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981. Europe 1957 to 1979: From the Common Market to the European Monetary System

Author:
Joseph Halevi
Publication Date:
11-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
This essay deals with the contradictory dynamics that engulfed Europe from 1959 to 1979, the year of the launching of the European Monetary System. It focuses on how the macroeconomic frame- work of stop-go policies in the 1960s ended up privileging external – intra-European - exports at the expense of domestic demand. The paper offers a very tentative explanation as to why stop-go policies, by weakening domestic demand, did not put an end to the to the ‘long boom’ earlier as they should have. The French crisis of 1968-69 leading to the demise of De Gaulle is discussed at length, as is the renewal of the German export drive in the wake of a nominal revaluation of the D-Mark in 1969. Finally, the revival of labor struggles in Italy in the same year is put in the context of the structural weaknesses of the Italian economy as analyzed by the late Marcello de Cecco. The conclusion is that European countries had neither the political culture nor the institutional mechanisms to coordinate mutually advantageous policies. Their so-called cooperation was an exercise in establishing hegemony while defending the interests specific to the dominant economic groups of each country. The essay then deals with the formation of the EMS as an expression of efforts to establish and enforce economic dominance.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, History, Monetary Policy, Capitalism, Common Market, and Macroeconomics
Political Geography:
Europe

982. From the EMS to the EMU and...to China

Author:
Joseph Halevi
Publication Date:
11-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
The paper highlights the position of German authorities, showing that they were quite lucid about the fundamental weaknesses inherent in a process that separated monetary from fiscal policies by giving priority to the centralization of the former. Instead of repeating the well known critiques levelled against the EMU – for which readers are referred to the unsurpassed treatment by Stiglitz, the essay highlights the splintering of Europe in the way in which it has unfolded during the 1990s and in the first decade of the present millennium. In particular the early economic and political origins of the terminal crisis of Italy are located between the late 1980s and the 1990s. France is shown to belong increasingly to the so-called European periphery by virtue of a weakening industrial structure and persistent balance of payments deficits. The paper argues that France regains its central role by political means and through its weight as an active nuclear military power centered on maintaining its imperial interests and posture especially in Africa. The first decade of the present millennium is portrayed as the period in which a distinct German economic area had been formed in the midst of Europe with a strong drive to the east with an increasingly powerful gravitational pull towards the People’s Republic of China.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, Political Economy, History, and Macroeconomics
Political Geography:
Africa, China, Europe, Asia, Germany, and Global Focus

983. Synthetic MMT: Old Line Keynesianism with an Expansionary Twist

Author:
Lance Taylor
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Expansionary macroeconomic policy with a strong redistributive component is an attractive proposition, most recently launched on the basis of Modern Monetary Theory or MMT. The Theory is a synthesis of familiar ideas, newly relevant but scarcely path-breaking. Its basics – Chartalist or fiat money, functional finance, and models based on consistent national accounting – come straight from Maynard Keynes, Abba Lerner, and Wynne Godley. Functional finance is the heart of fiscalist Keynesianism built upon automatic stabilizers for the business cycle. MMT’s job guarantee proposal is one more stabilizer which could be a modest helpful supplement to the system which exists. National accounting comparisons of a possible MMT package with the 2008 crash and the Trump tax cut are presented with emphasis on autonomous shifts in demand. The package could have problems with debt sustainability and external balance. Inflation is unlikely if wage repression in the USA is not reversed. But strong wage increases are presumably a goal of MMT.
Topic:
Economics, Monetary Policy, Finance, Economic Theory, Macroeconomics, and Money
Political Geography:
United States

984. Big Tech Acquisitions and the Potential Competition Doctrine: The Case of Facebook

Author:
Catherine Ruetschli and Mark Glick
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
The Big Tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, have individually and collectively engaged in an unprecedented number of acquisitions.When a dominant firm purchases a start-up that could be a future entrant and thereby increase competitive rivalry, it raises a potential competition issue. Unfortunately, the antitrust law of potential competition mergers is ill-equipped to address tech mergers. We contend that the Chicago School’s assumptions and policy prescriptions hobbled antitrust law and policy on potential competition mergers. We illustrate this problem with the example of Facebook. Facebook has engaged in 90 completed acquisitions in its short history (documented in the Appendix to this paper). Many antitrust commentators have focused on the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions as cases of mergers that have reduced potential competition. We show the impotence of the potential competition doctrine applied to these two acquisitions. We suggest that the remedy for Chicago School damage to the potential competition doctrine is a return to an empirically tractable structural approach to potential competition mergers.
Topic:
Economics, Science and Technology, Communications, Law, Digital Economy, Macroeconomics, Monopoly, and Antitrust Law
Political Geography:
United States

985. American Gothic: How Chicago Economics Distorts “Consumer Welfare” in Antitrust

Author:
Mark Glick
Publication Date:
07-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Since the publication of Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, lawyers, judges, and many economists have defended “Consumer welfare” (CW) as a standard for decisions about antitrust goals and enforcement priorities. This paper argues that the CW is actually an empty concept and is an inappropriate goal for antitrust. Welfare economists concede that there is no credible measurable link between price and output and human well-being. This means that the concept of CW does not legitimate limited antitrust enforcement, nor does it justify the exclusion of other antitrust goals that require more active enforcement practices. This paper contends that antitrust policy is not welfare based at all, and that if it were, antitrust policy and enforcement would differ significantly from the Chicago School vision. Without the fiction that economists can establish that in the short run lower price and higher output measurably increases welfare more than other goals, recent defenses of the CW standard resolve down to arguments based on unsupported assumptions.
Topic:
Economics, Law, Legal Theory, Economic Theory, Macroeconomics, Antitrust Law, and Microeconomics
Political Geography:
United States

986. Firm-Level Political Risk: Measurement and Effects

Publication Date:
07-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
We validate our measure by showing it correctly identifies calls containing extensive conversations on risks that are political in nature, that it varies intuitively over time and across sectors, and that it correlates with the firm’s actions and stock market volatility in a manner that is highly indicative of political risk. Firms exposed to political risk retrench hiring and investment and actively lobby and donate to politicians. These results continue to hold after controlling for news about the mean (as opposed to the variance) of political shocks. Interestingly, the vast majority of the variation in our measure is at the firm level rather than at the aggregate or sector level, in the sense that it is neither captured by the interaction of sector and time fixed effects, nor by heterogeneous exposure of individual firms to aggregate political risk. The dispersion of this firm-level political risk increases significantly at times with high aggregate political risk. Decomposing our measure of political risk by topic, we find that firms that devote more time to discussing risks associated with a given political topic tend to increase lobbying on that topic, but not on other topics, in the following quarter.
Topic:
Economics, Economy, Business, and Risk
Political Geography:
United States

987. Expansionary Austerity and Reverse Causality: A Critique of the Conventional Approach

Author:
Christian Breuer
Publication Date:
07-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
In this paper we methodologically review and criticize a broad literature of empirical work on the effects of fiscal policy (the ‘conventional approach’). Beyond previous critiques of this approach, we show that the cyclical adjustment strategy as used in this literature entails erroneous assumptions that necessarily produce flawed results in support of expansionary austerity. Specifically, the cyclically-adjusted primary balance (CAPB) strategy this literature employs fails to correct for cyclical effects in the expenditure- GDP-ratio, so that the estimates of the results of expansionary fiscal consolidation are affected by reverse causality, i.e. increasing GDP causally decreases expenditure-GDP- ratios, rather than vice versa. We provide suggestions on how to fix this incomplete cyclical adjustment problem with a new approach. After replicating two famous articles of the conventional literature and controlling for this bias, the expansionary effects of fiscal adjustments disappear or turn into their opposite
Topic:
Economics, Macroeconomics, and Fiscal Policy
Political Geography:
United States

988. State Capacity and Demand for Identity: Evidence from Political Instability in Mali

Author:
Maxim Ananyev and Michael Poyker
Publication Date:
06-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
We demonstrate that civil conflict erodes self-identification with a nation-state even among non- rebellious ethnic groups in non-conflict areas. We perform a difference-in-difference estimation using Afrobarometer data. Using the onset of Tuareg-led insurgency in Mali caused by the demise of the Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi as an exogenous shock to state capacity, we find that residents living closer to the border with the conflict zone experienced a larger decrease in national identification. The effect was greater on people who were more exposed to local media. We hypothesize about the mechanism and show that civil conflict erodes national identity through the peoples’ perception of a state weakness.
Topic:
Development, Economics, State Formation, State Actors, State, and Institutions
Political Geography:
Africa, Libya, and Mali

989. Macroeconomic Management Meets the New Economy

Author:
Commission on Global Economic Transformation
Publication Date:
05-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Finance and the macroeconomy, both policy and industry practices as well as academic research, have evolved substantially in recent years. While the old questions of business cycles, macroeconomic management, financial regulation, and social protection are still being debated, we are now confronted with new developments in the economy, characterized by digital technology, new modes of production and business models, and changing employment relations. Macroeconomics and finance need urgent rethinking as the global economy transforms. Our gathering on March 5, 2019 brought together economists, policymakers, financial regulators, and industry practitioners from around the world. We heard diverse perspectives on multilateralism, pension and labor market reform, international trade, and risks in the world economy, and we grappled with issues on stagnant wages, public debt, fiscal and monetary policy, and banking reforms. Our discussion was by no means exhaustive or conclusive, but we attempted to harness the group’s collective wisdom to address some of the most prominent questions of our day. This document is intended to inform our commissioners as they develop CGET’s final report and to share our timely conversation with policymakers and the general public. Fomenting multidisciplinary, critical discourse is one of the most important responsibilities of this initiative, and we sincerely thank the staff at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), our dedicated Commissioners, and our outside experts for helping us to promote this dialogue.
Topic:
Economics, Industrial Policy, Regulation, Digital Economy, Economic Theory, and Macroeconomics
Political Geography:
United States and Global Focus

990. Demand-determined potential output: a revision and update of Okun’s original method

Author:
Claudia Fontanari, Antonella Palumbo, and Chiara Salvatori
Publication Date:
05-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
This paper challenges the mainstream view of potential output, and enquires into the supposed effects of Great Recession on potential growth. We identify in the demand-led growth perspective a more promising theoretical framework both to define the notion and to gauge the long-term effects of a demand slow down. Based on the poor reliability of standard estimates of potential output, we also propose an alternative calculation. This is based on an update of Arthur M. Okun’s original method for estimating potential output, which, differently from the estimation methods currently in use, does not rely on the notion of NAIRU, thus being immune to its theoretical and empirical shortcomings. Our calculation, based on a re-estimation of Okun’s Law on US quarterly data, shows both how far an economy generally operates from its production possibilities, and how much potential growth is affected by the actual growth of demand over time. These wide margins for expansion of actual and potential output growth imply that a determined policy of demand expansion would create, given time, the very capacity that justifies it.
Topic:
Economics, Global Recession, Economic growth, Macroeconomics, and Demand
Political Geography:
United States and Global Focus