isolate and weaken Taiwan, and exert pressure on firms (Taiwanese and international).

As for Australia, it is probably still early days (the article I linked to above appeared only yesterday).  Whatever the PRC has yet done –  plausible deniability and all –  is only a token of what they could yet do, if the Australian government continues to push back against PRC influence activities in Australia, and against PRC military expansionism.  For the moment there is no sign of the Australian government backing down, and bipartisan concern about PRC influence activities assists their position (as, presumably, does the coming election) but, equally, pressure from the sectors that are, or could yet be, targeted must be building.

The authors of the CNAS report are not optimistic that the PRC will become any less willing to use these coercive techniques; if anything, the continuing relative rise of China’s economic fortunes could increase the willingness, and perhaps ability, to exert pressure on individual firms, business and political leaders, and countries, blended perhaps with inducements (trade agreements) and other blandishments.

They offer a series of recommendations, many of which are quite US focused (and, as they note, for various reasons the US has not yet been subject to PRC coercive efforts yet).  Many of the recommendations focus on better understanding the issues and risks, at a detailed levels, raising awareness, and encouraging a forceful and supportive response to the PRC when other countries are targeted.  The advice for private sector companies is to take steps to ensure that they are not unduly reliant on PRC suppliers or the PRC market.   In the end, other countries (especially small countries) can’t stop the PRC attempting to act the bully-boy, but success (giving in) will only encourage the thug, and so there is something important about building resilience, reducing exposure, and being willing to take a stand alongside whoever the PRC picks off, rather than cowering in a corner, thankful that the bully has chosen someone else this time, and determining to be even more submissive next time the government engages with the PRC.

What does it all mean for New Zealand?

I hope our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has already been thinking hard about these case studies and about the lessons for New Zealand, and that in doing so their response is to advise the government on reducing exposure, not doubling down and living in the sort of fear of the battered wife –  too scared to leave, unable to resist.

But we don’t see any sign of that sort of approach, at least when our ministers and Prime Ministers (advised by officials) speak.  This is, after all, the regime that our government last year signed an agreement with, supposedly working towards a “fusion of civilisations”.

There is no point pretending there are no areas of vulnerability, if our government ever took a stand, even rather politely.  Quarantine and other related rules could be enforced rather more tightly.  I don’t suppose milk powder is a big risk –  the Chinese need it, and would only have to buy it from somewhere else if somehow trade with New Zealand was disrupted.  But higher-end lamb exports might be –  fresh product, not consumed by the mass Chinese market.  But I still reckon that the biggest, and most obvious, area of vulnerability is around export education and tourism, exports actually delivered here, rather than in China.  There are plenty of other places in the world for Chinese tourists to visit for a year or two, and other places –  often with better-rated universities –  for PRC students to study.   Put a ban on group tourism to New Zealand, or issue official warnings about safety here etc, or raise difficulties about landing rights and the numbers coming would be disrupted quite materially.  Being a small country –  and selling nothing critical to Chinese supply chains –  we might be a good case to try to “make an example of”

These sorts of threats aren’t some existential threat to our economic health and wellbeing –  recall the central bank estimate of a 0.4 per cent of GDP effect in Korea last year –  but they could be a big issue for some operators in the industries concerned.  As the Taiwanese example illustrates, tourism source markets can change, and can even do so relatively quickly (although perhaps as a long-haul destination the challenges are a bit greater here), especially if public money were put behind marketing campaigns.

In a way, the export education industry worries me more, especially the universities.  Last year, half all student visas were issued to Chinese students, and foreign students make up a huge share of university (and PTE, and some schools) income, in a system in which domestic fees are capped at (typically) below long-run average cost.   Universities and polytechs are government agencies, but ones with their own agendas to serve, and empires to preserve (Waikato, for example, has a degree-granting arrangements in China itself, presumably at risk of regulatory enforcement changes quietly implemented by the PRC, and several have Confucius Institute where they receive direct PRC funding).

A prudent industry would not have so many eggs in one basket, particular a basket controlled by a regime that has shown willing to act the international bully (one might have a quite different view if half the student visas were going to German students, Korea students, or Canadian students).  A prudent industry would be stress-testing itself (and its prime domestic funders and regulators would be insisting on such stress-testing) and adjusting its marketing accordingly.   But a rent-seeking one, knowing the feebleness of our governments, will continue to pull in the revenue from Chinese students knowing that (a) they can put a lot of pressure on governments to go along, and never upset Beijing about anything, and (b) even if things go wrong on that score, the financial risk will really lie with the government itself, not those who now run the universities (who would no doubt run an effective marketing and political campaign about how NZ students would suffer without a government bailout.

We might be small, and thus vulnerable on that count.  On the other hand, we are a long way away –  New Zealand is just a great deal less important to China than, say, the issues around Korea, Mongolia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.   And in aggregate we just aren’t that exposed to specific Chinese markets (even allowing for the fact that the PRC is a large part of the world economy now).  Even a bad year or two is just that –  not the abandonment of all future prosperity.

But we’ve allowed a couple of industries –  one highly-subsidised, through the immigration connection –  to flourish, and politically salient sector risks to develop, which now depend on the New Zealand government cowering in the corner and never upsetting Beijing.    Neither industry is at the leading edge of productivity growth –  indeed, our services exports in total are smaller now as a share of GDP than they were 15 years ago – but the probable political clout is undeniable.  It should be a matter of priority for any self-respecting government to look to reduce those specific exposures, encouraging greater resilience in the respective industries, so that one day we could have the courage to stand for what we believe –  assuming that among the political classes, belief is still about something more than the last trade dollar, and the next political donation.   In time –  one hopes, in a day (decades hence) when freedom comes to China –  we should aim for a relationship of trust and mutual respect, not one of the battered wife cowering in the corner.

(But as I reflected on this issue, my admiration increases for successive New Zealand governments decades ago –  most notably that led the Prime Minister’s predecessor Norman Kirk –  who were willing to openly take on France over atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific.)

A modestly indebted advanced economy

Michael Reddell Financial stabilty

Sometimes people like to give the impression that New Zealanders are highly indebted.   And so this summary chart, which I stumbled on this afternoon, is some helpful context.

total debt

Among advanced economies, only in Israel and Germany is total debt/GDP lower than in New Zealand.

And also among advanced economies, only Denmark, Israel, and Germany had less of an increase in economywide debt/GDP over the 10 years to the end of 2017 (encompassing the recession and aftermath and subsequent recovery).

A decade ago, a comparable chart would have looked quite different.  I recall getting someone to dig out the data in about 2008 or 2009 which showed that our total debt/GDP ratio had increased in the previous few years about as much as the increase in Japan in the late 1980s (and all the increase was business and household).   And with most other advanced countries having materially increased their debt/GDP ratios over the last decade, New Zealand a decade ago would have been nearer the middle of the pack for the stock of debt than it is now.

Total debt to GDP calculations include household, corporate, and government debt.    As I showed in a post a couple of weeks ago, household debt to GDP hasn’t changed much here.  Government debt to GDP has increased a bit, and corporate debt to GDP also won’t have changed much.

Of course, those who want to remain worried about the New Zealand situation –  if I recall rightly the Governor said he was `scared’ –  will point out the role that big increases in government debt played in many other advanced countries.  Household debt to GDP has not changed very much in some of those other countries either.   But who is government but a collection of households?  We are the ones who have to service government debt.  And in many of these other countries, the total debt/GDP numbers will be understated because public service pension liabilities (contractural obligations) are not typically included in the debt numbers.  In New Zealand, there are almost no such liabilities, and those there are are properly accounted for.

Add in the reduction in the ratio of the net international investment position (net liabilities) to GDP over the last decade, and the picture is one in which debt should be much less of a concern here than in almost all advanced economies, and than in many – perhaps most –  emerging markets economies.  In a better world –  more business investment, on a path to more productivity –  we might perhaps have hoped there would have been more business debt being taken on.

 

Relative poverty: old and young

Michael Reddell Poverty, Productivity, Superannuation

When I was working on my lecture last month on productivity as the best sure basis for dealing with poverty across a society as whole, I did take the opportunity to read around some of the literature on child poverty in New Zealand.   A line that used to be quite common in the New Zealand debate was that we had high rates of child poverty but low rates of poverty among old people, and that this represented some mix of a misplaced sense of priorities and some imbalance in political clout.  On checking, I see that I previously used the “low poverty rate among the elderly” argument myself in a published report.  On further checking, this was the sort of chart we used to see.

oecd elderly poverty chart 2000s

I’m fairly sceptical of these measures of poverty or deprivation.   They are mostly measures of (in)equality rather than of poverty, being calculated as the percentage of people in any particular group with incomes less than some threshold percentage (typically 50 or 60 per cent) of the (equivilised) median.     Real incomes for everyone could be doubled over time – by some mix of economic good fortune, innovation, and fine management –  and yet if the distribution of income didn’t change, we’d be told that exactly the same share of the population was still in “poverty”.  Sure, the detailed reports will specify that what they are measuring is relative “poverty”, but (a) that is almost a meaningless concept (whereas income or consumption inequality is not), and (b) the “relative” qualifier is usually too readily lost sight of once we shift from detailed technical reports to political debate and the like.     And so, a few months ago we had a  (very capable and well-regarded) visiting economist and politician noting in his lecture that child poverty rates (on these measures) were very similar in New Zealand and Australia, while failing to mention that average or median incomes in Australia are much higher in Australia than in New Zealand   People will be classified as “poor” in Australian who would be close to the median income in New Zealand.

Of course, there is a place for redistributive policies, but over time lifting overall rates of productivity make much more difference: the difference between the “poverty” most New Zealanders lived with (by today’s standards) when we were the richest country in the world a century ago, and the living standards of today.

But the specific point of this post, was this OECD chart I stumbled when I was thinking about poverty issues.  The differences in the differences between male and female rates look as though they could be interesting, but my focus is on the blue bars –  the number for the entire population aged over 65.

elderly poverty

OECD data used to (see first chart) suggest that New Zealand had some of the very lowest rates of elderly “poverty” anywhere.  But, apparently, that is no longer so.  On this measure –  using the 50th percentile –  New Zealand elderly “poverty” rates are still a little below the OECD total, and are actually a little above the OECD median (the countries labelled in italics are not OECD members).

And even in the days when numbers like those in the first chart were widely cited, people used to point out that it made quite a difference whether one looked at the 50th percentile, or (say) the 60th.  The widely-quoted child “poverty” measures in New Zealand typically use the 60th percentile.

Somehow I managed to find the underlying data for the elderly on the OECD website.  The tables say that there is a new measure being used since 2012 (and thus the difference between the first two charts).   Here is an aggregate chart showing the share of the population aged over 65 with income below 60 per cent of median equivilised disposable income (ie the same measure as in the OECD chart above, just using a different percentile threshold).  Here are the data for 2015 (or most recent).

elderly poverty 60%

I was quite taken aback when I saw those numbers.   The results of this new methodology are so different from those under the old methodology (at least for New Zealand) that one would need to dig into the new and old methodologies to be at all comfortable with the results.  After all, it is not as if NZS policy has changed materially over the last 15 years or so, and we know that a relatively high share of New Zealand over-65s are still in the workforce.    And given the universal coverage of NZS, I find it a little difficult to believe that our elderly (relative) “poverty” rates are so much higher than those in, say, the United States.   Then again, it is interesting to see the Australian numbers – especially when we hear occasional calls to adopt something more like the Australian system (compulsory private savings and a means-tested age pension) here.

But if the OECD numbers are to be taken seriously at all, it looks as if  –  relative to the rest of the OECD –  our child poverty scores might be not much different than those for our elderly.   This is the OECD data on child “poverty” using the same 50th percentile benchmark as in the fancy OECD chart above.

child poverty 2014

New Zealand almost identical to the OECD average.

There will, unfortunately always be pockets of extreme deprivation and perhaps even absolute poverty (often perhaps not well-captured in these sorts of aggregate charts).  Some of that –  even after welfare system redistribution – will be about culture, some about personal poor choices, and some about misfortune.  Some of it will even be about atrocious policies –  for example, land use law in New Zealand.

But what we do know, with a very high degree of confidence, is that overall average material living standards –  for children, the old, and everyone in between –  in New Zealand are well below those in most of the “old” OECD countries, that we used to far exceed.  Remember the statistic I’ve quoted previously: it would take a two-thirds lift in average productivity in New Zealand to match that on average in Germany, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and the United States.   The best way to sustainably –  including politically sustainably – and substantially lift the living standards of those at the bottom is to lift productivity across the economy as a whole.  And there is little sign that the government or the Opposition have any ideas as to how to turn the decades of underperformance on that score around,