Person:

Frankel, Jeffrey

In the past, industrial countries have tended to pursue countercyclical or, at worst, acyclical fiscal policy. In sharp contrast, emerging and developing countries have followed procyclical fiscal policy, thus exacerbating the underlying business cycle. We show that, over the last decade, about a third of the developing world has been able to escape the procyclicality trap and actually become countercyclical. In line with existing literature, we confirm the role of increased financial integration and lower output volatility in reducing overall procyclicality. In this paper, however, we focus on the role played by the quality of institutions. Indeed, the quality of institutions seems to be a key determinant of a country's ability to graduate. We provide a formal analysis, controlling for the endogeneity of institutions and other determinants of fiscal procyclicality, that strongly suggests that there is a causal link running from stronger institutions to less procyclical or more countercyclical fiscal policy.

American fiscal policy has been procyclical: Washington wasted the expansion period 2001-2007 by running budget deficits, but by 2011 had come to feel constrained by inherited debt to withdraw fiscal stimulus. Chile has achieved countercyclical fiscal policy – saving in booms and easing in recession – during the same decade that rich countries forgot how to do so. Chile has a rule that targets a structural budget balance. But rules are not credible by themselves. In Europe and the U.S., official forecasts are overly optimistic in booms; so revenue is spent rather than saved. Chile avoids such wishful thinking by having independent panels of experts decide what is structural and what is cyclical.

Two decades ago, many people had drawn a lesson from the 1980s: Japan's variant of capitalism was the best model. Other countries around the world should and would follow it. Japan's admired institutions included relationship banking, keiretsu, bonus compensation for workers, lifetime employment, consensus building, strategic trade policy, administrative guidance, pro-saving policies, and corporate goals of maximizing companies’ industrial capacity or market share. These features were viewed as elements of Japanese economic success that were potentially worthy of emulation. The Japanese model quickly lost its luster in the 1990s, however, when the stock market and real estate market crashed, followed by many years of severe stagnation in the real economy.

A decade ago, many thought that the lesson of the 1990s had been that the United States’ variant of capitalism was the best model, and that other countries should and would follow. The touted institutions included arms-length banking, competition for corporate control, Anglo-American securities markets, reliance on accounting firms and rating agencies, derivatives, bonus-compensation for executives, an adversarial legal system, deregulation, pro-consumer credit policies, and corporate goals of maximizing companies’ profits or share price. These features were viewed as elements of US economic success and potentially worthy of emulation. The American model quickly lost its attractiveness in the 2000s, however, when the stock market and real estate market crashed. Poor economic performance left per capita income and median household income below their levels of 2000 – even before the severe US-originated recession of 2008–2009.2 "Where should countries look now, for models of economic success to emulate?"

Perhaps they should look to the periphery of the world economy. Some smaller and less-rich countries have experimented with policies and institutions that could usefully be adopted by others. Singapore achieved rich country status with a unique development strategy. Among its many innovations was a paternalistic approach to saving. Costa Rica in Central America and Mauritius in Africa are each conspicuous performance standouts in their respective regions. Among many other decisions that worked out well, both countries have foregone a standing army. The result in both cases has been histories with no coups and with financial savings that could be used for education and other good things. Slovakia and Estonia in Central/Eastern Europe have simplified their tax systems by means of a flat tax.

Some of the lessons from emerging market countries can be useful for the big advanced countries. Two illustrations from microeconomics: First, Singapore pioneered the use of the price mechanism to reduce traffic congestion in its urban center. London emulated Singapore when it successfully adopted congestion pricing in 2003; other big cities should do the same. Second, Mexico pioneered Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). CCT programs, which make poverty benefits contingent on children's school attendance, have been emulated in many countries, and embraced even in New York City.

Some emerging market and developing countries also have lessons for the United States in areas of macroeconomics, specifically regarding the cyclicality of fiscal policy. To state the message of this paper most succinctly, over the last decade countries from Chile to China learned how to run properly countercyclical fiscal policy: taking advantage of boom periods such as 2003–2008 to achieve high national savings, and in particular to run budget surpluses, which then allows some fiscal ease in response to downturns such as 2008–2009. During this same period, advanced countries such as the United States and United Kingdom forgot how to run countercyclical fiscal policy. Perhaps the ‘leaders’ could look to the ‘followers’ for some tips on how to get back on track.

The characteristics that distinguish most developing countries, compared to large industrialized countries, include: greater exposure to supply shocks in general and trade volatility in particular, procyclicality of both domestic fiscal policy and international finance, lower credibility with respect to both price stability and default risk, and other imperfect institutions. These characteristics warrant appropriate models. Models of dynamic inconsistency in monetary policy and the need for central bank independence and commitment to nominal targets apply even more strongly to developing countries. But because most developing countries are price-takers on world markets, the small open economy model, with nontraded goods, is often more useful than the two-country two-good model. Contractionary effects of devaluation are also far more important for developing countries, particularly the balance sheet effects that arise from currency mismatch. The exchange rate was the favored nominal anchor for monetary policy in inflation stabilizations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. After the currency crises of 1994-2001, the conventional wisdom anointed Inflation Targeting as the preferred monetary regime in place of exchange rate targets. But events associated with the global crisis of 2007-09 have revealed limitations to the choice of CPI for the role of price index. The participation of emerging markets in global finance is a major reason why they have by now earned their own large body of research, but it also means that they remain highly prone to problems of asymmetric information, illiquidity, default risk, moral hazard and imperfect institutions. Many of the models designed to fit emerging market countries were built around such financial market imperfections; few economists thought this inappropriate. With the global crisis of 2007-09, the tables have turned: economists should now consider drawing on the models of emerging market crises to try to understand the unexpected imperfections and failures of advanced-country financial markets.

Seven possible nominal variables are considered as candidates to be the anchor or target for monetary policy. The context is countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which tend to be price takers on world markets, to produce commodity exports subject to volatile terms of trade, and to experience procyclical international finance. Three anchor candidates are exchange rate pegs: to the dollar, euro and SDR. One candidate is orthodox Inflation Targeting. Three candidates represent proposals for a new sort of inflation targeting that differs from the usual focus on the CPI, in that prices of export commodities are given substantial weight and prices of imports are not: PEP (Peg the Export Price), PEPI (Peg an Export Price Index), and PPT (Product Price Targeting). The selling point of these production-based price indices is that each could serve as a nominal anchor while yet accommodating terms of trade shocks, in comparison to a CPI target. CPI-targeters such as Brazil, Chile, and Peru are observed to respond to increases in world prices of imported oil with monetary policy that is sufficiently tight to appreciate their currencies, an undesirable property, which is the opposite of accommodating the terms of trade. As hypothesized, a product price target generally does a better job of stabilizing the real domestic prices of tradable goods than does a CPI target. Bottom line: A Product Price Targeter would appreciate in response to an increase in world prices of its commodity exports, not in response to an increase in world prices of its imports. CPI targeting gets this backwards.

Fiscal and monetary policy each has a role to play in mitigating the volatility that stems from the large trade shocks hitting commodity-exporting countries. All too often macroeconomic policy is procyclical, that is, destabilizing, rather than countercyclical. This paper suggests two institutional innovations designed to achieve greater countercyclicality, one for fiscal policy and one for monetary policy. The proposal for fiscal policy is to emulate Chile’s structural budget rule, and particularly its avoidance of over-optimism in forecasting. The proposal for monetary policy is called Product Price Targeting (PPT), an alternative to CPI-targeting that is designed to be more robust with respect to terms of trade shocks.

Historically, many countries have suffered a pattern of procyclical fiscal policy: spending too much in booms and then forced to cut back in recessions, thereby exacerbating the business cycle. This problem has especially plagued Latin American commodity-producers. Since 2000, fiscal policy in Chile has been governed by a structural budget rule that has succeeded in implementing countercyclical fiscal policy. The key innovation is that the two most important estimates of the structural versus cyclical components of the budget – trend output and the 10-year price of copper – are made by expert panels and thus insulated from the political process. Chile’s fiscal institutions could usefully be emulated everywhere, but especially in other commodity-exporting countries. This paper finds statistical support for a series of hypotheses regarding forecasts by official agencies that have responsibility for formulating the budget. 1) Official forecasts of budgets and GDP in a 33-country sample are overly optimistic on average. 2) The bias toward over-optimism is stronger the longer the horizon 3) The bias is greater among European governments that are politically subject to the budget rules in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). 4) The bias is greater at the extremes of the business cycle, particularly in booms. 5) In most countries, the real growth rate is the key macroeconomic input for budget forecasting. In Chile it is the price of copper. 6) Real copper prices mean-revert in the long run, but this is not always readily perceived. 7) Chile’s official forecasts are not overly optimistic on average. 8) Chile has apparently avoided the problem of official forecasts that unrealistically extrapolate in boom times. The conclusion: official forecasts, if not insulated from politics, tend to be overly optimistic, and the problem can be worse when the government is formally subject to budget rules. The key innovation that has allowed Chile in general to achieve countercyclical fiscal policy, and in particular to run surpluses in booms, is not just a structural budget rule in itself, but a regime that entrusts to panels of independent experts the responsibility for estimating the extent to which contemporaneous copper prices and GDP have departed from their long-run trends.

The paper studies forecasts of real growth rates and budget balances made by official government agencies among 33 countries. In general, the forecasts are found: (i) to have a positive average bias, (ii) to be more biased in booms, and (iii) to be even more biased at the 3-year horizon than at shorter horizons. This over-optimism in official forecasts can help explain excessive budget deficits, especially the failure to run surpluses during periods of high output: if a boom is forecasted to last indefinitely, retrenchment is treated as unnecessary. Many believe that better fiscal policy can be obtained by means of rules such as ceilings for the deficit or, better yet, the structural deficit. But we also find: (iv) countries subject to a budget rule, in the form of euroland’s Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), make official forecasts of growth and budget deficits that are even more biased and more correlated with booms than do other countries. This effect may help explain frequent violations of the SGP. The question becomes how to overcome governments’ tendency to satisfy fiscal targets by wishful thinking rather than by action. Chile in 2000 created structural budget institutions that may have solved the problem. Independent expert panels, insulated from political pressures, are responsible for estimating the long-run trends that determine whether a given deficit is deemed structural or cyclical. The result is that Chile’s official forecasts of growth and the budget have not been overly optimistic, even in booms. Unlike many countries in the North, Chile took advantage of the 2002–7 expansion to run budget surpluses, and so was able to ease in the 2008–9 recession.