Tag: macroeconomics

China and a Balance-Sheet Recession

Ashish1 Comment

This is a topic I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently, and to the extent that it is possible to do so, I want to spend some time in thinking about this in greater detail throughout this week. What’s up with China, and how should we think about

  1. What got China where it is today?
  2. Where does China go from here?

There are other things to think about in this regard, particularly as an Indian, but that takes me into the realm of geopolitics, and I know very little about it. One day, maybe. But for now, the question of what got China where it is today.

And lots of things have gotten China where it is today. But one of the many strings that we need to pick up on and see where it takes us begins with a country and a person. The country is Japan, and the person is Richard Koo. Koo is most famous, of course, for having coined the phrase “balance-sheet recession”:

After its stockmarket bubble burst in 1989, share prices plunged by 60% in less than three years. Property prices in Tokyo fell for over a decade. Deflation, by some measures, persisted even longer. Even the price of golf memberships—tradeable on organised exchanges in Japan—tumbled by 94%. Many companies, which had borrowed to buy property or shares in other firms, found themselves technically insolvent, with assets worth less than liabilities. But they remained liquid, earning enough revenue to meet ongoing obligations. With survival at stake, they redirected their efforts from maximising profit to minimising debt, as Mr Koo put it.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/10/does-china-face-a-lost-decade

How should you think about this? Well, here’s a very simplified example. Imagine that every single household in your locality decides to not spend more in the month of September 2023, but instead save more. That may be good news for each household, but can you imagine what the local grocer, the neighborhood restaurants and the local movie-theater might feel about such a move? Exactly the same thing happened in Japan, but at a national level:

In post-bubble Japan, things looked different. Instead of raising funds, the corporate sector began to repay debts and accumulate financial claims of its own. Its traditional financial deficit turned to a chronic financial surplus. Corporate inhibition robbed the economy of much-needed demand and entrepreneurial vigour, condemning it to a deflationary decade or two.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/10/does-china-face-a-lost-decade

The question that The Economist article asks and answers is whether China is “going the Japan way”. Note that this has been covered on EFE before, by the way.

And the answer they come up with is yes, but only kinda-sorta. And there’s (of course) more to it than just that. Yes, Chinese firms have accumulated insane amounts of debt, yes China’s house prices are undergoing a massive correction, and yes credit growth has slowed sharply.

But most of the debt is held by SOE’s, and they will borrow more, if that is what the Chinese government desires. And Chinese households drawing down their debts has more to do with the peculiarities of the Chinese market for mortgages than with households having stressed balance sheets. In fact, if anything, Chinese household debts are reasonably low. On the whole, the article argues, Chinese businesses don’t seem to be behaving the way Japanese businesses were in the 1990’s.

So yes, debt reduction is a thing in China, but it’s not quite Japan all over again, not yet. There is a problem, in other words, and it kind of looks like the Japan problem, but only in some ways. Still, it is a problem, there is no getting around that fact.

So how should this problem be solved?

Richard Koo says that the government should spend its way out of this problem. If the private sector is running up fiscal surpluses (saving more), than those savings need to be deployed somewhere. Where? The government should borrow and spend that money, according to Richard Koo.

If you accept that this is a good solution, there is only one problem. It would seem the Chinese government is not willing to play ball:

The country’s budget deficit, broadly defined to include various kinds of local-government borrowing, has tightened this year, worsening the downturn. The central government has room to borrow more, but seems reluctant to do so, preferring to keep its powder dry. This is a mistake. If the government spends late, it will probably have to spend more. It is ironic that China risks slipping into a prolonged recession not because the private sector is intent on cleaning up its finances, but because the central government is unwilling to get its own balance-sheet dirty enough.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/10/does-china-face-a-lost-decade

And if you’ve got a mild headache thinking through all of this, I’ve got worse news for you. There are other economists who would argue that it is a good thing that the Chinese government is not willing to play ball. Fiscal policy, they argue, is not the way to solve this problem.

So what is their solution?

We’ll find out tomorrow.

All About GDP

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If you are a student of economics in India, you should set up a calendar for yourself. This calendar should include the date of the release of important information about the Indian economy – and the 28th of February is one such day. Why? Because that is when we get to know what went on in the third quarter when it comes to India’s GDP (and more GDP related information besides).

In today’s blogpost, I want to ask you ten questions. If you are a student of the Indian economy, you should try and figure out the answers to these questions. The act of researching the answers to these questions will tell you a lot more about GDP in India than any column praising or defending these numbers will.

Why ten questions? Nice round number, and a good place for me to stop, that’s all. I hope you come up with even more questions!

Here goes:

  1. What is the “second advance estimate”? And while you’re at it, what is the first advanced estimate?
  2. And if you are a glutton for punishment, what are the first, second and third revised estimates? When are they typically released?
  3. When have they been released this year? Why the difference?
  4. Has the data for previous years been revised? Why? How? What does that tell you about how to interpret the current quarter’s data?
  5. Take a look at the first table on pp. 7 of the PDF. What is up with manufacturing? This is an oh-so-important question. Think about it everyday if you are a student of macroeconomics and development in India. Every single day.
  6. Take a look at Private Final Consumption Expenditure (PFCE) (Tables 6A and 8A). What is up with consumption? This is also an oh-so-important question. Also think about it everyday. Every single day.
  7. What, in your opinion, are the drivers of growth right now? Whatever your answer, why? (Hint: what do you think about capital expenditure in India today? How do you think about it at the central government level and at the level of the states?)
  8. Where, in your opinion, will interest rates be going this year? How will this impact your assessment of GDP growth estimates this year? Why?
  9. What is your assessment of this year’s monsoon? Why do you think this question matters in the context of India’s GDP, especially this year?
  10. What is your assessment of where oil prices are going to go this year? How do you think the answer to this question will impact India’s GDP, especially this year?

How should you go about answering these questions?

  1. Take a printout of the press note, and annotate it to your heart’s content. Come up with questions about your annotations, and don’t worry about how many questions you come up with. The more the merrier!
  2. Go ask your batchmates (and also your seniors) about their answers to these questions. Don’t worry (yet) about whether you agree with the answers you get – listen, imbibe and check whatever sources you get to learn about.
  3. Once you do this, go ask your professor(s) about their answers to some of these questions. Feel free to ask them about what you should be reading to learn more.
  4. Reach out to people on Twitter or LinkedIn who you think might be able to answer some of your questions. Don’t be afraid of asking pretty much whoever you like, but do not think you are entitled to a response. You aren’t – but if your question is a well-thought out one, not only will you likely get a response, but it will most likely be a considered, detailed response. People are helpful that way, especially if they see that you’re making a serious effort to learn. The emphasis is on the word serious!
  5. Write. Once you do all of this, pen down your learnings, and the questions that still remain. Share it with the world. Make sure you do all this before 5.30 pm on the 31st of May, 2023. If you want to ask why, go reread the first sentence of today’s blogpost.

See you then!

Pranay Kotasthane on the defence budget

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… which, of course, makes it self-recommending:

What Am I Optimizing For on EFE in 2023?

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Six principles, three big picture questions, and three bonus questions.

Anybody who’s attended a principles class taught by me knows what is coming next. It is my deeply rooted conviction that almost every single problem/concept/idea in economics can become more relatable by simplifying it down to one out of these twelve things: six principles, three big picture questions and three bonus questions. If you get the hang of these twelve things, you can go a very long way in terms of both understanding what economics is about, and how economics can be used to make the world around you a slightly better place.

And while mastery over these twelve things will likely take a lifetime – and almost definitely more than that – familiarity with them isn’t so difficult. And my aim is to write blogposts – in one way or another, and as much as possible – centered around one of these twelve things.

Not just blogposts, but we’ll leave that for aother day. For today’s blogpost, a simple list of what these twelve things are.

First, the six principles:

  1. Incentives matter
  2. TINSTAAFL – There is no such thing as a free lunch
  3. Costs matter
  4. Trade matters
  5. Prices matter
  6. Externalities matter

If I’m teaching a class in a semester at a college, I would dearly like to spend as much time as possible in speaking about just these six principles. Different teachers the world over may have a slightly different list, but I would be surprised if there were to be no overlap at all between two different lists. We may define concepts within these principles slightly differently, we may disagree on some of the underlying mechanisms, but here’s a nice way to think about my list. I am more than willing to listen to arguments about what I really should be adding to my list, but you’ll have to do a lot of convincing to make me remove an item from this list.

These six principles really do define economics for me. They can be expanded upon in multiple ways, a million derivatives can be constructed, there are endless tangents that can be drawn, and the nuances for each can be separate books in their own right. But at it’s heart, these six principles do most of the weight-lifting when it comes to economics.

Next, the three big picture questions:

  1. What does the world look like?
  2. Why does it look the way it does?
  3. What can we do to make the world a better place?

I don’t much like the artificial divide of the subject into “micro” and “macro” economics, but if you like, you can think of the six principles as a way to think about an introduction to microeconomics, while these three questions are a way to get started on thinking about macroeconomics. Depending upon how you want to go about answering the third question, there is yet a further division that is possible, between short term macroeconomic fluctuations and long term growth theory. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

But you can’t really begin analyzing macroeconomics without having a sense of what the world looks like today. Which countries in the world are doing well today, and how do you define “doing well”? Which countries in the world are not developing as rapidy as one would have hoped for? A comparative analysis of what the world looks like is where the study of macroeconomics should start.

At which point, the second question comes into its own. Why is Afghanistan doing so poorly when compared to its peers (howsoever defined), or when compared to its neighbours? Is it because Afghanistan is a landlocked country? Are all landlocked countries poor? If not, why not? Is it because of natural resources in Afghanistan? Is it because of geo-politics? Is it because of colonization? Does religion have a role to play? The list of questions is nowhere near complete, and this is just one nation. We can go on and on like this for all nations – and multiple careers have been spent on answering only parts of one question for just one nation.

And then we come to question number three, the most vexatious question of them all. Just two little words in that sentence, but what a world of (intellectual) pain they bring forth into the world.

“What can we do to make the world a better place?”

Who is we? What form of government works best to make one’s own country a better place? Is the answer to this question always the same regardless of the stage of development? Is your answer based on ideals and hope, or on empiricism? For which part(s) of the world and in which time period?

Does the word better mean the same thing to all people? Are we in a better world when everybody has access to a washing machine? Or are we in a better world when we don’t generate more carbon emissions? Can we have both? If yes, how?

These three questions define macroeconomics for me. Most of what we do in big picture economics (a term that I prefer to macroeconomics, for reasons I’ll get into in a later blogpost) can be thought of using this framework.

There are many good things that have happened as a consequence of blogging regularly here on EFE. But one of the best things to have happened is that I’ve been able to come up with three additional questions – questions that I find myself asking ad nauseam, both to myself and of other people:

  1. What are you optimizing for?
  2. Relative to what?
  3. Over what horizon?

That first question, strictly speaking, isn’t really a question economics can answer. What you are optimizing for is a question that requires deep introspection, and the answer likely comes from either other domains, or from a place that will perhaps forever lie beyond the fartherest probes of academia. But I will say this much – it is impossible to proceed further in economic analysis of any kind, without clarity about the answer to this question.

The second question here really is just another way of saying opportunity costs. But it is surprising to see how easy it is to forget that opportunity costs are real. This is particularly true in the case of public policy, but “relative to what” is a question that more people need to ask of themselves (myself included).

And finally, that most problematic of all questions: time. Just when you think you’re done with intellectual wrestling, trying to answer that third question can often bring you all the way back to square one. Is your answer to the first two questions the same over all time horizons?

I could have optimized for playing (judge me all you like) Subway Surfers instead of writing this post, because I was optimizing for relaxing myself. Or that, at any rate, is the story I tell myself when I give in to temptation. That choice is the best for me (if at all) only in the very short run. That is, over a very short horizon. So is playing yet another round of Subway Surfers really the best thing that I can do? Back, as I said, to square one.

India can optimize for (extending PMGKAY/ reviving the old pension scheme / pick whichever topic makes you the most uncomfortable), and ask yourself why what India is optimizing for. Ask what the opportunity costs of doing so will be. And finally ask if your answer (whatever it may be) remains the same if you ask what is best for India over the course of the next two years. What about two decades? What about two centuries? Which is the best timeframe to use to answer this question, and whatever your answer, what are you optimizing for? Back, as I said, to square one!

In one way, this is exactly what I have been doing in any case these past six years – writing blogs about these topics. A little bit of circular logic is involved here, of course. If I say that this framework:

six principles | three big picture questions | three bonus questions

can be used to think about any topic in economics, maybe I say I’ve been writing about this because I now think about those blogposts that I have written using this framework.

Be that as it may, writing here on EFE has convinced me that this framework can be used to think about all questions in economics, regardless of whether you have been formally trained in the subject or otherwise. And my attempt, this year, is going to be to think about as many questions as I can, explicitly using this framework. Of course I’ll benefit, but hey, as the sixth principle reminds us, externalities matter. You’ll benefit too!

Or is it the other way round?

Steady As She Goes

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Gulzar Natarajan has a typically excellent post (part of a two-part series) on India’s economic growth trajectory. And they key point in the post is a counter-intuitive one.

India cannot, and should not, grow too rapidly.

In Can India Grow, we had argued that India does not possess the capital foundations to sustain high rates of growth for long periods. It does not have the physical infrastructure, human resources, financial capital, and institutional capabilities to grow in the 7-9% ranges without engendering serious distortions and overheating. The last such episode of high growth in the 2003-11 period required nearly a decade for companies to deleverage and for banks to overcome their bad assets. While some commentators have since come forth with similar views citing aggregate demand etc, I think we were the earliest to put forth a clear case for lowering expectations and targeting a 5-6% economic growth rate.

https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2022/11/indian-economy-thoughts-on-growth.html

Our household owns two cars, a Tata Zest and Tata Nano, and the best analogy I can come up with for 2003-2011 is that it was like racing the Nano along the expressway to Bombay at a 110 kilometers per hour. It might (perhaps) have made it to Bombay at those speeds, but the little blue car would then have needed a long time at the mechanic before being road-worthy again. India, similarly, did grow rapidly in that period, but as Gulzar Natarajan puts it, it did not have the “physical infrastructure, human resources, financial capital, and institutional capabilities to grow in the 7-9% ranges without engendering serious distortions and overheating.”

Or put another way, if we want India to grow rapidy in the next two decades or so (and who wouldn’t?), it is very much a question of whether we’re driving a Nano or a Zest over the course of the next two decades. Or, god willing, an even better car. But a Nano will simply not cut it, and in terms of our infrastructure, human resources, financial capital and institutional capablities, we’re more like Tata’s cheapest car than we are like the Tata’s most expensive car.

But our country needs those upgradations if we want to achieve (and sustain) those aspirational growth rates. And here’s another counter-intuitive bit: even a 6% growth rate would be a challenge when we are talking about sustaining it over the course of twenty long years. That’s not the pessimist in me talking, that’s empirics:

A 6% baseline growth for the next three decades would be extraordinary. Underlining this point, as Ruchir Sharma has written, there are only six countries which have grown at 5% for four decades – Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and China. As the data shows, India has become the seventh. But just two have done it for five decades in a row – South Korea and Taiwan. Given that China looks certain to fall short, India could become just the third. It could go one better and strive to become the only country to grow at 5% for seven decades in a row. This would be exceptional at a time when developed countries will struggle to grow at even 2%.

https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2022/11/indian-economy-thoughts-on-growth.html

But for that to happen – for us to embark on this journey, we would do well to first take the Nano to the garage, and bring out the Zest instead. We could do with a bigger engine, better suspension, better safety features – why, better everything:

We should simultaneously use the growth to build the capital foundations – increase domestic savings, deepen financial inclusion, develop robust financial intermediation systems, expand physical infrastructure, prioritise human capacity development, and develop and strengthen state capabilities.

https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2022/11/indian-economy-thoughts-on-growth.html

All of which is easier said than done, as many a “growth star” state of the 20th century will tell you. This stuff is hard, unglamorous, politically risky, and with payoffs that manifest themselves only in the long run. But also, this stuff is unavoidable. Here’s one way to think about it as a student of economics: studying macroeconomics without a deep study of development economics is dangerous.

For as a nation to our north and east is hell bent on showing us in recent times, attemptig rapid growth without getting the basics right isn’t a good idea:

A too rapid growth will invariably drive up signatures of overheating – high inflation, property bubbles and land valuations, spike in wages, environmental damage, clogged infrastructure like traffic congestions and water scarcity etc.

https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2022/11/indian-economy-thoughts-on-growth.html

Institutions matter. Education matters. Physical infrastructure matters. State capacity matters.

And attempting to engineer rapid growth without getting all (not some, all) of these right is a bad idea.

P.S. If you are a student of the Indian economy, the first chart in this blogpost is worth deep contemplation and reflection. What is your best guess for what comes next, and why is your guess whatever it is? That’s be an excellent essay to assign at the end of a macro semester that focuses on the Indian economy.

Macro is *Hard*, Edition #293483343643

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I began teaching a course on introductory macro this past Saturday at a college here in Pune. I often tell my students that my job in a macro course is to leave them more confused at the end than they were at the start. That always evokes laugther by way of response, but as anyone who has learnt (and especially taught!) macro will tell you, I’m quite serious.

Macroeconomics is hard, it is confusing and as the person responsible for teaching it, you’re always on your toes, because you’re never sure if you’ve understood it yourself!

And I really do mean that, it is not a rhetorical statement. My own PhD is in macroeconomics (business cycles, more specifically), but I’ll happily admit to still not being sure about what exactly causes business cycles, what (if anything) to do about them and when to stop doing whatever it is that we’ve chosen to do about them. And I suspect that most macroeconomists will tell you the same thing.

This humility stems from a very good reason: macro is hard.

It is hard for lots of reasons, and not to get too meta, but quite a few debates within the field are also about which of these reasons are most relevant, and whether the relevance changes over time – and if so, due to which reasons!

But if I were to try and write a simple post for people who have no formal trianing in macro about why macro is so hard, here would be my reasons:

  1. Macro is really about trying to figure out everything that goes on in an economy, and if you try to think about all the things that go on in an economy, you very quickly realize that figuring them out is even more challenging.
  2. Time and uncertainty!
    • Macroeconomic decisions take time. It takes time to decide to start a new factory. It takes time to figure out the financing. Land acquisitions, regulatory approvals, construction delays will all add weeks to the planned schedule, if not months, and sometimes years.
    • These expensive decisions are made at the start, but there is no guarantee that macroeconomic conditions will be the same at the finish of the project as they were at the start. You want a relatable example? How sure are you that macroeconomic conditions will be the same when you graduate from college – as they were when you enrolled in it?
  3. The way macroeconomic variables interact with each other isn’t known for sure. We think we know how inflation and unemployment are related to each other, but we can’t really say for sure. We think we know how exchange rates impact the domestic economy, but we can’t really say for sure.We’re still figuring out how monetary policy and fiscal policy should interact in theoretical models, let alone in reality. The impact of monetary policy in America today on India’s economy tomorrow? Don’t get me started. I can go on, and folks with greater expertise than me will prbably not stop for years.
  4. Life has a way of throwing up surprises that macroeconomic models never thought about. You could (and probably should) blame macroeconomists for not getting enough finance into their models prior to 2008, but who, pray, could have foreseen 2020 and 2021? How do you come up with models and policies on the fly in such a scenario? And then, just for fun, throw in a jammed Suez canal. Life, I tell you.
    We call these things exogenous shocks in macroeconomics, but the name hardly matters. Reality will always be more complex and more unexpected than any model you can come up with, and that’s just a fact.
  5. Counterfactuals are impossible to test. How do we know that Ben Bernanke did the “right” thing in 2008? We don’t! What if he had done x instead of y? There’s no way to test this, since we can’t turn the clock back to 2008, and ask Mr. Bernanke to, well, do x instead of y. This is both a problem and when it comes to critiquing models, a great convenience.
  6. Attitudes towards risk, and the propensity to copy what others are doing change according to your outlook towards the macroeconomic environment. You can call this animal spirits, but what you’re really saying is that you don’t quite know how to think about it, even less model it cohesively.
  7. Building a model – any model – requires simplification. When you build a model, it will by definition be an approximation. Unfortunately (and I wish this weren’t so), this very real limitation isn’t always front and centre within the field while developing models.
  8. What are you optimizing for when you build a model? Is it fidelity to reality or is it a beautiful model that may or may not have anything to do with reality? Again, I wish this weren’t so, but the answer isn’t always clear cut.
  9. Any field that uses the pool player analogy is a field that is, by definition, unsure about how the world works.
  10. No matter how much data we have access to, there will always be data points that we cannot capture, and we don’t quite know how these data points, and their unavailability, will impact our understanding of the economy.
  11. Social structures, psychological make-up, cultural parameters will all have an impact upon the decision making capabilities of individuals, but quite how this works (and that too across space and time) isn’t well known. For example, how would your grandfather have reacted to the prospect of not being employed upon graduation? What about your dad? What about you? What does this say about the nature of India’s changing economy, and what does it say about cultural norms and expectations? Is your answer likely to be different depending upon how much your family earns, where in the country you are located and your family size? Can we model this? (Hint: no.)

So sure, I’ll teach them about the variables, the models and the case studies.

But I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret, so long as you promise not to tell anybody: I’m just not sure if I really and truly understand what I’m teaching in macro.

Is The Indian Economy Slowing Down?

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That is a bit of a misleading title, because the focus of this blogpost isn’t about answering the question. It is, rather, about how to go about answering this question.

If you are a student new to economics, and someone were to ask you the question that is the title of this blogpost, how would you go about answering this question?

  1. Note that GDP data comes with a lag of about two months. You really should be looking at more recent data. But that being said, a good place to begin will be by tracking India’s quarterly GDP growth for the past (say) twelve quarters or so. This is actually bad advice for this specific time period, because of the pandemic, but under usual circumstances, not a bad place to start.
  2. Take a look at electricity generation numbers for the country. Check if there has been an increase, and if so, by how much.
  3. Check the trends in GST collections.
  4. Check trends in freight movement.
  5. Take a look at the Index of Industrial Production data.
  6. Take a look at India’s foreign trade data. Note that I have not used the word trend for these two points. That’s not because trends aren’t important (they are!) but because I want to lament the fact that India – the country that makes software for literally the entire world – isn’t able to come up with better ways to represent its own government’s data. Why does this not improve?!
  7. Take a look at the “Quarterly Financials of Listed Companies” on the CMIE website. Take a look at the trends for Net Profits and the PAT margins. This is usually on the right hand side of the website, you’ll have to scroll down a bit.
  8. Use the same website to take a look at the employment data.
  9. Take a look at the inflation data.
  10. Take a look at the bank credit data.
  11. Finally, note that this list is by no means complete. Other economists might well have more indicators they would like to recommend, and please don’t hesitate to show this list to them, and ask what they might like to include.
  12. Then, and only then, should you start to read opinion pieces about how well/badly the Indian economy is doing. See if your assessment matches with what is written or being said by others. If it doesn’t, ask yourself why. Check if you should look at other data sources, or other opinion pieces.
  13. But as an economist, remember: data comes first.

Risks, Investment and the Government

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I linked to a Scott Galloway post about this topic recently, and have other posts about this topic (see this review of The Entrepreneurial State, and a post on R&D spends in an Indian context).

And the reason for another post about this topic is a recent Ezra Klein column about a new initiative out of the United States called ARPA-H:

Shortly after winning the presidency, Biden persuaded Congress to fund an analogue focused on medical technology: ARPA-H. Why do we need an ARPA-H when the National Institutes of Health already exists? Because the N.I.H., for all its rigor and marvels, is widely considered too cautious. ARPA-H will — in a move some lament — be housed at the Institutes, but its explicit mandate is to take the kind of gambles that Darpa takes, and the N.I.H. sometimes lets go. Wegrzyn, Biden promised, is “going to bring the legendary Darpa attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/opinion/biden-invention-arpa-h.html

Please read the whole article, as always, but I wanted to use this post to talk about the three things that make up the title of today’s post: risks, investments and the government.

If you are a student of economics, how should you think about these three things, and why do they matter?

  1. Investment is necessary for an economy to grow. And investment depends on a whole host of factors, and for a variety of reasons, this investment isn’t always forthcoming at speeds which one would like. This is one way to think about macroeconomics as a field of study.
  2. Part of the reason the requisite level of investment isn’t forthcoming is because of risks. Not all investments bear fruit, and it is quite likely that some investments will fall by the wayside. If firms are risk-averse, they may choose to not invest.
  3. Risk aversion (whether on parts of firms or individuals) isn’t a constant. It keeps on changing, once again for a variety of reasons, and what makes this even more difficult is that the assessment of risk is a very subjective phenomenon. You can dress it up in the garb of statistics and models as much as you like, but you’d be wrong to assume that subjectivity can be eliminated entirely. Leave alone the difference between risk and uncertainty, and the discussions that follow from here on in. That’s a whole other topic!
  4. If private firms aren’t willing to make investments, or take risks, especially in the case of moonshot investments that other nations are making, governments might decide to step in and invest instead. Remember that there is no reason to assume that governments will get the judgment call of when to do so right. They are as prone to mistakes as they rest of us, and if you take into account incentive alignment, you might well be right in assuming that they are likely to do marginally worse.
  5. But remember always that all-important question: relative to what? That is, if the need to invest is pressing and urgent (strategic considerations, geopolitical considerations, the need to develop more rapidly than we are thus far), and if investment is not forthcoming from the private sector, it makes sense for government to step in and get things moving.
  6. When should government step in? How much should it fund? How should it recoup its investments, if at all? How long should it stick around? What are the metrics of success? What are the opportunity costs? How is continuity of such programs guaranteed across different political administrations?
    There are no easy answers to these questions, and controversies galore are guaranteed.
  7. But the bottomline (to me) is that investments are necessary, they are risky, and they aren’t always forthcoming from the private sector. And there is therefore a role for government.
  8. But an economist should also worry about whether government will get it right or not, and if not, for what reasons. And to focus on making suggestions to make the processes associated with this better. This is hard, it is politically fraught, and it will go wrong more often than not.
  9. But it is necessary, and often unavoidable.
  10. If you are new to economics, and are wondering how principles of economics are applicable in “real-life” problems, I guarantee you this – you can spend entire careers thinking about these issues. And no matter when you start, your timing couldn’t be better.

Imports and GDP: This Stuff Matters!

Ashish2 Comments

I’ve done an earlier version of this post, but have tried to simplify it even further in what follows.

Let’s go back and take a look at a concept that most of us are familiar with, but perhaps don’t know well enough (myself included!): GDP.

What is GDP?

That’s an easy question to answer, and one that every student of Econ101 more or less memorizes:

The final value of all goods and services produced in an economy in one accounting period.

Check out this definition from Wikipedia, this one from the OECD, this one from the IMF,  or run a search yourself – they’ll all be more or less the same.

Now, you can measure GDP in more than a couple of ways, but the version that most students of economics are definitely familiar with is the expenditure approach. It says that GDP is measured by tallying up the total expenditure used to buy final goods and services.

You might be familiar with this equation, for example:

GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Exports – Imports

Or, to give this equation its abbreviated version:

GDP = C + I + G + X – M

Now, this is where things begin to get a little tricky.

This equation, and the way it is written out, leaves a lot of people under the impression that a country’s income will go up, if only we imported less as a country. 

And it is an understandable position to take! If we imagine that M has a value of, say, 100, then GDP goes down by 100. If M were to be zero instead, GDP would be higher by hundred in this alternate scenario.

But this is wrong! I’m going to use two different ways to show you why this is wrong.

Here’s the first one: go back to the definition of GDP, at the top of this piece. Now that you’ve read it, answer this question: where are imports produced? Are they produced in our country, or are they produced in another country?

And if they’re produced in another country, should they be included in our GDP?

The reason the equation says minus M is because we shouldn’t be counting it in GDP in the first place. Once we remove imports, we’re left with the very definition of GDP: goods and services produced in an economy in a given time period. 

Subtracting imports doesn’t make GDP higher. Adding it is completely wrong accounting.

All right, fine, you might grudgingly say. But then why is it in the equation at all in the first place?

Fair question! 

If you are an American, living in America, and you buy a smartphone manufactured in China, that would count as an import (M). 

But here’s the thing: it would also count as consumption ( C ). 

Think about it: if you are using the expenditure approach to measure GDP, your purchase of a Chinese manufactured smartphone is consumption, and it is also an import.

If the American government were to import binoculars manufactured in Israel, it would be government expenditure (G). But it would also be imports (M). You could make similar arguments for investment (I) as well, but you get the idea now.

So, a longer, but more accurate and understandable way of writing out the expenditure method of GDP is as follows (hat-tip to Noah Smith for this version):

GDP = Domestically produced consumption + Imported consumption + Domestically produced investment + Imported investment + Government spending on domestically produced stuff + Government spending on imported stuff + Exports – Imports

Now, some simple crossing out of terms…

Gross Domestic Product = Domestically produced consumption + Imported consumption + Domestically produced investment + Imported investment + Government spending on domestically produced stuff + Government spending on imported stuff + Exports – Imports

…leaves you with this:

Gross Domestic Product = Domestically produced  consumption + domestically produced investment + Government spending on domestically produced stuff + Exports

That first version, with all the crossed out terms, is how we should really be writing it out all the time, because that is what economists really mean. But we don’t do that, unfortunately, leaving folks with the entirely understandable impression that reducing imports makes us richer.

But hey, now you know! GDP, by definition, has nothing to do with imports, and the reason we subtract imports out is because we’re adding them in while counting consumption, investment and government expenditure.

TN Ninan on The Misery Index

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More often than not, inflation and unemployment move in opposite directions. Why this should be so, and whether this actually is so, are questions that can get a lot of economists very hot under the collar very quickly! 

But every now and then, this relationship breaks down very quickly, and we’re then staring at a problem that economists refer to as stagflation. That, in effect, is when inflation is stubbornly high, but unemployment is also stubbornly high. TN Ninan, a columnist for the Business Standard, riffs on this and related concepts in an excellent recent column. 

In particular, he drags up an idea that most of us haven’t heard about lately, the misery index. Given what’s around us these days, though, you might want to construct such an index for the months to come! What is the misery index, you ask? Well, simply add up the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation for any given economy! It’s a simple enough index to create, and you can learn a fair bit by taking a look at which countries are doing well (low on the misery index), and which countries are the unfortunate table-toppers. 

As the column points out, Turkey, Argentina and South Africa top these charts, and Brazil and Russia round off the current top five. But most major economies are inching up this particular chart, and this is something you want to keep an eye on in the days to come. Here is more information, if you’re interested in learning more about the misery index.

Now, as with ice-cream flavors, so also with indices such as these. You can add in different flavors and come up with many different variations. So it was only a matter of time before somebody thought of adding in interest rates to create a new version of the misery index. Imagine living in an economy with high inflation, high unemployment and high interest rates! And if you want a little-bit-of-everything-when-it-comes-to-macro index, well, throw in per capita growth rates too. Note that this last addition actually makes it rather less of a misery index, since high per capita growth is a good thing.

And finally, TN Ninan’s column also mentions another interesting, relatively recent idea that you might want to explore yourself: The Great Gatsby curve. Take a look at what it means, and reflect on how appropriate the name is.

Literature and economic theory – who’d have thunk it, eh?