miércoles, 3 de diciembre de 2014

La estructura productiva en America Latina y las politicas publicas


En los últimos 50 años, Latinoamérica no ha sido capaz de converger en términos de bienestar con los países más desarrollados. Aunque en relación con 1960 la renta per capita de Latinoamérica en dólares constantes se ha multiplicado por 4,5, respecto al ciudadano estadounidense la brecha de bienestar es hoy un 8% mayor que la que padecían sus padres o abuelos. Mientras, los emergentes asiáticos hacían de las últimas décadas la plataforma para su despegue al desarrollo. Singapur, que en 1960 tenía una renta per capita equivalente a la que tenía Ecuador, ya ha convergido con la de EE UU. Corea, en los sesenta igual de próspero que Brasil, hoy tiene un 66% de la renta norteamericana y ha sobrepasado el nivel de vida del ciudadano español. China, con una renta inferior a la vigésima parte de la americana, ha llegado a los 10.000 dólares en dos décadas.

Como muchos otros, en el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) llevamos años tratando de identificar las razones del decepcionante comportamiento diferencial de la región. Como ocurre con los problemas complejos, no hay una explicación única. A lo largo de los años hemos ido construyendo una agenda de investigación que, huyendo de los prejuicios, se apoya sobre la mejor evidencia empírica y marcos analíticos rigurosos que mejoran nuestra comprensión del problema y, con ella, nuestra capacidad para contribuir eficazmente al diálogo de política económica.

Durante muchos años fue obvio que el mayor enemigo de la convergencia de renta del continente era su inestabilidad macroeconómica. La sucesión de crisis financieras, fiscales, cambiarias e hiperinflaciones era la seña de identidad macroeconómica de la región. Aquello acabó hace tiempo, cuando buena parte de los países de la región demostraron haber aprendido las lecciones de aquellas crisis, creando instituciones y políticas que mejoraron los fundamentos macro de la región. Sin embargo, recobrar —y mantener— la estabilidad macroeconómica fue condición necesaria pero no suficiente para la convergencia real.

Cuando la evidencia se impuso, el foco se desplazó hacia el potencial productivo. También era un dato que Latinoamérica contaba con menos capital físico y humano que los países desarrollados. Menos máquinas, menos años de escolarización. Esta explicación aunque correcta, era parcial: a lo largo de estos últimos 50 años la región ha acumulado capital físico, creado empleo y mejorado su capital humano a mayor velocidad que EE UU. Si la convergencia sólo dependiera de la acumulación de factores, el ciudadano de Latinoamérica habría cerrado en más de un 25% su brecha de bienestar con el vecino americano. Pero ocurrió todo lo contrario. La inferencia por tanto debe ser que el principal problema es la eficiencia con la que se combinan los factores de producción; lo que los economistas llamamos productividad total de los factores. En ese campo, los logros de la región eran más que decepcionantes: mientras que Asia redujo a dos tercios su brecha de productividad relativa frente a EE UU, Latinoamérica la duplicó, convirtiendo la convergencia de la acumulación de factores en divergencia neta de bienestar.

Hay que debatir la mejora de la productividad y buscar la colaboración del Estado y el sector privado

Los niveles de desigualdad, la informalidad del mercado de trabajo —algo más de la mitad de los latinoamericanos empleados trabajan en la economía informal—, el tamaño de las empresas, las deficiencias de salud y educación, la falta de infraestructuras, la seguridad ciudadana, la debilidad institucional, la corrupción son, entre otros, factores relevantes que coadyuvan para que el continente no crezca más. Sobre cada uno hay muchos estudios que nos han enseñado la naturaleza del problema e informado de algunas propuestas de reformas estructurales para corregirlos.

Una perspectiva complementaria de la anterior es preguntarse por qué el papel que las políticas activas de desarrollo productivo tuvieron en Asia no fue emulado en Latinoamérica. Una posible razón es que el continente tuvo en el pasado reciente malas experiencias con ellas. Las políticas industriales fueron parte nuclear de las estrategias de desarrollo de muchas economías del continente, si bien su diseño respondía más bien al objetivo de proteger el mercado interno y acelerar la industrialización, y no al de perseguir el aumento de la competitividad internacional. En gran medida no funcionaron. Con frecuencia se convirtieron en fuente de inestabilidad macroeconómica, origen de malas asignaciones de recursos, de corrupción y de captura del Estado por parte de los buscadores de rentas. Por todo ello se ganaron a pulso que la frase de “la mejor política industrial es la que no existe” ocupe todavía hoy un lugar destacado en el imaginario de la región.

En Asia, las políticas de desarrollo productivo fueron diseñadas para impulsar la productividad en un entorno de economías abiertas. Tenían instrumentos claramente definidos ligados a objetivos de exportación y criterios cuantificados, y prestaban una atención especial a los incentivos microeconómicos y a la colaboración entre el sector público y privado. Y esas políticas activas de desarrollo funcionaron.

Se trata de propiciar la adopción de políticas activas con objetivos claros y resultados medibles

El principal mensaje del informe del año 2014 del BID (¿Cómo repensar el desarrollo productivo? Políticas e instituciones sólidas para la transformación económica), es simple: creemos que la región debe pasar página e ir más allá de la pasividad de las políticas de desarrollo auspiciada por el Consenso de Washington. Con el crecimiento mundial en desaceleración y un entorno externo menos favorable para Latinoamérica, es un imperativo impostergable.

No es una vuelta al pasado. Tampoco un recetario de políticas o de mejores prácticas para aplicar sin tener en cuenta las necesidades y singularidades de cada economía. Lo que se propone es situar en el centro del debate económico la mejora de la productividad para, sin apriorismos y con evidencia sólida y contrastada, encontrar los espacios de colaboración del Estado y el sector privado que propicien la adopción de políticas activas con objetivos claros y resultados medibles. Para ello es necesario que su diseño, gestión y evaluación esté encomendada a instituciones transparentes y con capacidad de defenderse de la captura por parte de los buscadores de renta.

No es fácil, pero tampoco imposible. En la región hay prácticas —más de las que se piensa— que han sobrevivido a la demonización de las políticas industriales y siguen conspirando contra el bienestar general. Pero también hay una nueva generación de políticas que funcionan.

En vez de renunciar ciegamente a ser proactivos, lo que se necesita es un marco conceptual que discierna entre buenas y malas políticas. Para ello proponemos una terna de pruebas. Primera: para evitar las ocurrencias y las improvisaciones, antes de anunciar una política pública hay que identificar con precisión qué falla de mercado se pretende solucionar; no siempre se ha hecho, y las consecuencias han sido políticas brumosas sin justificación que no pueden ser evaluadas ni juzgadas por sus méritos. Segunda: a la luz del problema que se pretende solucionar, cuál es el instrumento más apropiado como solución; no todo vale, no se trata de disponer subsidios o desgravaciones fiscales a troche y moche sino de usar instrumentos idóneos para atender la falla de mercado con precisión. Finalmente, la tercera prueba es la verificación de que existen las capacidades institucionales para adoptar la política con éxito: identificar la institución en condiciones de encargarse de ponerla en práctica, gestionar sus recursos, medir sus resultados y garantizar que es capaz de preservar su autonomía frente a los grupos de intereses que potencialmente pretendan capturarla.

Se trata de hacer políticas públicas de desarrollo productivo con objetivos e instrumentos claramente validados y con resultados evaluables, gestionadas por instituciones transparentes y autónomas. Aunque parezca simple, no lo es. Gastar mejor para crecer más es una idea deslumbrante en su sencillez conceptual, aunque también en su dificultad en la práctica. Pero ya está germinando y creciendo en la región. Y conviene que lo sepan, porque este enfoque puede servirles para los retos de crecimiento que España tiene y que, al fin y al cabo, también se resumen en el bajo crecimiento de la productividad de los factores y su dual mercado de trabajo.

José Juan Ruiz es economista jefe del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID). Eduardo Fernández-Arias y Ernesto Stein son economistas del departamento de Investigación del BID. Acaban de publicar ¿Cómo repensar el desarrollo productivo?, que se puede descargar en http://publications.iadb.org/

La innovacion en America Latina


El gasto en innovación y desarrollo (I+D) en América Latina ha crecido en los últimos años, pero aún sigue lejos del de las regiones más punteras. La inversión latinoamericana en I+D llegó al 0,78% del PIB en 2011, el último año con datos disponibles recopilados por el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID). La tasa es superior al 0,48% y al 0,57% que se registraba en 1990 y 2000 respectivamente, según la base de datos de la organización con sede en Washington. Pero sigue a mucha distancia del 2,8% de Estados Unidos y de los niveles de los líderes mundiales, como Corea del Sur (3,7%), Finlandia (3,9%) o Israel (4,3%).

“Hay un enorme déficit de innovación en América Latina”, admite el presidente del BID, Luis Alberto Moreno, en una entrevista con motivo de las jornadas sobre innovación que celebró este martes el banco en la capital de Estados Unidos y que buscan precisamente revertir ese vacío. Tras una selección previa, 16 jóvenes emprendedores latinoamericanos presentaron sus proyectos de innovación ante un foro con inversores privados, y representantes del BID y otros organismos. El objetivo es dar a conocer los proyectos y establecer sinergias que puedan llevar a apoyos económicos.

La inversión latinoamericana en I+D ha pasado en dos décadas del 0,48% del PIB al 0,78%, pero sigue lejos del 2,8% de EE UU o del 3,9% de Finlandia

El contexto actual invita a ello. El colombiano Moreno -que lleva en el cargo desde 2005- cree que la innovación puede ayudar a amortiguar la desaceleración económica que acecha a América Latina. “No hay duda de que los vientos cambiaron, tuvimos vientos a favor con un consumo muy importante de China, buenos precios y tasas de interés bajas. Todo esto está cambiando y eso significa que tenemos que hacer mayores esfuerzos internos, tenemos que remar más por cuenta propia y allí la innovación es una de las maneras de remar mejor”, señala.

Pero al mismo tiempo, el presidente del BID pide ensalzar los avances logrados. “Es verdad que tenemos esos déficits, pero también es cierto que cuando veo a los jóvenes que hemos escogido, una de las cosas que nos falta es celebrar justamente los éxitos de los innovadores de la misma manera que se celebran en otras partes del mundo”, afirma Moreno, que antes de entrar al BID fue embajador de Colombia en EE UU. Y recurre a una analogía futbolística: “Nosotros en América Latina celebramos a los grandes futbolistas. Está muy bien y nos sentimos muy contentos por ejemplo los colombianos por tener un James Rodríguez en el Real Madrid. Pero yo me pregunto dónde está el James Rodríguez de la biotecnología”.

Como ejemplo del progreso en los últimos años, Moreno menciona el impacto que ha tenido la aplicación de técnicas de I+D en la producción agrícola en Brasil y Argentina. Son los dos países que lideran la inversión en innovación en la región. El gasto en I+D en Brasil representó el 1,21% del PIB en 2011, seguido a distancia por Argentina (0,65%), Costa Rica (0,48%), México (0,46%), Chile (0,45%) y Uruguay (0,43%), según los últimos datos disponibles recopilados por el BID.

Nos sentimos muy contentos  los colombianos por tener un James Rodríguez en el Real Madrid. Pero yo me pregunto dónde está el James Rodríguez de la biotecnología"

Moreno cree que en América Latina la innovación puede servir para paliar desigualdades sociales y ocupar los vacíos que pueden generar la falta de servicios públicos. El objetivo son “aplicaciones que pueden ser propias a nuestros problemas”. Como ejemplo, apunta, son muy distintas las necesidades de las clases medias latinoamericanas de las estadounidenses, que “son familias que tienen dos coches y una piscina en casa”.

Algunos de los proyectos seleccionados en las jornadas avanzan en esa dirección. Por ejemplo, un joven brasileño ha creado una empresa que utiliza tecnologías móviles para ofrecer atención sanitaria a comunidades con escaso acceso a la asistencia pública. La plataforma identifica, por medio de una serie de exámenes, el riesgo que tiene una persona de padecer enfermedades graves. Un colombiano ha impulsado un sistema de tratamiento de aguas, que genera un ahorro del 70%. Mientras, un chileno ha ideado un sistema de evaluación oftalmológica que reduce costes y tiempo de espera. “Nuestro espacio vital es construir soluciones de tecnología a nuestras propias necesidades”, remarca Moreno.

El presidente del BID sostiene que la innovación es un “ecosistema” con tres patas: educación, financiación y acceso a redes de emprendedores. “En la medida en que todo ese ecosistema funcione, los emprendedores tienen más capacidad de sobresalir”, apunta. Y subraya que el apoyo público es un factor importante, pero que también hay intangibles: “Entender que el fracaso es uno de los instrumentos mediante el cual se aprende para innovar mejor. Es algo que culturalmente nos falta”.
http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2014/12/03/actualidad/1417562044_908650.html

lunes, 24 de noviembre de 2014

Germany´s position in Europe´s Crisis

BERLIN – Germany’s stance toward Europe has become one of rejection and disengagement. Its policymakers deny the eurozone’s crisis-ridden countries a more active fiscal policy; refuse to support a European investment agenda to generate demand and growth; have declared a fiscal surplus, rather than faster potential growth, as their primary domestic goal; and have begun turning against the European Central Bank (ECB) in the struggle against deflation and a credit crunch. On all four counts, Germany is wrong.
To be sure, Germany is justified in rejecting narrow-minded calls by France and Italy for unconditional fiscal expansion. After all, fiscal stimulus can work only if it supports private investment and is accompanied by much more ambitious structural reforms – the kind of reforms that France and Italy are currently resisting.
But Germany has all of the leverage it needs to implement the stability-oriented reforms that it wants for Europe. For starters, Germany, together with the European Commission, can compel France to pursue deeper reforms in exchange for more time to consolidate its deficit.
Germany cannot, however, indulge its obsession with supply-side reforms without also pursuing growth-enhancing policies. As Germany knows from its own experience in the early 2000s, the benefits of supply-side reforms – namely, improved competitiveness and higher long-term growth rates – take a long time to emerge.
Time is a luxury that Europe does not have. With every month that the economy loses productive capacity, the likelihood of stagnation and deflation rises.
The key to ending the European crisis is a stimulus plan that addresses deficiencies on both the supply and demand sides. That is why Germany’s refusal to help find a way to finance the proposed European investment agenda – which, for a limited time, would fund productive private investment – is a mistake.
Equally problematic is Germany’s focus on maintaining a fiscal surplus. With projections for German GDP growth this year and next revised downward by more than 0.6 percentage points in the last few months, the government could be forced to initiate a pro-cyclical fiscal policy to achieve its goal, inducing even lower growth at home and throughout the eurozone.
Given that the German economy’s output gap remains negative, the government should be implementing expansionary fiscal policy that targets the country’s infrastructure weaknesses. In this sense, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s plan to spend an additional €10 billion ($12.5 billion) on public investment in 2016-2018 is a step in the right direction. But, at just 0.1% of Germany’s annual GDP, Schäuble’s scheme looks more like an attempt to quiet criticism from the rest of Europe than a genuine policy shift.
Germany’s fourth policy mistake is its apparent withdrawal of support for the ECB. Over the last seven years, the ECB’s actions have helped Germany’s economy and taxpayers as much as those of its neighbors. Moreover, the claim that the ECB’s purchases of asset-backed securities amount to “toxic loans” that transfer risk to German taxpayers is unfounded; after all, there have been almost no defaults since 2008.
Germany’s leaders need to recognize this – and to defend the ECB publicly from baseless fear mongering. Failure to do so may reflect an effort to forestall the rise of the far-right anti-European political forces, particularly the Alternative for Germany. But this strategy merely plays into the party’s hands.
If Germany refuses to take a more reasoned approach, it risks undermining the ECB’s credibility, thereby reducing the effectiveness of its measures. If that happens, the ECB may well be compelled to initiate large-scale purchases of eurozone government bonds through its so-called “outright monetary transactions” scheme – a plan that many German policymakers and economists staunchly oppose.
The German government can use its considerable leverage to compel France and Italy to pursue the structural reforms that both countries need, while allowing a growth-friendly demand stimulus to lift the threat of deflation hanging over the eurozone. And it has the authority to bolster the ECB’s credibility and thus its efforts to ensure future price stability and prevent financial contagion.
Europe needs a grand bargain, involving close coordination on structural reforms and fiscal and monetary policy. Germany’s relative economic and political stability, far from enabling it to disengage from such efforts, makes it among the most important protagonists in their development and implementation. The question is whether Germany’s leaders will recognize this before Europe’s economy falls into an even deeper slump.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/germany-wrong-on-european-policy-by-marcel-fratzscher-2014-11#jgzfx3ZlLVGRL7Ot.99

Dollar recovery and international economy

 

 

The Return of the Dollar

 
LAGUNA BEACH – The US dollar is on the move. In the last four months alone, it has soared by more than 7% compared with a basket of more than a dozen global currencies, and by even more against the euro and the Japanese yen. This dollar rally, the result of genuine economic progress and divergent policy developments, could contribute to the “rebalancing” that has long eluded the world economy. But that outcome is far from guaranteed, especially given the related risks of financial instability.
Two major factors are currently working in the dollar’s favor, particularly compared to the euro and the yen. First, the United States is consistently outperforming Europe and Japan in terms of economic growth and dynamism – and will likely continue to do so – owing not only to its economic flexibility and entrepreneurial energy, but also to its more decisive policy action since the start of the global financial crisis.
Second, after a period of alignment, the monetary policies of these three large and systemically important economies are diverging, taking the world economy from a multi-speed trajectory to a multi-track one. Indeed, whereas the US Federal Reserve terminated its large-scale securities purchases, known as “quantitative easing” (QE), last month, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank recently announced the expansion of their monetary-stimulus programs. In fact, ECB President Mario Draghi signaled a willingness to expand his institution’s balance sheet by a massive €1 trillion ($1.25 trillion).
With higher US market interest rates attracting additional capital inflows and pushing the dollar even higher, the currency’s revaluation would appear to be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to catalyzing a long-awaited global rebalancing – one that promotes stronger growth and mitigates deflation risk in Europe and Japan. Specifically, an appreciating dollar improves the price competitiveness of European and Japanese companies in the US and other markets, while moderating some of the structural deflationary pressure in the lagging economies by causing import prices to rise.
Yet the benefits of the dollar’s rally are far from guaranteed, for both economic and financial reasons. While the US economy is more resilient and agile than its developed counterparts, it is not yet robust enough to be able to adjust smoothly to a significant shift in external demand to other countries. There is also the risk that, given the role of the ECB and the Bank of Japan in shaping their currencies’ performance, such a shift could be characterized as a “currency war” in the US Congress, prompting a retaliatory policy response.
Furthermore, sudden large currency moves tend to translate into financial-market instability. To be sure, this risk was more acute when a larger number of emerging-economy currencies were pegged to the US dollar, which meant that a significant shift in the dollar’s value would weaken other countries’ balance-of-payments position and erode their international reserves, thereby undermining their creditworthiness. Today, many of these countries have adopted more flexible exchange-rate regimes, and quite a few retain adequate reserve holdings.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-dollar-rally-global-rebalancing-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2014-11#HqSSFoZf34MDxeBf.99

lunes, 27 de octubre de 2014

Crecimiento economico vs bienestar social


Dos nuevos estudios muestran, una vez más, la magnitud del problema de la desigualdad que azota a Estados Unidos. El primero, el informe anual sobre ingresos y pobreza, emitido por la Oficina del Censo de Estados Unidos, muestra que, a pesar de la supuesta recuperación de la economía desde la Gran Recesión, los ingresos de los estadounidenses comunes continúan estancados. El ingreso promedio de los hogares, ajustado a la inflación, se mantiene por debajo del nivel de hace un cuarto de siglo.

Antes se pensaba que la mayor fortaleza de Estados Unidos no era su poder militar, sino un sistema económico que era la envidia del mundo. Sin embargo, ¿por qué otros buscarían emular un modelo económico mediante el cual una gran parte —incluso una mayoría— de la población ha visto que sus ingresos se estancan mientras que los ingresos de los ubicados en la parte superior de la distribución de ingresos se disparan al alza?

Un segundo estudio, el Informe sobre Desarrollo Humano 2014 del Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, corrobora estos hallazgos. Cada año, el PNUD publica una clasificación de países según su índice de desarrollo humano (IDH), el cual incorpora otras dimensiones del bienestar además del ingreso, que incluyen las relacionadas a la salud y educación.

EE UU, según el IDH, ocupa el quinto lugar en el mundo y se encuentra por debajo de Noruega, Australia, Suiza y los Países Bajos. No obstante, cuando su puntuación se ajusta por el factor desigualdad, esta cae 23 puntos —uno los más grandes descensos de ese tipo entre los países altamente desarrollado. De hecho, EE UU cae por debajo de Grecia y Eslovaquia, países que las personas normalmente no consideran como modelos a seguir o como competidores de EE UU en la disputa por los primeros puestos en las tablas de clasificación.

La movilidad descendente es una amenaza real, mientras que la movilidad ascendente es limitada

El informe del PNUD hace hincapié en otro aspecto del desempeño social: la vulnerabilidad. Señala que, si bien muchos países lograron sacar a las personas de la pobreza, la vida de muchas de esas personas continúa siendo precaria. Una pequeña vicisitud —por ejemplo, una enfermedad en la familia— puede empujarlas nuevamente a la indigencia. La movilidad descendente es una amenaza real, mientras que la movilidad ascendente es limitada.

En Estados Unidos la movilidad ascendente es más un mito que una realidad, mientras que la movilidad descendente y la vulnerabilidad es una experiencia ampliamente compartida. Esto se debe, en parte, al sistema de atención de salud de Estados Unidos, el cual continúa dejando a los estadounidenses pobres en una situación precaria, a pesar de las reformas del presidente Barack Obama.

Aquellos en la parte inferior se encuentran sólo a pocos pasos de la quiebra, enfrentando todo lo que esto implica. Con frecuencia, es suficiente que sufran una enfermedad, divorcio o pérdida del empleo para que se vean empujados al abismo.

La Ley de Protección al Paciente y Cuidado de Salud Asequible de 2010 (también llamada Obamacare) tenía la intención de desahogar estas amenazas —y hay fuertes indicios que señalan que esta ley sí se encuentra de camino a reducir significativamente el número de estadounidenses sin seguro médico. Sin embargo, y en parte debido a un fallo de la Corte Suprema y a la obstinación de los gobernadores y legisladores republicanos, que en dos docenas de Estados de EE UU se han negado a ampliar Medicaid (seguro para los pobres) —a pesar de que el Gobierno federal paga casi la totalidad de la factura— 41 millones de estadounidenses permanecen sin seguro de enfermedad. Cuando la desigualdad económica se traduce en desigualdad política —tal como ha sucedido en muchas regiones de EE UU—, los gobiernos prestan poca atención a las necesidades de aquellos en los estratos inferiores.

Ni el producto interior bruto (PIB) ni el IDH reflejan cambios en el transcurso del tiempo o las diferencias entre países en cuanto a la vulnerabilidad. No obstante, en Estados Unidos y en otros lugares se ha mostrado una marcada disminución de la seguridad del empleo. Aquellos con un trabajo se preocupan sobre si van a ser capaces de mantenerlos, mientras que los desempleados se preocupan sobre si van a conseguir trabajar .

La reciente crisis económica aniquiló la riqueza de mucha gente. En EE UU, incluso después de la recuperación del mercado de valores, la mediana de la riqueza cayó más del 40% desde el año 2007 al 2013. Eso significa que muchas de las personas mayores y aquellas que se acercan a la jubilación se preocupan sobre sus niveles de vida. Millones de estadounidenses han perdido sus viviendas y millones de personas más se enfrentan a la inseguridad de saber que pueden perder las suyas en el futuro.

Tradicionalmente, Europa ha entendido la importancia de abordar la vulnerabilidad, pero la austeridad ha hecho crecer de una manera sin precedentes

Estas inseguridades se suman a las que durante mucho tiempo han enfrentado los estadounidenses. En las zonas urbanas centrales marginadas del país miles de jóvenes hispanos y afroamericanos se enfrentan a la inseguridad de una policía y un sistema judicial que son disfuncionales e injustos; cruzarse en el camino de un oficial de policía que tuvo una mala noche puede llevar a una pena de prisión injustificada, o incluso a peores situaciones.

Tradicionalmente, Europa ha entendido la importancia de abordar la vulnerabilidad mediante el suministro de un sistema de protección social. Los europeos han reconocido que un buen sistema de protección social puede incluso conducir a un mejor desempeño económico en general, debido a que los individuos están más dispuestos a asumir riesgos que conducen a un mayor crecimiento económico.

No obstante, en muchas partes de Europa, en la actualidad, la alta tasa de paro (12% en promedio, y del 25% en los países más afectados), junto con los recortes en la protección social que fueron inducidos por la austeridad, se han traducido en un aumento sin precedentes en la vulnerabilidad. Esto implica que la caída del bienestar de la sociedad puede ser mucho mayor a la disminución que muestran la medición convencional del PIB —cifras que por sí solas ya son bastante sombrías, debido a que la mayoría de los países publican ingresos reales per cápita (ajustados a la inflación) que son menores en la actualidad que aquellos que mostraban antes de la crisis—. Es decir, que se ha perdido un lustro.
El informe emitido por la Comisión Internacional para la Medición del Desempeño Económico y el Progreso Social (que presidí) hizo hincapié en que el PIB no es una buena medida para mostrar cuán bien se desempeña la economía. Los informes del Censo de EE UU y del PNUD nos recuerdan la importancia de esta percepción. Ya se ha sacrificado demasiado en el altar del fetichismo del PIB.
Independientemente de cuán rápido crece el PIB, un sistema económico que no puede brindar ganancias a la mayoría de sus ciudadanos y en el cual una proporción creciente de la población se enfrenta a una inseguridad cada vez mayor es, fundamentalmente, un sistema económico fracasado. Y algunas las políticas, como las de la austeridad, que aumentan la inseguridad y conducen a ingresos y nivel de vida menores a grandes segmentos de la población son, fundamentalmente, políticas erróneas.

 

Joseph E. Stiglitz es premio Nobel de Economía y profesor en la Universidad de Columbia.

Su libro más reciente, en coautoría con Bruce Greenwald, es Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress.

 

© Project Syndicate, 2014.

 

Traducido del inglés por Rocío L. Barrientos.

viernes, 17 de octubre de 2014

Inequality: theory and practice

 article on inequality....


LAGUNA BEACH – There were quite a few disconnects at the recently concluded Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Among the most striking was the disparity between participants’ interest in discussions of inequality and the ongoing lack of a formal action plan for governments to address it. This represents a profound failure of policy imagination – one that must urgently be addressed.
There is good reason for the spike in interest. While inequality has decreased across countries, it has increased within them, in the advanced and developing worlds alike. The process has been driven by a combination of secular and structural issues – including the changing nature of technological advancement, the rise of “winner-take-all” investment characteristics, and political systems favoring the wealthy – and has been turbocharged by cyclical forces.
In the developed world, the problem is rooted in unprecedented political polarization, which has impeded comprehensive responses and placed an excessive policy burden on central banks. Though monetary authorities enjoy more political autonomy than other policymaking bodies, they lack the needed tools to address effectively the challenges that their countries face.
In normal times, fiscal policy would support monetary policy, including by playing a redistributive role. But these are not normal times. With political gridlock blocking an appropriate fiscal response – after 2008, the United States Congress did not pass an annual budget, a basic component of responsible economic governance, for five years – central banks have been forced to bolster economies artificially. To do so, they have relied on near-zero interest rates and unconventional measures like quantitative easing to stimulate growth and job creation.
Beyond being incomplete, this approach implicitly favors the wealthy, who hold a disproportionately large share of financial assets. Meanwhile, companies have become increasingly aggressive in their efforts to reduce their tax bills, including through so-called inversions, by which they move their headquarters to lower-tax jurisdictions.
As a result, most countries face a trio of inequalities – of income, wealth, and opportunity – which, left unchecked, reinforce one another, with far-reaching consequences. Indeed, beyond this trio’s moral, social, and political implications lies a serious economic concern: instead of creating incentives for hard work and innovation, inequality begins to undermine economic dynamism, investment, employment, and prosperity.
Given that affluent households spend a smaller share of their incomes and wealth, greater inequality translates into lower overall consumption, thereby hindering the recovery of economies already burdened by inadequate aggregate demand. Today’s high levels of inequality also impede the structural reforms needed to boost productivity, while undermining efforts to address residual pockets of excessive indebtedness.
This is a dangerous combination that erodes social cohesion, political effectiveness, current GDP growth, and future economic potential. That is why it is so disappointing that, despite heightened awareness of inequality, the IMF/World Bank meetings – a gathering of thousands of policymakers, private-sector participants, and journalists, which included seminars on inequality in advanced countries and developing regions alike – failed to make a consequential impact on the policy agenda.
Policymakers seem convinced that the time is not right for a meaningful initiative to address inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. But waiting will only make the problem more difficult to resolve.
In fact, a number of steps can and should be taken to stem the rise in inequality. In the US, for example, sustained political determination would help to close massive loopholes in estate planning and inheritance, as well as in household and corporate taxation, that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
Likewise, there is scope for removing the antiquated practice of taxing hedge and private-equity funds’ “carried interest” at a preferential rate. The way home ownership is taxed and subsidized could be reformed more significantly, especially at the top price levels. And a strong case has been made for raising the minimum wage.
To be sure, such measures will make only a dent in inequality, albeit an important and visible one. In order to deepen their impact, a more comprehensive macroeconomic policy stance is needed, with the explicit goal of reinvigorating and redesigning structural-reform efforts, boosting aggregate demand, and eliminating debt overhangs. Such an approach would reduce the enormous policy burden currently borne by central banks.
It is time for heightened global attention to inequality to translate into concerted action. Some initiatives would tackle inequality directly; others would defuse some of the forces that drive it. Together, they would go a long way toward mitigating a serious impediment to the economic and social wellbeing of current and future generations.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/imf-world-bank-annual-meetings-and-inequality-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2014-10#BZkarHF2oS5dlCi0.99

sábado, 11 de octubre de 2014

Where economic policy is taken Europe?

Unfortunately, Krugman´s analysis continue to be right based in the evidence of Europe economic performance.......

Anyone who works in international monetary economics is familiar with Dornbusch’s Law:
The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.
And so it is with the latest euro crisis. Not that long ago the austerians who had dictated macro policy in the euro area were strutting around, proclaiming victory on the basis of a modest uptick in growth. Then inflation plunged and the eurozone economy began to sputter — and perhaps more important, everyone looked at the fundamentals again and realized that the situation remainsextremely dire.
Now, things looked very dire in the summer of 2012, too, and Mario Draghi pulled Europe back from the brink. And maybe, just maybe, he can do it again. But the task looks much harder.
In 2012, the problem was very high borrowing costs in the periphery — which we now know were driven more by liquidity issues than solvency concerns. That is, the markets basically feared that Spain or Italy might default in the near term because they would literally run out of money — and market fears threatened to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And all it took to defuse that crisis was three words: “Whatever it takes”. Once the prospect of a cash shortage was taken off the table, the panic quickly subsided, and at this point both Spain and Italy have historically low borrowing costs.
What’s happening now, however, is very different. It’s a slower-motion crisis, involving the euro area as a whole, which is sliding into a deflationary trap with the ECB already essentially at the zero lower bound. Draghi can try to get traction through quantitative easing, but it’s by no means clear that this could do the trick even under the best of circumstances — and in reality he faces severe political constraints on what he can do.
What strikes me, also, is the extent of intellectual confusion that remains. Germany still seems determined to regard the whole thing as the wages of fiscal irresponsibility, which not only rules out effective fiscal stimulus but hobbles QE, since it’s anathema for them to consider buying government debt.
And it’s remarkable, too, how the logic of the liquidity trap remains elusive even after six years — six years! — at the zero lower bound. Not the worst example, but I read Reza Moghadam today:
Wages and other labour costs are simply too high, even by the standards of rich countries, let alone emerging markets competitors.
Augh! If it’s external competitiveness you’re worried about, depreciating the euro is what you want, not wage cuts. And cutting wages in a liquidity-trap economy almost surely deepens the slump. How can this not be part of what everyone understands by now?
Europe has surprised many people, myself included, with its resilience. And I do think the Draghi-era ECB has become a major source of strength. But I (and others I talk to) are having an ever harder time seeing how this ends — or rather, how it ends non-catastrophically. You may find a story in which Marine Le Pen takes France out of both the euro and the EU implausible; but what’s your scenario?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

martes, 9 de septiembre de 2014

Recuperacion en US versus depresion en Europa

Interesante analisis de Krugman.
 
El jueves, el Banco Central Europeo anunciaba una serie de nuevas medidas que iba a tomar para tratar de impulsar la economía de Europa. El anuncio tenía un tufillo a desesperación, lo cual era tranquilizador. Europa, que está en peor situación económica que durante la década de 1930, se encuentra sin lugar a dudas atrapada en un torbellino deflacionario, y es bueno saber que el BCE es consciente de ello. Pero puede que la revelación haya llegado demasiado tarde. No está nada claro que las medidas que hay ahora sobre el tapete sean lo bastante contundentes para invertir el sentido de esa espiral deflacionaria.
Y ahí estaríamos nosotros, si no fuera por Bernanke. En Estados Unidos, las cosas distan de ir bien, pero parece que (al menos por ahora) hemos escapado a la clase de trampa que amenaza a Europa. ¿Por qué? Una posible respuesta es que la Reserva Federal empezó hace años a hacer lo que debía, al comprar billones de dólares en obligaciones, a fin de evitar la situación a la que se enfrenta ahora su homólogo europeo.
Se puede alegar, y yo lo haría, que la Reserva debería haber hecho todavía más. Pero sus responsables han sido víctimas de ataques feroces durante todo este tiempo. Expertos, políticos y plutócratas los han acusado una y otra vez de "degradar" el dólar, y nos advertían de que la inflación iba a dispararse de un momento a otro. El repunte de la inflación que predijeron no se ha producido pero, a pesar de haberse equivocado un año tras otro, casi ninguno de esos detractores ha reconocido su error, y ni siquiera han cambiado de cantinela. Y la pregunta que me he estado haciendo es por qué. ¿Qué empuja a un sector poderoso de nuestra clase política —llamémoslo el comité de la deflación— a exigir políticas de restricción del crédito incluso en una economía deprimida y con poca inflación?
Una cosa está clara: como tantas otras cosas hoy día, la política monetaria se ha convertido en gran medida en un asunto partidista. No solo porque los mensajes sobre la degradación del dólar provengan casi exclusivamente de la derecha del espectro político; la paranoia de la inflación se ha convertido, hasta un punto llamativo, en una cuestión de corrección política conservadora, de manera que incluso algunos economistas que deberían ser más sensatos se han unido al coro. Así que podemos concretar más la pregunta: ¿por qué la gente de derechas odia la expansión monetaria, aun cuando se necesita desesperadamente?
Una de las respuestas reside en el poder de la verdadez, expresión de justa fama acuñada por Stephen Colbert para referirse a cosas que no son ciertas, pero se lo parecen a algunos. "La Reserva Federal está imprimiendo dinero, el hecho de imprimir dinero genera inflación y la inflación siempre es mala" es una afirmación falsa por partida triple, pero a mucha gente le parece verdadera. Y sí, la tendencia a preferir la verdadez a una verdad más compleja está y ha estado casi siempre relacionada con el conservadurismo político, y esta tendencia se intensifica aún más en una época en la que algunos líderes políticos extraen sus teorías monetarias de las novelas de Ayn Rand.
Otra respuesta es el interés de clase. La inflación ayuda a los deudores y perjudica a los acreedores, mientras que con la deflación sucede lo contrario. Y los ricos tienen muchas más probabilidades que los pobres de ser acreedores, de tener dinero en el banco y obligaciones en la cartera, en vez de hipotecas y saldos pendientes en la tarjeta de crédito. En la época dorada de finales del siglo XIX, la élite se movilizó en masa para derrotar a William Jennings Bryan, que pretendía sacar a Estados Unidos del patrón oro; el coste de la campaña electoral, expresado como porcentaje del PIB, fue mucho más alto en 1896 que en cualquier otra elección presidencial, anterior o posterior. ¿Se están movilizando hoy los ricos de manera similar en contra de la política del crédito barato?
Por lo que yo sé, no tenemos pruebas fehacientes de ello. Sin duda, hay muchos inversores ricos entre la multitud que denuncia la degradación del dólar, pero no sabemos con certeza lo representativos que son; y se podría argumentar que a los grandes inversores les deberían gustar las políticas expansivas de la Reserva, que han sido muy beneficiosas para la Bolsa. Pero puede que los ricos no confíen en esa conexión, en parte porque la inflacionaria década de 1970 fue muy mala para los mercados bursátiles. Y sabemos a ciencia cierta que los muy ricos tienen más tendencia que el resto de los ciudadanos a considerar que el déficit presupuestario es nuestro mayor problema, aun cuando la austeridad fiscal probablemente sea perjudicial para sus ganancias. Por tanto, es probable que el interés de clase aparente también sea una motivación clave para el comité de la deflación.
Una nota al margen: los ricos de Europa no son tan ricos ni tan influyentes como los estadounidenses pero, no obstante, los intereses de los acreedores son todavía mayores que en Estados Unidos porque los países acreedores, Alemania en concreto, han acabado dictando las políticas de toda Europa.
Y es importante que entendamos que el dominio que ejercen los intereses de los acreedores a ambos lados del Atlántico, respaldado por doctrinas económicas falsas pero que generan una atracción visceral, ha tenido consecuencias trágicas. Nuestras economías se han debilitado a causa de la penosa situación de los deudores, que se han visto obligados a recortar drásticamente el gasto. Para evitar una depresión profunda y prolongada, necesitamos políticas que contrarresten ese lastre. Pero, en vez de eso, lo que tenemos es la obsesión con los peligros del déficit presupuestario y la paranoia de la inflación. Y una depresión económica que no se acaba nunca.
Paul Krugman es profesor de Economía de la Universidad de Princeton y premio Nobel de Economía de 2008.

US economic recovery vs EU depression



Krugman analysis of EU and US economic situation
 
On Thursday, the European Central Bank announced a series of new steps it was taking in an effort to boost Europe’s economy. There was a whiff of desperation about the announcement, which was reassuring. Europe, which is doing worse than it did in the 1930s, is clearly in the grip of a deflationary vortex, and it’s good to know that the central bank understands that. But its epiphany may have come too late. It’s far from clear that the measures now on the table will be strong enough to reverse the downward spiral.
 
And there but for the grace of Bernanke go we. Things in the United States are far from O.K., but we seem (at least for now) to have steered clear of the kind of trap facing Europe. Why? One answer is that the Federal Reserve started doing the right thing years ago, buying trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds in order to avoid the situation its European counterpart now faces.
 
You can argue, and I would, that the Fed should have done even more. But Fed officials have faced fierce attacks all the way. Pundits, politicians and plutocrats have accused them, over and over again, of “debasing” the dollar, and warned that soaring inflation is just around the corner. The predicted surge in inflation has never arrived, but despite being wrong year after year, hardly any of the critics have admitted being wrong, or even changed their tune. And the question I’ve been trying to answer is why. What is it that makes a powerful faction in our body politic — call it the deflation caucus — demand tight money even in a depressed, low-inflation economy?
 
One thing is clear: Like so much else these days, monetary policy has become very much a partisan issue. It’s not just that talk of dollar debasement comes pretty much exclusively from the right of the political spectrum; inflation paranoia has, to a remarkable extent, become a matter of conservative political correctness, so that even economists who should know better have joined in the chorus. So we can focus the question further: Why do people on the right hate monetary expansion, even when it’s desperately needed?
 
One answer is the power of truthiness — Stephen Colbert’s justly famed term for things that aren’t true, but feel true to some people. “The Fed is printing money, printing money leads to inflation, and inflation is always a bad thing” is a triply untrue statement, but it feels true to a lot of people. And, yes, a tendency to prefer truthiness to more complicated truth is and pretty much always has been associated with political conservatism, and this tendency is especially strong in an era when leading politicians get their monetary theory from Ayn Rand novels.
 
Another answer is class interest. Inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors, deflation does the reverse. And the wealthy are much more likely than workers and the poor to be creditors, to have money in the bank and bonds in their portfolio rather than mortgages and credit-card balances outstanding. Back in the Gilded Age, the elite mobilized en masse to defeat William Jennings Bryan, who threatened to take the United States off the gold standard; campaign spending as a percentage of G.D.P. was far higher in 1896 than in any presidential election before or since. Are the wealthy similarly mobilized against easy-money policies today?
 
As far as I know, we don’t have rigorous evidence to that effect. There are certainly a lot of wealthy investors in the debasing-the-dollar crowd, but we don’t know for sure how representative they are — and you could argue that big investors should like the Fed’s expansionary policies, which have been very good for the stock market. But the wealthy may not trust that connection, in part because the inflationary ’70s were very bad for stocks. And we do know that the very wealthy are much more likely than the general public to consider budget deficits our biggest problem, even though fiscal austerity is probably bad for profits. So perceived class interest is probably also a key motivation for the deflation caucus.
 
A side note: Europe’s wealthy aren’t as wealthy or influential as their American counterparts, but creditor interests are nonetheless even more powerful than they are here because creditor nations, Germany in particular, have ended up dictating policy for the whole of Europe.
 
And the important thing to understand is that the dominance of creditor interests on both sides of the Atlantic, supported by false but viscerally appealing economic doctrines, has had tragic consequences. Our economies have been dragged down by the woes of debtors, who have been forced to slash spending. To avoid a deep, prolonged slump, we needed policies to offset this drag. What we got instead was an obsession with the evils of budget deficits and paranoia over inflation — and a slump that has gone on and on.

miércoles, 20 de agosto de 2014

Perils of Economic Consensus

Rodrik´s analysis on economic consensus
 
PRINCETON – The Initiative on Global Markets, based at the University of Chicago, periodically surveys a group of leading academic economists, of varying political persuasions, on the issues of the day. Its latest roundup asked whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan helped to reduce unemployment in the United States.
Officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the plan entailed government spending of more than $800 billion on infrastructure, education, health, and energy, tax incentives, and various social programs. Implemented in the midst of an economic crisis, it was the classic Keynesian response.
The economists were virtually unanimous. Thirty-six of the 37 top economists who responded to the survey said that the plan had been successful in its avowed objective of reducing unemployment. The University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers cheered the consensus in his New York Times blog. The virulent public debate about whether fiscal stimulus works, he complained, has become totally disconnected from what experts know and agree on.
In fact, economists agree on many things, a number of which are politically controversial. The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw listed some of them in 2009. The following propositions garnered support from at least 90% of economists: import tariffs and quotas reduce general economic welfare; rent controls reduce the supply of housing; floating exchange rates provide an effective international monetary system; the US should not restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries; and fiscal policy stimulates the economy when there is less than full employment.
This consensus about so many important issues contrasts rather starkly with the general perception that economists rarely agree on anything. “If all the economists were laid end to end,” George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, “they would not reach a conclusion.” Frustrated by the conflicting and hedged advice that he was receiving from his advisers, President Dwight Eisenhower is said to have asked once for a “one-handed economist.”
No doubt, there are many public-policy questions that economists debate vigorously. What should the top income-tax rate be? Should the minimum wage be raised? Should the fiscal deficit be reduced by raising taxes or cutting spending? Do patents stimulate or impede innovation? On these and many other issues, economists tend to be good at seeing both sides of the issue, and I suspect that a survey on such questions would reveal little consensus.
A consensus among economists can arise for both good and bad reasons. Sometimes a consensus is innocuous enough, as when you hear economists argue that one ignores the role of incentives at one’s peril. Can anyone really disagree with that? Sometimes it is restricted to a particular episode and is based on evidence accumulated after the fact: Yes, the Soviet economic system was hugely inefficient; yes, the Obama fiscal stimulus of 2009 did reduce unemployment.
But when a consensus forms around the universal applicability of a specific model, the critical assumptions of which are likely to be violated in many settings, we have a problem.
Consider some of the areas of widespread agreement that I listed above. The proposition that trade restrictions reduce economic welfare is certainly not generally valid, and it is violated when certain conditions – such as externalities or increasing returns to scale – are present. Moreover, it requires that economists make value judgments on distributional effects, which are better left to the electorate itself.
Likewise, the proposition that rent controls reduce the supply of housing is violated under conditions of imperfect competition. And the proposition that floating exchange rates are an effective system relies on assumptions about the workings of the monetary and financial system that have proved problematic; I suspect a poll today would find significantly less support for it.
Perhaps economists tend to agree that certain assumptions are more prevalent in the real world. Or they think that one set of models works better “on average” than another. Even so, as scientists, should they not adorn their endorsements with the appropriate caveats? Shouldn’t they worry that categorical statements such as those above may prove to be misleading in at least some settings?
The problem is that economists often confuse a model for the model. When that happens, a consensus is certainly not something to cheer about.
Two kinds of mischief may then follow. First, there are errors of omission – cases in which blind spots in the consensus prevent economists from being able to see troubles looming ahead. A recent example is the failure of economists to grasp the dangerous confluence of circumstances that produced the global financial crisis. The oversight was not due to the lack of models of bubbles, asymmetric information, distorted incentives, or bank runs. It was due to the fact that such models were neglected in favor of models that stressed efficient markets.
Then there are the errors of commission – cases in which economists’ fixation on one particular model of the world makes them complicit in the administration of policies whose failure could have been predicted ahead of time. Economists’ advocacy of neoliberal “Washington Consensus” policies and of financial globalization falls into this category. What happened in both cases is that economists overlooked serious second-best complications, such as learning externalities and weak institutions, which blunted the reforms and, in some cases, caused them to backfire.
Disagreements among economists are healthy. They reflect the fact that their discipline comprises a diverse collection of models, and that matching reality to model is an imperfect science with a lot of room for error. It is better for the public to be exposed to this uncertainty than for it to be lulled into a false sense of security based on the appearance of certain knowledge.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dani-rodrik-warns-that-agreement-among-economists-can-create-an-illusion-of-certain-knowledge#vMC4dEtuBw6bLcAb.99

lunes, 11 de agosto de 2014

Income, inequality and economic growth in US



The topic of income inequality and its effects has been the subject of countless analysis stretching back generations and crossing geopolitical boundaries. Despite the tendency to speak about this issue in moral terms, the central questions are economic ones: Would the U.S. economy be better off with a narrower income gap? And, if an unequal distribution of income hinders growth, which solutions could do more harm than good, and which could make the economic pie bigger for all?

Given the decades--indeed, centuries--of debate on this subject, it comes as no surprise that the answers are complex. A degree of inequality is to be expected in any market economy. It can keep the economy functioning effectively, incentivizing investment and expansion--but too much inequality can undermine growth.

Higher levels of income inequality increase political pressures, discouraging trade, investment, and hiring. Keynes first showed that income inequality can lead affluent households (Americans included) to increase savings and decrease consumption (1), while those with less means increase consumer borrowing to sustain consumption…until those options run out. When these imbalances can no longer be sustained, we see a boom/bust cycle such as the one that culminated in the Great Recession (2).

Aside from the extreme economic swings, such income imbalances tend to dampen social mobility and produce a less-educated workforce that can't compete in a changing global economy. This diminishes future income prospects and potential long-term growth, becoming entrenched as political repercussions extend the problems.

Alternatively, if we added another year of education to the American workforce from 2014 to 2019, in line with education levels increasing at the rate of educational achievement seen from 1960 to 1965, U.S. potential GDP would likely be $525 billion, or 2.4% higher in five years, than in the baseline. If education levels were increasing at the rate they were 15 years ago, the level of potential GDP would be 1%, or $185 billion higher in five years.

Our review of the data, as well as a wealth of research on this matter, leads us to conclude that the current level of income inequality in the U.S. is dampening GDP growth, at a time when the world's biggest economy is struggling to recover from the Great Recession and the government is in need of funds to support an aging population.


We see a narrowing of the current income gap as beneficial to the economy. In addition to strengthening the quality of economic expansions, bringing levels of income inequality under control would improve U.S. economic resilience in the face of potential risks to growth. From a consumer perspective, benefits would extend across income levels, boosting purchasing power among those in the middle and lower levels of the pay scale--while the richest Americans would enjoy increased spending power in a sustained economic expansion. Policymakers should take care, however, to avoid policies and practices that are either too heavy handed or foster an unchecked widening of the wealth gap. Extreme approaches on either side would stunt GDP growth and lead to shorter, more fragile expansionary periods.

Is Income Inequality Increasing?


Several institutions, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have published studies showing that income inequality has been increasing for the past several decades (3). According to a 2011 review by the OECD, the average income of the richest 10% of the population is nine times that of the poorest 10%--in other words, a ratio of 9-to-1. The U.S. ratio is much higher, at 14-to-1 (4). The U.S. Gini coefficient, after taxes, has increased by more than 20% from 1979--to 0.434 in 2010 (see chart 1).

Chart 1 | 

image

Although a 2011 CBO report demonstrated that real net average U.S. household income grew 62% from 1979-2007, household income growth was much more rapid at the higher end of the income scale than at the middle and lower end. Revisiting the issue in 2013, the CBO showed that after-tax average income soared 15.1% for the top 1% from 2009 to 2010--but grew by less than 1% for the bottom 90% over the same time period, and fell for many income groups (5). Additionally, although the Census Bureau estimates that real mean household income increased 0.2% in 2011 and 2012, it declined for all groups other than those in the top fifth of earners (6).

This concentration of household income follows a long period in which income concentration remained relatively flat. Using U.S. tax returns, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that income concentration dropped dramatically following both World Wars and was roughly unchanged for the next few decades (7). It started climbing again in 1975, reaching pre-World War I levels by 2000--and Saez later observed that U.S. income inequality has now reached levels not seen since 1928 (8). In both cases, a similar pattern was in evidence--a boom in the financial sector, over-leveraged lower-income households, a massive, systemic financial crash--and the two worst economic slumps in U.S. history, the Great Depression and Great Recession, followed.

When Ends Don't Meet


A few factors help explain the concentration within so-called "market income," which consists of labor income (wages and salaries, plus employer-paid benefits), capital income (excluding capital gains), business income, capital gains, and other income--all before government taxes and transfers (see Glossary for full definition).

The first reason is relatively simple: All these sources of income are less evenly distributed now than a few decades ago. In 1979, the bottom four-fifths of the income spectrum earned nearly 60% of total labor income, about 33% of income from capital and business, and about 8% from capital gains. By 2007, the bottom four-fifths share of labor income had dropped to less than 50%, income from capital and business had decreased to 20%, and capital gains fell to about 5%. In other words, all sources of income were less evenly distributed in 2007 than in 1979 (9).

Some point to the "superstar status" effect, with professional athletes and movie actors enjoying astronomical increases in earnings in the past few decades, helped by technological innovation that broadened their reach across global markets and a "winner take all" phenomenon.

Another "superstar" is the "super managers." Piketty argues that the "primary reason for increased income inequality in recent decades is the rise of the super managers in both the financial and nonfinancial sectors," finding that about 70% of the increase in income going to the top 0.1% from 1979 to 2005 came from increasing pay for those professionals (10). Other studies show that, since the 1990s, deregulation, corporate governance, and a greater reliance on equity options in executive compensation contributed to the compensation gap (11).

Another explanation of market income concentration is technological innovation. This phenomenon boosted the value of high-skill workers, enhancing their productivity and growth, while rendering some low-skill workers superfluous. As automation and production efficiencies have reduced the need for labor in mid-level professional or service jobs, wages have fallen, and occupations requiring a college degree typically offer double the salary of those requiring a high school diploma or less.

Other arguments suggest international trade and increased immigration--as well as the decrease in unionization--may also dampen wages of domestic workers. However, research on the trade effect has been inconclusive, while the impact from increased immigration on domestic wages has been modest (see "Adding Skilled Labor To America's Melting Pot Would Heat Up U.S. Economic Growth," published March 19, 2014, on RatingsDirect) (12). Meanwhile, some research has shown that the sharp decline in the unionization in the country, especially in the 1980s, has had a small but measurable impact on the overall increase in inequality for men over the last few decades (13).

The juxtaposition of slow or stagnant federal minimum wage growth and soaring compensation at the higher end of the labor income scale is another factor to consider. The minimum wage, which has held at $7.25 an hour since July 2009, has suffered a decline in purchasing power for almost half a century--peaking in 1968, when it was at $1.60, or just shy of $11 in today's money.

Not Just The Fruits Of Our Labor


Though the share of income from labor and capital, excluding capital gains, has decreased, the share coming from capital gains and business income has increased over time. In particular, inherited wealth has increased since the World Wars and the Great Depression, as Thomas Piketty has shown (14), and with it the earnings from that wealth. This trend is important because labor income tends to be distributed across income levels more evenly than capital gains--so a shift in income composition can significantly affect inequality.

While labor income accounted for nearly three-fourths of market income from 1979-2007, that figure had dropped to two-thirds by 2007. Capital income (excluding capital gains) is the next largest source, but even at its 1981 peak, it represented only 14% of market income before falling to about 10% of total income in 2007. Conversely, income from capital gains rose, doubling to approximately 8% of market income in 2007 from about 4% in 1979. Business income and income from other sources (primarily private pensions) each accounted for about 7% of total income in 2007, up from about 4% each.

In addition, capital income has become increasingly concentrated since the early 1990s--and, despite declines in 2001 and 2002, concentration spiked from 2003 through 2007, with more than 80% of the capital gains realized by the top 5% of earners going to the top 1% alone (15). Capital gains also have become increasingly concentrated and are tied with business income as the most concentrated income source.

The Impact Of Government Policy


Government policies on taxation and government transfers, such as Social Security and Medicare, have done little to reduce income inequality--and may have contributed to a further widening of the gap.

Because government transfers and federal taxes are progressive, the distribution of net household income (after transfers and federal taxes) is more evenly balanced than the distribution of market income. That said, at the federal level, the equalizing effect of transfers and taxes on household income was smaller in 2007 than it had been in 1979. The CBO estimates that the dispersion of market income grew by about one-quarter from 1979-2007, but the dispersion of after-tax income grew by about one-third (16). The distribution of after-tax income in 2010 became slightly more even among different groups than before-tax income, though the dispersion of after-tax income in 2010 remained wider than in 1979 (see chart 2) (17).

Chart 2 | 

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While the size of transfer payments rose by a small amount from 1979-2010, the distribution of transfers shifted away from households in the lower part of the income scale. The bottom 20% of households received only 36% of transfer payments in 2010, after receiving 54% in 1979 (18). This was largely because of the growth in spending on programs for the elderly (such as Social Security and Medicare), and benefits of these programs aren't limited to low-income households. Benefits for other programs that largely benefit the poor were also reduced (19). In addition, tax expenditures mostly benefit the affluent: Tax credits and tax deductions benefit those more at higher tax rates.

Changes in federal government tax policy have also exacerbated income inequality in recent decades (20). According to the CBO, the average rate for each income group in 2012 was below the rate that prevailed for that group in the 1990s and most of the 2000s even with the increases in average federal tax rates in 2010 (21). Indeed, the federal income tax rate for the top income earners fell to 35% in 2012 from 70% in 1979, while the government didn't reduce the payroll tax rate until the temporary Payroll Tax Holiday of 2010 (22). Keep in mind that the payroll tax that funds Social Security is levied on pay below a certain threshold ($117,000 this year). In practice, this means that those earning less than the cap pay a higher rate of Social Security tax than those who earn more than the cap. So, the composition of federal revenues has shifted away from progressive income taxes to less-progressive payroll taxes, and income taxes have become slightly more concentrated at the higher end of the income scale.

Increasing income inequality also poses a risk to certain states' finances, given the correlation between income inequality and revenue volatility in the slow growth after the Great Recession. According to Gabriel Petek, credit analyst at Standard & Poor's, the volatility of tax revenue seems to be increasing despite the states' less-progressive tax structures--suggesting that income inequality as a macroeconomic issue can translate to credit implications for states.

Undereducated Workers: Both Today's And Tomorrow's


Technological achievement has saved us time and reconfigured our daily routines, allowing us to focus on our own skills and boosting productivity and growth. These advances are naturally disruptive in the beginning as workers adjust; that disruption becomes alarming when people don't have the means to adapt, making a lasting impact on career development.

Although the U.S. has been fairly quick to adapt in the past, today's workers have been left behind by technological change. Indeed, while recent advances now require many workers to have graduated from college, the supply of college-educated workers hasn't kept up with demand--and even the fraction of high school graduates has stopped climbing.

This education gap is a main reason for the growing income divide, and it affects both wages and net worth. From a wage perspective, occupations that typically require postsecondary education generally paid much higher median wages ($57,770 in 2012)--more than double those occupations that typically require a high school diploma or less ($27,670 in 2012). Further, those with a bachelor's degree had a median net worth value nearly twice that of people with a high-school diploma in 1998--climbing to almost 3.5 times greater by 2010 (see chart 3) (23). This difference is even greater higher up the educational ladder.

Chart 3 | 

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Harvard professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz argue that, rather than technology picking up speed, the reduced supply of educated workers is the key factor explaining the education gap, finding that between 1980 and 2005 the pace of the increase in educational attainment slowed dramatically. In 1980, Americans age 30 years or older had 4.7 years more schooling on average than Americans in 1930--but Americans in 2005 had only 0.8 years more schooling on average than Americans in 1980 (24). Based on this data, it would appear the problem isn't that technology has leaped ahead--rather, the supply of educated workers has stalled.

The impact of income inequality on future generations of qualified workers is particularly disconcerting. Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney, Jeremy Patashnik, and Muxin Yu (Hamilton Project-Brookings) examined the effect that the income divide in the U.S. could have on the future upward mobility of the country's children (25). They found that investments in education and skills, traits that increasingly decide job market success, are becoming more stratified by family income, threatening the earning potential of the youngest Americans.

These researchers note that, although cognitive tests of ability show little difference between children of high- and low-income parents in the first years of their lives, "large and persistent" differences start to appear before kindergarten and widen throughout high school (26). Indeed, researchers have found that the gap in test results of children from families at the 90th income percentile versus children of families at the 10th percentile has grown by about 40% over the past 30 years (27).

Not surprisingly, these differences persist into college and beyond. While there is a 45% chance that a child born into a poor family will remain there as an adult, chances of staying poor drops to 16% if that child finishes college (see chart 4). A child born into the bottom 20% will only have a 5% chance of reaching the top 20% of income earners as adults. But that increases to 19% if they earn a college degree.

Chart 4 | 

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However, college graduation rates have stagnated for low-income students, in sharp contrast with strong gains for wealthy students. While college graduation rates increased by about 4 percentage points between those born in the early 1960s and those born in the early 1980s for the poorest households, the graduation rate for the wealthiest households increased by almost 20 percentage points over the same period (28). These trends likely feed into the income potential for kids as they grew older, with children of well-off families much more likely to stay well-off and the children of poor families disproportionately likely to remain poor.

Given that education--particularly a college degree--is so important in a jobs market that increasingly demands a more educated workforce, these trends are disturbing. The findings suggest that last generation's inequalities will extend into the next generation, with diminished opportunities for upward social mobility. Moreover, the U.S. is losing the potential addition to growth of a worker who has reached his or her full potential.

The pace of U.S. education is also falling behind its peers (see chart 5). Approximately 43% of Americans aged 25-34 had a college degree in 2011, compared with more than half of people the same age in Canada, Japan, and Korea. Moreover, the proportion of degree holders among Americans aged 25-34 is virtually the same as that among those 55-64, meaning that graduation rates haven't changed much--a sharp contrast with the OECD average and a number of other countries, where graduation rates have increased significantly. As today's U.S. educational attainment slips behind other countries, the U.S.' ability to remain economically competitive in the international market is threatened.

Chart 5 | 

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What if, instead, we broke that cycle? What if the supply of educated workers picked up its pace, and, more or less, kept up with technological changes? The U.S. has been no stranger to this in the past. In the early part of this century, technological advancements were accompanied by an education boom (29). What would be the impact to the economy and to people's pocketbooks if the U.S. workforce's pace of education were to reach rates of education seen 50 years ago? That was when the American workforce gained a year of education from 1960 to 1965, which is a bit stronger than the period from 1950 to 1980, where they gained an average of about eight months of education every five years (30). In this scenario, the U.S. would add another year of education to the American workforce. U.S. potential GDP would likely be $525 billion, or 2.4% higher in five years than in the baseline (see chart 6). If education levels were increasing at the rate they were 15 years ago, the level of potential GDP would be 1%, or $185 billion higher in five years. A more educated workforce would benefit from higher wages. While the increased supply of people with advanced degrees may initially slow wage gains for jobs requiring an advanced degree, a stronger economy would help support higher incomes for all and help government budgets.

Chart 6 | 

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Historically, data at the state level support these results. States with a well-educated workforce are high-wage states. A clear and strong correlation exists between the educational attainment of a state's workforce and median wages in the state, with more educated individuals more likely to participate in the job market and earn more, and less likely to be unemployed (31). The unemployment rate for people 25 years old and older with a college degree was 3.3% in June 2014, which is one-third of the unemployment rate of those with less than a high school degree.

Education is an investment in the health and livelihood of future generations, with greater parent education positively correlated to a child's health, cognitive abilities, academic achievement, and future economic opportunities. Education not only benefits workers today, but also children tomorrow.

With evidence indicating that a well-educated U.S. workforce is not just good for today's workers and their children but also for the economy's potential long-term growth rate and government balance sheets, what do we need to do to get there? This will likely require some investment in the human capital of the U.S. workforce, today and tomorrow. But studies have indicated that the benefits greatly outweigh the costs. Researchers estimate that, depending on the exact program, $1,000 in college aid results in a 3- to 6-percentage-point increase in college enrollment, with the total cost in aid averaging $20,000 to $30,000 to send one student to college (32). Given a college graduate is expected to earn about $30,000 more per year than a high school graduate over the course of their life, the benefits outweigh the costs. It also this means more tax revenue from higher income than otherwise would have been the case.

Other new low-cost interventions, like simpler financial aid applications, more outreach about financial aid options that are available to students from low-income households, as well as offering college mentors to students, could help send more kids to school and encourage them to stay once they get there (33). Indeed, while the sticker price of a college degree is high, according to the College Board in 2012, the actual price paid after financial aid is often lower. That may be enough to encourage more low-income families to enroll.

While most agree that increasing college graduation rates would be a boon for economic growth, what about education before college? Goldin and Katz argue that the U.S. had "pioneered" free and accessible elementary education for most of its citizens and extended its lead into high school education when other countries were introducing mass elementary school education (34). After World War II, U.S. universities were known to be the best in the world. But by the early 1970s, Golden and Katz note that high school graduation rates plateaued and have been relatively flat for more than three decades, and college graduation rates slid backwards. That educational slowdown is likely the most important reason for increased education wage differentials since 1980 and is a major contributor to income inequality today.

Even if the U.S. government offers financial aid for college, many high school graduates aren't prepared for the rigors of university education. The 2003 Program for International Assessment (PISA), for one, showed U.S. 15-year-olds to be substantially below the OECD average in mathematics literacy, problem solving, and scientific literacy (35).

Increasing aptitude in early education has been discussed in a number of studies. Most point to increasing the quality of K-12 education to improve high school graduation rates and postsecondary education (36). Some have argued that inadequate investments by states and local governments in education have weakened the ability of a state to develop, grow, and attract businesses that offer high-skilled, high-wage jobs (37). The Brookings Institution has found that a high-quality universal preschool program, costing about $59 billion, could add $2 trillion in annual U.S. GDP by 2080. This additional growth would generate enough federal revenue to easily cover its costs several times over (38). However, the authors note that it is difficult to win support for a short-term investment, like preschool programs, given the long-term nature of its benefits to the economy.

Catching Up With The Joneses


As income inequality increased before the crisis, less affluent households took on more and more debt to keep up--or, in this case, catch up--with the Joneses, first by purchasing a new home. Further, when home prices climbed, these households were willing to borrow against their newfound equity--and financial institutions were increasingly willing to help them do so, despite slow income growth. A number of economists have pointed to ways in which this trend may have harmed the U.S. economy.

Professor of Public Policy at U.S. Berkeley Robert Reich argues that increased inequality has reduced overall aggregate demand. He observes that high-income households have a lower marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of income than other households, and they're currently holding a bigger slice of the economic pie. Research by economists Atif Mian, Kamalesh Rao, and Amir Sufi backed that up, finding the MPC for households with an average annual income of less than $35,000 to be three times larger than the MPC for households with average income over $200,000 (39). Mian and Sufi also found that, as home values increased between 2002 and 2006, low-income households very aggressively borrowed and spent (possibly borrowing on increased home equity)--while high-income households were less responsive. Unsurprisingly, when housing wealth declined, the cutback on spending for low-income households was twice as large as that for rich households (40).

Mian and Sufi further used ZIP codes to locate areas with disproportionately large numbers of subprime borrowers (those with low incomes and credit ratings) and found that these ZIP codes experienced growth in borrowing between 2002 and 2005 that was more than twice as high as in ZIP codes with wealthy "prime" borrowers (41). They also found that ZIP codes with lower income growth received more mortgage loans during that time period, supporting the notion that government policy targeting low-income groups increased lending to the less well-off. After 2006, the subprime ZIP codes experienced an increase in default rates three times that of prime ZIP codes.

Raghuram Rajan claims that, while high-income individuals saved, low-income individuals borrowed beyond their means in order to sustain their consumption, and that this overleveraging, as a result of increased inequality, was a significant cause of the financial crisis in 2008 (42). An IMF paper by Michael Kumhof and Romain Ranciere also details the mechanisms that may have linked income distribution and financial excess and have suggested that these same factors were likely at play in both the Great Depression and Great Recession (43).

Unfortunately, coming back from the Great Recession appears to be taking longer than many had hoped. With a postrecession annual growth rate of 2.2%, our recovery is not even half the historical average annual growth of 4.6% for other recoveries going back to 1959. This is not a complete surprise, given that financial crises are often followed by prolonged recessions and a long bout of subpar growth--thanks in part to the deleveraging that comes as people try to repair their finances.

Indeed, during the recession, the consumption-to-income ratio of the bottom 95% of earners fell sharply, as banks and other lenders imposed tighter borrowing constraints, according to a study by Barry Z. Cynamon and Stephen M. Fazzari (44). Though the consumption-to-income ratio of the top 5% rose, this increase was not enough to offset inadequate demand coming from the bottom 95%. That makes sense. Between 2007 and 2010, the average U.S. household lost 39.6%, or about 18 years' worth, of their net wealth in the three years when the recession started in 2007 to the early recovery in 2010. The middle class lost over 40% of their wealth in just three years, while the top 10% of income earners actually accumulated an additional 2% to their wealth (see chart 7). Corporations that have been reluctant to invest or to cut prices to gain market share because of distorted incentives to seek short-term stock market gains have also depressed demand, according to Andrew Smithers (45). These two factors go a long way to explain why the recent recovery has been subpar in comparison with other postrecessionary periods.


Indeed, economist Robert E. Hall, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, laments that "the years since 2007 have been a macroeconomic disaster for the United States of an unprecedented magnitude since the Great Depression," noting that U.S. economic output in 2013 was 13% below what the precrisis trend has predicted (46). He is skeptical that a sudden surge in output will help the economy recover the ground it lost. Rather, a possible scenario would be a gradual return to a precrisis growth rate, which leaves the U.S. permanently below the level of output that precrisis trends had suggested.

Indeed, while Standard & Poor's is expecting the annual real growth rate to climb above the 3% mark in 2015. That will be the first time since 2005 and comes after another year of subpar growth of just 2.0% expected for 2014. The U.S. already has averaged a mere 1.4% over the last 10 years, through 2013. After expecting to see that long-awaited burst of growth in 2014 of 3% at the beginning of the year, we have reduced our expectations for GDP growth back to that 2% mark once again. We now expect the 10-year average annual growth to be about 2.5% though 2024. To put that in perspective, five years ago, we forecasted the 10-year average annual growth rate to be 2.8%, with all yearly rates much higher than the 2% mark.

Secular Stagnation


The Fed's expectation for long-run U.S. economic growth has drifted down even more than our forecasts. Five years ago, the Fed expected to see the economy ambling along at a respectable 2.65% annual pace over the long run. By June, the Fed's expectation for long-run growth in the U.S. had dropped to 2.2% (central tendency was 2.1% to 2.3%).

The IMF and CBO have also lowered their long-term growth projections. Last month, the IMF lowered its long-run growth forecast for the U.S. to about 2% (47). The CBO now projects that real (inflation-adjusted) GDP will increase at an average annual rate of 2.3% over the next 25 years, compared with 3.1% during 1970–2007.

Aside from the fact that there are different Federal Open Market Committee participants now than before, the Fed's reasons for lowering its expectations for long-term growth are likely similar to concerns that the IMF and CBO raised, including the effects of an aging population on the economy and more modest prospects for productivity growth. The CBO also noted that in addition to the retirement of the baby-boom generation, the declining birth rates and leveling off of increases in women's participation in the work force also helped slow the growth of the labor force.

In this light, former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers has said that the U.S. may be mired in a period of slow growth, marked by only marginal increases in the size of the workforce and small gains in productivity--what he called "secular stagnation" (48). This refers to an economic era of persistently insufficient economic demand relative to the aggregate saving of households and corporations. Here, the U.S. may be stuck in a long-run equilibrium where real interest rates need to be negative to generate adequate demand. Without that, the U.S. slides into economic stagnation. While specific causes of secular stagnation are still uncertain, possible reasons include slower population growth, an aging population, globalization, and technological changes. An increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth is also cited as a contributing factor. Disparate income growth is important because those at the top of the distribution have a higher savings rate. Since income that is put into savings is not spent, it undercuts the overall level of economic activity that takes place. Mian and Sufi emphasize the role of income inequality and how recent years seem to suggest the only way the economy is capable of generating faster economic growth is by being juiced with more aggressive credit expansion, which does not last (49).

Unfortunately, the move toward low-paying jobs has continued unabated. In the past four years since the outset of the U.S. economic recovery, job gains have come mainly in low-paying positions, according to the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low-income workers. While 22% of job losses during the recession were in lower-wage industries, 44% of employment growth in the past four years has come in this group--meaning that, today, lower-wage industries employ 1.85 million more Americans than before the downturn. And often these low-wage jobs have less access to benefits, such as private health insurance, pensions, and paid leave, compared with their higher-paying brethren (50). Considering the Bureau of Labor Statistics' forecasts that low-paying jobs will dominate employment gains for the next decade, it seems clear that labor-income disparity will continue to widen.

Not Just A Problem For The Poor


Do societies inevitably face a choice between efficient production and the equitable distribution of income? According to IMF economists Andrew Berg, Jonathan Ostry, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, the answer is no. They argue that the empirical literature on growth and inequality using long-run average growth may have missed how income distribution is tied to abrupt ends in growth.

Their work examined growth over a long time horizon, between 1950 and 2006, focusing on the duration of growth spells, and showed that there may be no trade-off between efficiency and equality (51). In fact, they posited that equality could be an important component of sustained growth, observing that the level of inequality may be the key difference between countries that enjoy extended, rapid expansion and those whose growth spurts quickly dissipate. In short, promoting greater equality may also improve efficiency in the form of more sustainable long-run growth.

Of the number of variables associated with longer growth spells, income inequality's relationship with the duration of growth spells was the strongest (see chart 8). They found that a 10% decrease in inequality (a change in the Gini coefficient to 0.37 from 0.40) increases the expected length of a growth spell by 50%.


Meanwhile, the experiences of developing and emerging economies suggest that igniting growth is less difficult than sustaining it (52). Even the poorest of countries have managed to expand their economies for several years--only for growth to falter.

Berg and Ostry found that income inequality is the single most important factor in determining which countries can sustain economic growth. Using the GINI coefficient--which ranges from 0 to 1.0--they measured the extent to which economic growth falls as inequality rises. A country in which everyone earns exactly the same would have a score of 0, while a society in which one person owned everything would have a score of 1.0. Berg and Ostry saw that a GINI coefficient of higher than 0.45 could weigh on growth. Although correlation is not causation, we note that, based on after-tax income, the U.S. economy scored 0.434 on the GINI scale in 2010, according to the CBO, placing it near that threshold (53).

To be sure, it seems counterintuitive that inequality is associated with less-sustainable growth, since some inequality, by providing incentives to effort and entrepreneurship, may be essential to a functioning market economy. But beyond the risk that inequality may heighten the susceptibility of an economy to booms and busts, it may also spur political instability--thus discouraging investment. Inequality may make it harder for governments to enact policies to prevent--or soften--shocks, such as raising taxes or cutting public spending to avoid a debt crisis. The affluent may exercise disproportionate influence on the political process, or the needs of the less affluent may grow so severe as to make additional cuts to fiscal stabilizers that operate automatically in a downturn politically unviable.

Striking A Palatable Balance


The discussion about income inequality is hardly new, and contrary opinions abound. In his influential 1975 book "Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff," economist Arthur Okun argued that pursuing equality can reduce efficiency. He claimed that not only would more equal income distribution reduce work and investment incentives, but the efforts to redistribute wealth--through, for example, taxes and minimum wages--can themselves be costly (54).

Of course, income inequality in the U.S. was much less 40 years ago. Kristin Forbes found that, in the short- and medium-terms over a few years, an increase in income inequality has a significant positive relationship with economic expansion (55). But Forbes also found that the relationship was weakened (or could turn negative) when she increased the length of the growth spells. And a World Bank study later found that the positive effect on growth was almost exclusively reserved for the top end of the income distribution (56).

Income inequality can contribute to economic growth, and a degree of inequality is a necessary part of what keeps any market economic engine operating on all cylinders. Indeed, a degree of inequality is to be expected in any market economy, given differences in "initial endowments" (of wealth and ability), the differential market returns to investments in human capital and entrepreneurial activities, and the effect of luck.

However, too much of the focus in the debate about inequality has been on the top earners, rather than on how to lift a significant portion of the population out of poverty--which would be a good thing for the economy. And though extreme inequality can impair economic growth, badly designed and implemented efforts to reverse this trend could also undermine growth, hurting the very people such policies are meant to help (57).

There is no shortage of proposals for tackling extreme income inequality. President Obama has proposed an increase in the hourly minimum wage to $10.10 from the current rate of $7.25, and the IMF recently called on lawmakers to boost the wage (though it refrained from suggesting a specific level). Managing Director Christine Lagarde said that doing so would help raise the incomes of millions of poor and working-class Americans and "would be helpful from a macroeconomic point of view" (58).

An increase in the minimum wage would certainly carry with it short-term impacts, likely bringing 900,000 people above the poverty line in the second half of 2016--and, according to the CBO, lifting wages for 24 million workers at the next level above minimum wage. Fewer American households at or below the poverty line would also help bolster government balance sheets and likely improve state and local credit conditions.

But raising the minimum wage is not without negative consequences. Reduced labor demands resulting from higher wages could reduce potential hires by 500,000 jobs, according to CBO estimates (59). Further, while 49% of those workers making the minimum wage are under age 25, the CATO Institute reports that, of older workers (the other half of minimum wage earners), 29.2% live in poverty and 46.2% live near the poverty level, with family incomes less than 1.5 times the poverty line (60).

Apart from minimum wage discussions, a recent report from the OECD suggested that carried interest--the share of profits that money managers take in from an investment or fund--should be taxed as regular income rather than as returns on investment. Ian Ayres, professor of law at Yale, and Aaron S. Edlin, professor of law and economics at the University of California, Berkley, proposed an automatic extra tax, the so-called Brandeis tax, on the income of the top 1% of earners that would limit the after-tax incomes relative to median household income (61).

Warren Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, who consistently ranks among the world's wealthiest people, has long argued along similar lines. He claimed that his 2010 federal tax bill--income taxes and payroll taxes--amounted to 17.4% of his taxable income (62). That, he wrote, was the lowest percentage of any of the other 20 people in his office, whose tax burdens were between 33% and 41% and averaged 36%.

Meanwhile, two Democratic California legislators--Loni Hancock and Mark DeSaulnier--have proposed tying the state's corporate income tax to the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay--a sliding scale in which a company's tax bill could shrink along with the gap in pay between executives and workers. The change would trim a company's tax rate for any corporation in which the chief executive makes less than a hundred times what the median worker earns.

Any clear-headed consideration of these options must recognize that heavy taxation--solely to reduce wage inequality--could do more damage than good. While the IMF studies found that some redistribution appears benign, extreme cases may have a direct negative effect on growth. Heavy taxation solely to equalize wages may reduce incentives to work or hire more workers. A number of studies have indicated that losses from redistribution are likely to be minimal when tax rates are low but rise steeply with the tax or subsidy rate (63).

IMF authors Ostry, Berg, and Tsangarides note that "redistribution need not be inherently detrimental to growth, to the degree that it involves reducing tax expenditures or loopholes that benefit the rich or as part of broader tax reforms (such as higher inheritance taxes offset by lower taxes on labor income)" (63). Moreover, redistribution can also occur when taxes finance public investment, or spending on health and education disproportionately benefits the poor, which help offset the growing divide in educational opportunities and outcomes, broadening the pathways for our future leaders, to the benefit of all.

That said, some degree of rebalancing--along with spending in the areas of education, health care, and infrastructure, for example--could help bring under control an income gap that, at its current level, threatens the stability of an economy still struggling to recover. This could take the form of reallocating fiscal resources toward those with a greater propensity to spend, or toward badly needed public resources like roads, ports, and transit. Further, policies that foster job-rich recoveries may help make growth more sustainable, especially given that rising unemployment correlates with rising income concentration. Additionally, effective investments in health and education promote durable growth and equity, strengthening the labor force's capacity to cope with new technologies.

The challenge now is to find a path toward more sustainable growth, an essential part of which, in our view, is pulling more Americans out of poverty and bolstering the purchasing power of the middle class. A rising tide lifts all boats…but a lifeboat carrying a few, surrounded by many treading water, risks capsizing.

Writer: Joe Maguire

Glossary Of Relevant Terms


Market income

Based on CBO analysis, market income includes the following components:

  • Labor income: cash wages and salaries (including 401(k) plans), employer-paid health insurance premiums, and the employer's share of Social Security, Medicare, and federal unemployment insurance payroll taxes.
  • Business income: net income from businesses and farms operated solely by their owners, partnership income, and income from S corporations.
  • Capital gains: profits realized from the sale of assets. Increases in the value of assets that have not been realized through sales are not included in market income.
  • Capital income (excluding capital gains): taxable and tax-exempt interest, dividends paid by corporations (excluding S corporations), positive rental income, and corporate income taxes. The CBO assumes that corporate income taxes are borne by owners of capital in proportion to their income from capital, so the corporate tax is included in household income before taxes.
  • Other income: retirement income for past services and any other sources of income.

Transfer income

Transfer income includes cash payments from Social Security, unemployment insurance, Supplemental Security Income, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, veterans' benefits, workers' compensation, and state and local government assistance programs, as well as the value of in-kind benefits, including food stamps, school lunches and breakfasts, housing assistance, energy assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (health benefits are measured as the fungible value, a Census Bureau estimate of the value to recipients).

After-tax income

After-tax income is equal to market income plus transfer income minus federal taxes paid. In assessing the impact of various taxes, individual income taxes are allocated directly to households paying those taxes. Social insurance, or payroll, taxes are allocated to households paying those taxes directly or paying them indirectly through their employers. Corporate income taxes are allocated to households according to their share of capital income. Federal excise taxes are allocated to households according to their consumption of the taxed good or service.

Average tax rates are calculated by dividing federal taxes paid by the sum of market income and transfer income. Negative tax rates result from refundable tax credits, such as the earned income and child tax credits, exceeding the other taxes owed by people in an income group. (Refundable tax credits are not limited to the amount of income tax owed before they are applied.)

The Gini Index

The Gini Index is a measure of income inequality based on the relationship between shares of income and shares of the population. It is a value between 0 and 1.0, with 0 indicating complete equality and 1.0 indicating complete inequality (in which one household receives all the income). A Gini Index that increases over time indicates rising income dispersion.

Chart 8 details

Data from Berg, Ostry, and Zettelmeyer (2008).

Authors' calculations: The height of each factor represents the percentage change in a growth spell between 1950 and 2006 when the factor moves from the 50th percentile to the 60th percentile and all other factors are held constant. Income distribution uses the Gini coefficient. The political institutions factor is based on an index from the Polity IV Project database that ranges from +10 for the most open and democratic societies to –10 for the most closed and autocratic. Trade openness measures the effect of changes in trade liberalization on year-to-year growth. Exchange-rate competitiveness is calculated as the deviation of an exchange rate from purchasing power parity, adjusted for per capita income.

Endnotes


(1) "The General Theory," J. M. Keynes

(2) Rajan, "Fault Lines," 2010

(3) CBO, "Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007," 2011; "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010," 2013; OECD, 2011; Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, "Redistribution, Inequality and Growth," IMF February 2014; Berg and Ostry, "Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?," IMF April 2011; Berg and Ostry, "Equality and Efficiency," IMF September 2011

(4) "An Overview of Growing Income Inequalities in OECD Countries: Main Findings," OECD, 2011

(5) CBO, 2013

(6) To the extent that households benefit from company-sponsored health plans whose costs have risen sharply, these figures may be somewhat understated.

(7) Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, "Income Inequality in the U.S., 1913-1998," 2003

(8) Emmanuel Saez, "Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the U.S.," 2013

(9) CBO, 2011

(10) "Capital," Thomas Piketty

(11) CBO, 2011

(12) The globalization of the world economy may have affected the distribution of wage rates at home. The U.S. has seen international trade and immigration increase in the past few decades, as well as an increase in the consumption of imported goods. Theoretically, an increase in imported goods, at the expense of domestic goods produced by lower-skilled workers, could hold down wages of domestic workers, though research on the subject has been inconclusive. An increase in the supply of foreign-born workers could also put pressure on wages in those jobs. But, here as well, the effects of foreign workers on wage rates have been modest. Indeed, research note that immigrant workers largely complement, rather than substitute, native-born workers, and thus have little impact on wages, while actually increasing overall growth.

(13) David Card, Thomas Lemieux, and Craig Riddell, "Unions and Wage Inequality," December 2004; "Interview with David Card," Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Dec. 1, 2006

(14) "Capital," Thomas Piketty

(15) CBO, 2011

(16) CBO, 2011

(17) CBO, 2013

(18) CBO, 2013

(19) CBO, 2013. The CBO noted that other transfers declined from nearly 3% to under 2%. Transfers to low-income households, such as Aid to Families With Dependent Children and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, declined relative to market income.

(20) For example, the Bush Administration tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 reduced the income tax rate, capital gains tax rate, and dividend tax rate. Earlier, the tax cuts under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s lowered the top individual income tax rate to 28% from 50%. There was no reduction to the payroll tax rate until the Payroll Tax Holiday of 2010.

(21) CBO, 2013

(22) CBO, 2011; taxfoundation.org, "Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History"

(23) Census, "Changes in Household Net Worth from 2005 to 2010," July 2012, http://blogs.census.gov/2012/06/18/changes-in-household-net-worth-from-2005-to-2010/

(24) Goldin and Katz, "The Race Between Education and Technology," Cambridge, MA; Belknap Press, 2009

(25) "Thirteen Economic Facts about Social Mobility and the Role of Education," Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney, Jeremy Patashnik, and Muxin Yu, Hamilton Project-Brookings, 2013

(26) Hamilton Project-Brookings, 2013

(27) Sean F. Reardon, "The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations," 2011 "In Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality and the Uncertain Life Chances of Low-Income Children," edited by Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press.

(28) Hamilton Project-Brookings, 2013

(29) Goldin and Katz, 2009.

(30) Barro, Robert and Jong-Wha Lee, "A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950-2010." Journal of Development Economics, Vol 104.

(31) Lily French and Peter S. Fisher, "Education Pays in Iowa: The State's Return on Investment in Workforce Education," May 2009

(32) Deming, David, and Susan Dynarski, "Into College, Out of Poverty? Policies to Increase the Postsecondary Attainment of the Poor," National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2009

(33) Hamilton Project-Brookings, 2013

(34) Goldin and Katz, 2009

(35) Goldin and Katz, 2009

(36) Goldin and Katz, 2009, Rajan, 2010, Hamilton Project-Brookings, 2013

(37) "A Well-Educated Workforce is Key To State Prosperity," Economic Analysis and Research Network, 2014

(38) "The Effects of Investing in Early Education on Economic Growth," The Brookings Institution, 2006

(39) Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, "Household Balance Sheets, Consumption and the Economic Slump," 2013

(40) Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, "House Price Gains and U.S. Household Spending from 2002 to 2006," 2014.

(41) Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, "House Prices, Home Equity-based Borrowing, and the U.S. Household Leverage Crisis," American Economic Review, August 2011.

(42) Rajan, 2010. He argues that political measures to increase affordable housing for low-income groups instructed the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to develop affordable housing goals for Fannie and Freddie and to monitor those goals. HUD then steadily increased the amount of funding it required the agencies to allocate to low-income housing. Pressure on regulators to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), through investigations of banks and fines, may have increased lending activity in these areas.

(43) Kumhof and Ranciere, "Inequality, Leverage and Crises," IMF 2010.

(44) "Inequality, the Great Recession and Slow Recovery," Barry Z. Cynamon, visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Steven M. Fazzari, economics professor at Washington University, January 2014.

(45) "The Road to Recovery," Andrew Smithers

(46) "Economy May Never Fully Recover from Crisis", The Fiscal Times. June 2, 2014.

(47) CBO long-Term Budget Outlook 2014. July 2014. "IMF cuts US growth forecast as it urges minimum wage hike ", BBC, June 16, 2014

(48) "Crisis Yesterday and Today," Lawrence Summers, Jacques Pollack lecture, IMF.

(49) "Secular Stagnation and Wealth Inequality", Mian and Sufi, March 23, 2014)

(50) OECD Economic Surveys: United States. June 2014

(51) Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, "Redistribution, Inequality and Growth," IMF February 2014; Berg and Ostry, "Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?," IMF April 2011; Berg and Ostry, "Equality and Efficiency," IMF September 2011.

(52) "Growth Accelerations," a study by Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Lant Pritchett of the World Bank, 2005

(53) CBO, 2013

(54) Arthur Okun theorized that some of the redistributed resources would "simply disappear" because of administrative costs and disincentives to work for both those who pay taxes and those who receive transfers.

(55) "A Reassessment of the Relationship between Inequality and Growth," Kristin J. Forbes, M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, 2000

(56) Roy van der Weide and Branko Milanovic, "Inequality Is Bad for Growth of the Poor," July 2014

(57) "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" Benjamin Friedman

(58) "IMF calls on the US to hike its minimum wage rate," CNBC, June 16, 2014

(59) CBO, "The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income," February 2014

(60) Mark Wilson, "The Negative Effects of Minimum Wage Laws," CATO Institute, June 2012.

(61) "Don't Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself," 2011 op-ed in the New York Times

(62) "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich," 2011 op-ed in the New York Times

(63) Barro R.J., "Government Spending in a Simple Model of Endogeneous Growth," Journal of Political Economy, 1990; Jaimovich, N. and S. Rebelo, "Non-Linear Effects of Taxation on Growth," NBER, 2012

(64) Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, February 2014; Saint-Paul, G., and T. Verdier, "Education, Democracy and Growth," Journal of Development Economics, 1993

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