Question #1
Another important measure of how an economy is performing is the unemployment rate, but there is more to the unemployment rate than just the headline rate reported on the news.
In particular, we are going to look at the U3 rate (the Headline rate), the U6 rate, and
the labor force participation rate.
Go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On their home page, from the menu on the top of the page, click on “Economic Releases,” choose “Latest Releases,” click on “Employment Situation,” and then on “Employment Situation Summary.” Read the report. Then using the tables linked from the bottom of the report, find:
the U3 rate;
the U6 rate; and,
the labor force participation rate.
What are the differences among these measures? Note the percentages of each, what each measure includes, and then express your views on what factors may be causing the U6 rate to be roughly twice the U3 rate and what may be causing the decline in the labor participation rate. Is the headline rate used by most news reports misleading?
For your information, here is a summary of the six unemployment measures.
- U-1, persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force;
- U-2, job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force;
- U-3, total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (this is the definition used for the official unemployment rate);
- U-4, total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers;
- U-5, total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other marginally attached workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers; and
- U-6, total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.
Sources you can use:
Review the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Report
Please see attached.
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This text was adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as
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Preface
We have written a fundamentally different text for principles of economics, based on two
premises:
1. Students are motivated to study economics if they see that it relates to their own lives.
2. Students learn best from an inductive approach, in which they are first confronted with
a question and then led through the process of how to answer that question.
The intended audience of the textbook is first-year undergraduates taking courses on the
principles of macroeconomics and microeconomics. Many may never take another economics
course. We aim to increase their economic literacy both by developing their aptitude for
economic thinking and by presenting key insights about economics that every educated
individual should know.
Applications ahead of Theory
We present all the theory that is standard in books on the principles of
economics. But by beginning with applications, we also show students why this
theory is needed.
We take the kind of material that other authors put in “applications boxes” and place it at the
heart of our book. Each chapter is built around a particular business or policy application,
such as (for microeconomics) minimum wages, stock exchanges, and auctions, and (for
macroeconomics) social security, globalization, and the wealth and poverty of nations.
Why take this approach? Traditional courses focus too much on abstract theory relative to the
interests and capabilities of the average undergraduate. Students are rarely engaged, and the
formal theory is never integrated into the way students think about economic issues. We
provide students with a vehicle to understand the structure of economics, andwe train them
how to use this structure.
A New Organization
Traditional books are organized around theoretical constructs that mean
nothing to students. Our book is organized around the use of economics.
Our applications-first approach leads to a fundamental reorganization of the textbook.
Students will not see chapters with titles like “Cost Functions” or “Short-Run Fluctuations.”
We introduce tools and ideas as, and when, they are needed. Each chapter is designed with
two goals. First, the application upon which the chapter is built provides a “hook” that gets
students’ attention. Second, the application is a suitable vehicle for teaching the principles of
economics.
Learning through Repetition
Important tools appear over and over again, allowing students to learn from
repetition and to see how one framework can be useful in many different
contexts.
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Each piece of economic theory is first introduced and explained in the context of a specific
application. Most are reused in other chapters, so students see them in action on multiple
occasions. As students progress through the book, they accumulate a set of techniques and
ideas. These are collected separately in a “toolkit” that provides students with an easy
reference and also gives them a condensed summary of economic principles for exam
preparation.
A Truly International Book
International economics is not an afterthought in our book; it is integrated
throughout.
Many other texts pay lip service to international content. We have taught in numerous
countries in Europe, North America, and Asia, and we use that expertise to write a book that
deals with economics in a globalized world.
Rigor without Fear
We hold ourselves to high standards of rigor yet use mathematical argument
only when it is truly necessary.
We believe students are capable of grasping rigorous argument, and indeed are often confused
by loose argumentation. But rigor need not mean high mathematical difficulty. Many
students—even very bright ones—switch off when they see a lot of mathematics. Our book is
more rigorous yet less overtly mathematical than most others in the market. We also include a
math/stat toolkit to help students understand the key mathematical tools they do need.
A Textbook for the 21st Century
We introduce students to accessible versions of dynamic decision-making,
choice under uncertainty, and market power from the beginning.
Students are aware that they live in an uncertain world, and their choices are made in a
forward-looking manner. Yet traditional texts emphasize static choices in a world of certainty.
Students are also aware that firms typically set prices and that most firms sell products that
are differentiated from those of their competitors. Traditional texts base most of their analysis
on competitive markets. Students end up thinking that economic theory is unrealistic and
unrelated to the real world.
We do not shy away from dynamics and uncertainty, but instead introduce students to the
tools of discounted present value and decision-making under uncertainty. We also place
relatively more emphasis on imperfect competition and price-setting behavior, and then
explain why the competitive model is relevant even when markets are not truly competitive.
We give more prominence than other texts to topics such as basic game theory, statistics,
auctions, and asset prices. Far from being too difficult for principles students, such ideas are
in fact more intuitive, relevant, and easier to understand than many traditional topics.
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At the same time, we downplay some material that is traditionally included in principles
textbooks but that can seem confusing or irrelevant to students. We discuss imperfect
competition in terms of market power and strategic behavior, and say little about the
confusing taxonomy of market structure. We present a simplified treatment of costs that—
instead of giving excruciating detail about different cost definitions—explains which costs
matter for which decisions, and why.
A Non-Ideological Book
We emphasize the economics that most economists agree upon, minimizing
debates and schools of thought.
There is probably less ideological debate today among economists than there has been for
almost four decades. Textbooks have not caught up. We do not avoid all controversy, but we
avoid taking sides. We choose and present our material so that instructors will have all the
tools and resources they need to discuss controversial issues in the manner they choose.
Where appropriate, we explain why economists sometimes disagree on questions of policy.
Most key economic ideas—both microeconomic and macroeconomic—can be understood
using basic tools of markets, accounting identities, and budget sets. These are simpler for
students to understand, are less controversial within the profession, and do not require
allegiance to a particular school of thought.
A Single Voice
The book is a truly collaborative venture.
Very often, coauthored textbooks have one author for microeconomics and another for
macroeconomics. Both of us have researched and taught both microeconomic and
macroeconomic topics, and we have worked together on all aspects of the book. This means
that students who study both microeconomics and macroeconomics from our book will
benefit from a completely integrated and consistent approach to economics.
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Chapter 1
What Is Economics?
Fast-Food Economics
You are just beginning your study of economics, but let us fast-forward to the end of your first
economics course. How will your study of economics affect the way you see the world?
The final exam is over. You are sitting at a restaurant table, waiting for your friends to arrive.
The place is busy and loud as usual. Looking around, you see small groups of people sitting
and talking animatedly. Most of the customers are young; this is not somewhere your parents
visit very often. At the counter, people line up to buy food. You watch a woman choose some
items from the menu and hand some notes and coins to the young man behind the counter.
He is about the same age as you, and you think that he is probably from China. After a few
moments, he hands her some items, and she takes them to a table next to yours.
Where are you? Based on this description, you could be almost anywhere in the world. This
particular fast-food restaurant is a Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC, but it could easily have
been a McDonald’s, a Burger King, or any number of other fast-food chains. Restaurants like
this can be found in Auckland, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Denver, Edinburgh, Frankfurt,
Guangzhou, and nearly every other city in the world. Here, however, the menu is written in
French, and the customer paid in euros (€). Welcome to Paris.
While you are waiting, you look around you and realize that you are not looking at the world
in the same way that you previously did. The final exam you just completed was for an
economics course, and—for good or for ill—it has changed the way you understand the world.
Economics, you now understand, is all around you, all the time.
1.1 Microeconomics in a Fast-Food Restaurant
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
1. What kinds of problems do we study in microeconomics?
You watch another customer go to the counter and place an order. She purchases some fried
chicken, an order of fries, and a Coca-Cola. The cost is €10. She hands over a bill and gets the
food in exchange. It’s a simple transaction; you have witnessed exchanges like it thousands of
times before. Now, though, you think about the fact that this exchange has made both the
customer and the store better off than they were previously. The customer has voluntarily
given up money to get food. Presumably, she would do this only if having the food makes her
happier than having the €10. KFC, meanwhile, voluntarily gave up the food to get the €10.
Presumably, the managers of the store would sell the food only if they benefit from the deal as
well. They are willing to give up something of value (their food) in exchange for something
else of value (the customer’s money).
Think for a moment about all the transactions that could have taken place but did not. For the
same €10, the customer could have bought two orders of fried chicken. But she didn’t. So even
though you have never met the person, you know something about her. You know that—at this
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moment at least—she prefers having a Coca-Cola, fries, and one order of fried chicken to
having two orders of fried chicken. You also know that she prefers having that food to any
number of other things she could have bought with those euros, such as a movie theater ticket,
some chocolate bars, or a book.
From your study of economics, you know that her decision reflects two different factors. The
first is her tastes. Each customer likes different items on the menu. Some love the spicy fried
chicken; others dislike it. There is no accounting for differences in tastes. The second is what
she can afford. She has a budget in mind that limits how much she is willing to spend on fast
food on a given day. Her decision about what to buy comes from the interaction between her
tastes and her budget. Economists have built a rich and complicated theory of decision
making from this basic idea.
You look back at the counter and to the kitchen area behind it. The kitchen, you now know, is
an example of a production process that takes inputs and produces output. Some of the inputs
are perhaps obvious, such as basic ingredients like raw chicken and cooking oil. Before you
took the economics course, you might have thought only about those ingredients. Now you
know that there are many more inputs to the production process, including the following:
The building housing the restaurant
The tables and chairs inside the room
The people working behind the cash register and in the kitchen
The people working at KFC headquarters managing the outlets in Paris
The stoves, ovens, and other equipment in the kitchen used to cook the food
The energy used to run the stoves, the ovens, the lighting, and the heat
The recipes used to convert the ingredients into a finished product
The outputs of KFC are all the items listed on the menu. And, you realize, the restaurant
provides not only the food but also an additional service, which is a place where you can eat
the food. Transforming these inputs (for example, tables, chickens, people, recipes) into
outputs is not easy. Let us examine one output—for example, an order of fried chicken. The
production process starts with the purchase of some uncooked chicken. A cook then adds
some spices to the chicken and places it in a vat of very hot oil in the huge pots in the kitchen.
Once the chicken is cooked, it is placed in a box for you and served to you at the counter. That
production process uses, to a greater or lesser degree, almost all the inputs of KFC. The person
responsible for overseeing this transformation is the manager. Of course, she doesn’t have to
analyze how to do this herself; the head office provides a detailed organizational plan to help
her.
KFC management decides not only what to produce and how to produce it but also how much
to charge for each item. Before you took your economics course, you probably gave very little
thought to where those prices on the menu came from. You look at the price again: €5 for an
order of fried chicken. Just as you were able to learn some things about the customer from
observing her decision, you realize that you can also learn something about KFC. You know
that KFC wouldn’t sell an order of fried chicken at that price unless it was able to make a
profit by doing so. For example, if a piece of raw chicken cost €6, then KFC would obviously
make a loss. So the price charged must be greater than the cost of producing the fried chicken.
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KFC can’t set the price too low, or it would lose money. It also can’t set the price too high.
What would happen if KFC tried to charge, say, €100 for an order of chicken? Common sense
tells you that no one would buy it at that price. Now you understand that the challenge of
pricing is to find a balance: KFC needs to set the price high enough to earn a good profit on
each order sold but not so high that it drives away too many customers. In general, there is a
trade-off: as the price increases, each piece sold brings in more revenue, but fewer pieces are
sold. Managers need to understand this trade-off between price and quantity, which
economists call demand. It depends on many things, most of which are beyond the manager’s
control. These include the income of potential customers, the prices charged in alternative
restaurants nearby, the number of people who think that going to KFC is a cool thing to do,
and so on.
The simple transaction between the customer and the restaurant was therefore the outcome of
many economic choices. You can see other examples of economics as you look around you—
for example, you might know that the workers earn relatively low wages; indeed, they may
very well be earning minimum wage. Across the street, however, you see a very different kind
of establishment: a fancy restaurant. The chef there is also preparing food for customers, but
he undoubtedly earns a much higher wage than KFC cooks.
Before studying economics, you would have found it hard to explain why two cooks should
earn such different amounts. Now you notice that most of the workers at KFC are young—
possibly students trying to earn a few euros a month to help support them through college.
They do not have years of experience, and they have not spent years studying the art of
cooking. The chef across the street, however, has chosen to invest years of his life training and
acquiring specialized skills and, as a result, earns a much higher wage.
The well-heeled customers leaving that restaurant are likewise much richer than those around
you at KFC. You could probably eat for a week at KFC for the price of one meal at that
restaurant. Again, you used to be puzzled about why there are such disparities of income and
wealth in society—why some people can afford to pay €200 for one meal while others can
barely afford the prices at KFC. Your study of economics has revealed that there are many
causes: some people are rich because, like the skilled chef, they have abilities, education, and
experience that allow them to command high wages. Others are rich because of luck, such as
those born of wealthy parents.
Everything we have discussed in this section—the production process, pricing decisions,
purchase decisions, and the employment and career choices of firms and workers—are
examples of what we study in the part of economics called microeconomics.
Microeconomics is about the behavior of individuals and firms. It is also about how these
individuals and firms interact with each other through markets, as they do when KFC hires a
worker or when a customer buys a piece of fried chicken. When you sit in a fast-food
restaurant and look around you, you can see microeconomic decisions everywhere.
KEY TAKEAWAY
In microeconomics, we study the decisions of individual entities, such as households
and firms. We also study how households and firms interact with each other.
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CHECKING YOUR UNDERSTANDING
List three microeconomic decisions you have made today.
1.2 Macroeconomics in a Fast-Food Restaurant
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
1. What kinds of problems do we study in macroeconomics?
The economic decisions you witness inside Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) are only a few
examples of the vast number of economic transactions that take place daily across the globe.
People buy and sell goods and services. Firms hire and lay off workers. Governments collect
taxes and spend the revenues that they receive. Banks accept deposits and make loans. When
we think about the overall impact of all these choices, we move into the realm of
macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is the study of the economy as a whole.
While sitting in KFC, you can also see macroeconomic forces at work. Inside the restaurant,
some young men are sitting around talking and looking at the newspaper. It is early afternoon
on a weekday, yet these individuals are not working. Like many other workers in France and
around the world, they recently lost their jobs. Across the street, there are other signs that the
economy is not healthy: some storefronts are boarded up because many businesses have
recently been forced to close down.
You know from your economics class that the unemployed workers and closed-down
businesses are the visible signs of the global downturn, or recession, that began around the
middle of 2008. In a recession, several things typically happen. One is that the total
production of goods and services in a country decreases. In many countries, the total value of
all the goods and services produced was lower in 2008 than it was in 2007. A second typical
feature of a recession is that some people lose their jobs, and those who don’t have jobs find it
more difficult to find new employment. And a third feature of most recessions is that those
who do still have jobs are unlikely to see big increases in their wages or salaries. These
recessionary features are interconnected. Because people have lower income and perhaps
because they are nervous about the future, they tend to spend less. And because firms are
finding it harder to sell their products, they are less likely to invest in building new factories.
And when fewer factories are being built, there are fewer jobs available both for those who
build factories and for those who work in them.
Down the street from KFC, a large construction project is visible. An old road and a nearby
bridge are in the process of being replaced. The French government finances projects such as
these as a way to provide more jobs and help the economy recover from the recession. The
government has to finance this spending somehow. One way that governments obtain income
is by taxing people. KFC customers who have jobs pay taxes on their income. KFC pays taxes
on its profits. And customers pay taxes when they buy their food.
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Unfortunately for the government, higher taxes mean that people and firms have less income
to spend. But to help the economy out of a recession, the government would prefer people to
spend more. Indeed, another response to a recession is to reduce taxes. In the face of the
recession, the Obama administration in the United States passed a stimulus bill that both
increased government spending and reduced taxes. Before you studied macroeconomics, this
would have seemed quite mysterious. If the government is taking in less tax income, how is it
able to increase spending at the same time? The answer, you now know, is that the
government borrows the money. For example, to pay for the $787 billion stimulus bill, the US
government issued new debt. People and institutions (such as banks), both inside and outside
the United States, buy this debt—that is, they lend to the government.
There is another institution—called the monetary authority—that purchases government debt.
It has specific names in different countries: in the United States, it is called the Federal
Reserve Bank; in Europe, it is called the European Central Bank; in Australia, it is called the
Reserve Bank of Australia; and so on. When the US government issues more debt, the Federal
Reserve Bank purchases some of it. The Federal Reserve Bank has the legal authority to create
new money (in effect, to print new currency) and then to use that to buy government debt.
When it does so, the currency starts circulating in the economy. Similarly, decisions by the
European Central Bank lead to the circulation of the euro notes and coins you saw being used
to purchase fried chicken.
The decisions of the monetary authority have a big impact on the economy as well. When the
European Central Bank decides to put more euros into circulation, this has the effect of
reducing interest rates, which means it becomes cheaper for individuals to get a student loan
or a mortgage, and it is cheaper for firms to buy new machinery and build new factories.
Typically, another consequence is that the euro will become less valuable relative to other
currencies, such as the US dollar. If you are planning a trip to the United States now that your
class is finished, you had better hope that the European Central Bank doesn’t increase the
number of euros in circulation. If it does, it will be more expensive for you to buy US dollars.
Today, the world’s economies are highly interconnected. People travel from country to
country. Goods are shipped around the world. If you were to look at the labels on the clothing
worn by the customers in KFC, you would probably find that some of the clothes were
manufactured in China, perhaps some in Malaysia, some in France, some in the United States,
some in Guatemala, and so on. Information also moves around the world. The customer
sitting in the corner using a laptop might be in the process of transferring money from a
Canadian bank account to a Hong Kong account; the person at a neighboring table using a
mobile phone might be downloading an app from a web server in Illinois. This globalization
brings many benefits, but it means that recessions can be global as well.
Your study of economics has taught you one more thing: the idea that you can take a trip to
the United States would have seemed remarkable half a century ago. Despite the recent
recession, the world is a much richer place than it was 25, or 50, or 100 years ago. Almost
everyone in KFC has a mobile phone, and some people are using laptops. Had you visited a
similar fast-food restaurant 25 years ago, you would not have seen people carrying computers
and phones. A century ago, there was, of course, no such thing as KFC; automobiles were still
a novelty; and if you cut your finger on the sharp metal edge of a table, you ran a real risk of
dying from blood poisoning. Understanding why world economies have grown so
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spectacularly—and why not all countries have shared equally in this growth—is one of the big
challenges of macroeconomics.
KEY TAKEAWAY
In macroeconomics, we study the economy as a whole to understand why economies
grow and why they sometimes experience recessions. We also study the effects of
different kinds of government policy on the overall economy.
CHECKING YOUR UNDERSTANDING
If the government and the monetary authority think that the economy is growing too
fast, what could they do to slow down the economy?
1.3 What Is Economics, Really?
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
1. What methods do economists use to study the world?
Economists take their inspiration from exactly the kinds of observations that we have
discussed. Economists look at the world around them—from the transactions in fast-food
restaurants to the policies of central banks—and try to understand how the economic world
works. This means that economics is driven in large part by data. In microeconomics, we look
at data on the choices made by firms and households. In macroeconomics, we have access to a
lot of data gathered by governments and international agencies. Economists seek to describe
and understand these data.
But economics is more than just description. Economists also build models to explain these
data and make predictions about the future. The idea of a model is to capture the most
important aspects of the behavior of firms (like KFC) and individuals (like you). Models are
abstractions; they are not rich enough to capture all dimensions of what people do. Yet a good
model, for all its simplicity, is still capable of explaining economic data.
And what do we do with this understanding? Much of economics is about policy evaluation.
Suppose your national government has a proposal to undertake a certain policy—for example,
to cut taxes, build a road, or increase the minimum wage. Economics gives us the tools to
assess the likely effects of such actions and thus to help policymakers design good public
policies.
This is not really what you thought economics was going to be about when you walked into
your first class. Back then, you didn’t know much about what economics was. You had a vague
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thought that maybe your economics class would teach you how to make money. Now you
know that this is not really the point of economics. You don’t have any more ideas about how
to get rich than you did when you started the class. But your class has taught you something
about how to make better decisions and has given you a better understanding of the world
that you live in. You have started to think like an economist.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Economists gather data about the world and then build models to explain those data
and make predictions.
CHECKING YOUR UNDERSTANDING
Suppose you were building a model of pricing at KFC. Which of the following
factors would you want to make sure to include in your model? Which factors do
you think would be irrelevant?
the age of the manager making the pricing decisions
the price of chicken
the number of customers who come to the store on a typical day
the price of apples
the kinds of restaurants nearby
1.4 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
Economics is all around us. We all make dozens of economic decisions every day—some big,
some small. Your decisions—and those of others—shape the world we live in. In this book, we
will help you develop an understanding of economics by looking at examples of economics in
the everyday world. Our belief is that the best way to study economics is to understand how
economists think about such examples.
With this in mind, we have organized our book rather differently from most economics
textbooks. It is built not around the theoretical concepts of economics but around different
applications—economic illustrations as you encounter them in your own life or see them in
the world around you. As you read this book, we will show you how economists analyze these
illustrations, introducing you to the tools of economics as we proceed. After you have read the
whole book, you will have been introduced to all the fundamental tools of economics, and you
will also have seen them in action. Most of the tools are used in several different applications,
thus allowing you to practice using them and gain a deeper understanding of how they work.
You can see this organization at work in our table of contents. In fact, there are two versions of
the table of contents so that both students and instructors can easily see how the book is
organized. The student table of contents focuses on the applications and the questions that we
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address in each chapter. The instructor table of contents lists the theoretical concepts
introduced in each chapter so that instructors can easily see how economic theory is
developed and used in the book.
We have also gathered all the tools of economics into a toolkit. You will see many links to this
toolkit as you read the book. You can refer to the toolkit as needed when you want to be
reminded of how a tool works, and you can also use it as a study aid when preparing for exams
and quizzes.
EXERCISES
1. A map is a model constructed by geographers and cartographers. Like an economic
model, it is a simplified representation of reality. Suppose you have a map of your
hometown in front of you. Think of one question about your town that you could
answer using the map. Think of another question about your town for which the map
would be useless.
2. Which of the following questions do you think would be studied by a
macroeconomist and which by a microeconomist? (Note: we don’t expect you to be
able to answer all these questions yet.)
a) What should the European Central Bank do about increasing prices in
Europe?
b) What happens to the price of ice cream in the summer?
c) Should you take out a student loan to pay for college?
d) What happens when the US government cuts taxes and pays for these tax
cuts by borrowing money?
e) What would happen to the prices of computers if Apple and Microsoft
merged into a single firm?
Economics Detective
1. Look at a newspaper on the Internet. Find a news story about macroeconomics. How
do you know that it is about macroeconomics? Find a news story about
microeconomics. How do you know that it is about microeconomics?
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Chapter 2
Macroeconomics in Action
Four Examples of Macroeconomics
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How might you encounter macroeconomics?
2. What are the main indicators of the macroeconomy?
3. What are the primary macroeconomic policy tools of the government?
Figure 2.1
The four screens in Figure 2.1 are diverse illustrations of macroeconomics as you might
encounter it:
An evening news show presents a story about whether the economy is in a recession.
You wonder why prices seem to be higher now than they were a few years ago.
You sit down to fill out your tax return.
You make payments on a car loan or a student loan.
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By the time you have finished this book, you will see these examples very differently from the
way you do right now. You may not know it, but your everyday life is filled with
macroeconomics in action.
Economic Activity in the United States
The top left screen in Figure 2.1 is tuned to the Bureau of Economic Analysis
(BEA;http://www.bea.gov), which is a part of the US government. A newspaper article or blog
that reports such news from the BEA is telling us about the state of the macroeconomy. The
report from the BEA tells you how the economy has been doing over the previous three
months. More specifically, it describes what has happened to something called
real gross domestic product (real GDP).
As you will soon learn, real GDP is a measure of the overall level of economic activity within
an economy. We won’t worry for the moment about exactly what GDP means or how it is
measured. Looking at the BEA announcement
(http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2011/gdp1q11_2nd.htm), you can see that
in the first quarter of 2011, real GDP increased by 1.8 percent, whereas in the fourth quarter of
2010, it increased by 3.1 percent. Because real GDP increased in both quarters, we know that
the economy is growing. However, it grew much more slowly in the first quarter of 2011 than
in the final quarter of 2010.
You might wonder why you would bother to listen to this report. Perhaps it looks rather dry
and boring. Yet the performance of the economy has a direct impact on how easy it is to find a
job if you are looking for one, how likely you are to lose your job if you are already employed,
how much you will earn, and what you can buy with the income you receive from working.
Overall economic activity is directly linked to the well-being of everyone in the economy,
including yourself. Should you be worried when you see that real GDP is growing much more
slowly than before? After you have read this book, we hope you will know the answer.
Because real GDP is such a general measure of economic activity, it can also be used to
compare how economies throughout the world are performing. If you have traveled to other
countries, you may have observed big differences in people’s standards of living. If you go to
Canada, France, or Japan, you will generally see relatively prosperous people who can afford
decent food, clothing, and shelter. If you go to Laos, Guatemala, or Malawi, you will see
people living in severe poverty. To understand these differences, we need to understand what
determines real GDP in an economy.
Inflation in the United States
The top right screen in Figure 2.1 reports on another economic variable that comes up all the
time in the news: the rate of inflation. You have probably never visited the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS; http://www.bls.gov) website from which we took this quotation. But you have
certainly heard a news story, perhaps on television or your car radio, telling you about the
inflation rate.
After the BLS releases a report such as this one
(http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm), news programs will note that the inflation
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rate reported in March 2011 was 2.7 percent. This means that, on average, prices in the
economy are 2.7 percent greater than they were a year ago. If you bought a jacket for $100 last
year, you should expect the same jacket to cost about $102.70 right now. Not every single
good and service increases by exactly this amount, of course. But, on average, prices are now
2.7 percent higher.
A news report like this tells us that the things we buy have become more expensive. This
matters to all of us. If your income has not increased over the last year, this inflation report
tells you that you are worse off now than you were last year because you can no longer buy as
much with your income.
Most of the time, you will hear news reports about inflation only for the country in which you
are living. Occasionally, you might also hear a news report about inflation somewhere else. In
early 2008, you might well have heard a news report that the inflation rate in Zimbabwe was
over 100,000 percent. You would probably find it difficult to imagine living in a country
where prices increase so quickly, and you might reasonably wonder how two different
countries in the world could have such different rates of inflation. When you have finished
this book, you will know the answer to this question.
Fiscal Policy in Action
The bottom left screen in Figure 2.1 is something you may have seen before. It is a US tax
form. Residents of the United States must file this form or one like it every year by April 15. If
you live in another country, you almost certainly have to file a similar form. As individuals, we
typically see this form as a personal inconvenience, and we don’t think much about what it
means for the economy as a whole. But this is much more than a form. It is a manifestation of
decisions made by the government about how much tax you and everyone else should pay.
Decisions about how much to tax and how much to spend are known as fiscal policy. The
fiscal policy adopted by a government affects your life in more ways than you can easily
imagine. It not only tells you how much gets taken out of your paycheck, but it also affects real
GDP and much more. It affects how likely you are to be unemployed in the future and how
much money you will receive from the government if you do lose your job. It affects the
interest rate you must pay on your car loan or student loan. It affects the tax rates you will pay
20 years from now and your likelihood of receiving social security payments when you retire.
Monetary Policy in Action
The bottom right screen in Figure 2.1 draws the attention of individuals and businesses all
around the world. Every six weeks a group called the Federal Open Market Committee
(FOMC) meets in Washington, DC, to make decisions on the course of US monetary policy.
Their decisions affect the interest rates we pay on loans, including car loans, student loans,
and mortgages. Their decisions also influence the level of economic activity and the inflation
rate. The FOMC could, if it chose, create very high inflation by allowing rapid growth in the
amount of money in the economy. It could, if it chose, create high rates of unemployment. It is
a powerful organization. There are other similar organizations elsewhere in the world: every
country conducts monetary policy in some form, and most have some equivalent of the
FOMC.
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International Channels
Figure 2.1 shows the kind of economic news you might see in the United States. If you are
living or traveling in a different country, you would see similar announcements about real
GDP, inflation, and economic policy. Using the Internet, it is also easy to check news sources
in other countries. If you start reading about economics on the Internet, you will come to
appreciate the global nature of economics. You can read stories in the United States about
monetary policy in China or fiscal policy in Portugal. And you can read news stories in other
countries about economic policy in the United States. In the modern globalized world,
economic connections across countries are impossible to ignore.
Figure 2.2 “Price of Euro in British Pounds, March 2008” presents two stories that show
globalization at work. Both share a common theme: the effects of a March 20, 2008, decision
by the FOMC to cut the target federal funds rate. The graph at the top of Figure 2.2 “Price of
Euro in British Pounds, March 2008” shows the market price of the euro—the currency used
in most of Europe—in terms of the British pound. When you travel, you typically exchange
one currency for another. For example, an American tourist traveling to France would buy
euros with dollars to have money to spend in France. If that same tourist then wanted to
travel from France to London, she might take some of her euros and buy British pounds. The
graph tells the price she would have paid in February and March of 2008.
You can see that, over a little more than a week, the euro became much more valuable relative
to the pound. Most notably, there was a big increase in the price of the euro between March 9
and March 19, and then prices settled down a bit. This was a wild week for the international
economy. In the United States, the Federal Reserve announced major financial support for
Wall Street firms on March 16 and then reduced interest rates on March 19. Around the same
time, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England in London were also taking
actions to try to calm the financial markets. At least for a period of time, they seemed to
succeed in stopping the rapid rise of the euro against the British pound. It is striking that
much of the financial action was taking place in the United States, yet the markets in which
Europeans trade currencies were also affected.
The story at the bottom of Figure 2.2 “Price of Euro in British Pounds, March 2008″discusses
the response of Asian stock markets to the action of the US Federal Reserve. Markets all over
the world increased in value after the action of the FOMC. The actions of the Fed matter well
beyond the borders of the United States. Bankers and businesspeople all over the globe are
“Fed watchers.”
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Figure 2.2 Price of Euro in British Pounds, March 2008
Source: http://www.oanda.com.
Asian Stocks Rise after Fed Cut
TOKYO (AP)—Asian stock markets rose Wednesday as investors welcomed a hefty U.S.
interest rate cut…
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index climbed 2.5 percent to close at 12,260.44 after rising
more than 3 percent earlier. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index, which rose as much as 3 percent
earlier, closed up 2.3 percent at 21,866.94.
Australia’s main index jumped 4 percent, and markets in South Korea, China and India also
rose. [1]
KEY TAKEAWAYS
You encounter macroeconomics everyday through the news about the state of the
macroeconomy, the price you pay for goods and services, the tax you pay on income,
and the effects of macroeconomic policy on interest rates. Macroeconomic events and
policies in other countries affect you as well.
Real GDP, the rate of inflation, and the rate of unemployment are three primary
indicators of the state of the macroeconomy.
The government influences the macroeconomy through its level of spending, taxes,
and control of the money supply.
Checking Your Understanding
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What do we mean by “real” when we talk about GDP?
How might the state of the macroeconomy in another country, such as China, or in a
group of countries, such as the European Union, affect the macroeconomy of the United
States?
[1] “Asian Stocks Rise after Fed Cut,” MSNBC.com, March 19, 2008, accessed June 27,
2011,http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23703748/ns/business- eye_on_the_economy.
2.1 Behind the Screens
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How has real GDP changed over the past 40 years?
2. What is inflation and how does it affect the macroeconomy?
3. How can we see fiscal and monetary policy in action?
Let’s look at Figure 2.1 again in a bit more detail.
The State of the Economy
The top two panels in Figure 2.1 provide information on some key indicators of the state of the
economy. The announcement from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) concerns one of
the most closely watched indicators of the macroeconomy: real gross domestic product (real
GDP). This is a measure of the goods and services produced by an economy in a year. We
discuss real GDP in every macroeconomic application in this book.
Figure 2.3 Real GDP per Person in the United States, 1960–2009
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Source: Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 7.0,
Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of
Pennsylvania, May 2011.
Figure 2.3 “Real GDP per Person in the United States, 1960–2009” shows real GDP per
person (often called real GDP per capita) from 1960 to 2009. Pictures like this one show up all
the time in newspapers, in magazines, on television, or on the Internet. One of the things you
will learn in your study of macroeconomics is how to interpret such economic data. We devote
an entire chapter to understanding exactly how real GDP is measured. For now, we draw your
attention to some details to help you appreciate what the graph means.
The horizontal axis indicates the year. Real GDP per person is shown on the vertical axis. To
read this graph, you would look at a particular year on the horizontal axis, such as 2000, and
then use the curve to see that the real GDP per person in 1965 was about $39,000.
If you look at this picture, the single most notable thing is that real GDP per person has been
increasing. It was about 2.6 times larger in 2009 than in 1960. This tells us that, on average,
the typical individual in the United States was 2.6 times richer in 2000 compared to 1960.
The increase in GDP is not caused by the fact that there are more people in the economy
because the figure shows GDP per person. The increase in GDP is not because prices are going
up: the word real in this discussion means that it has been corrected for inflation. [1]
Another thing you can see from the picture is that the growth of the economy has not been
smooth. Sometimes the economy grows fast; sometimes it grows more slowly. Sometimes
there are even periods in which the economy shrinks rather than grows. From this figure, you
can see that real GDP per person decreased in the mid-1970s, the mid-1980s, and most
notably in 2008 and 2009. During these times, people were becoming poorer on average, not
richer.
We keep using the phrase on average. This reminds us that, even though the economy as a
whole has been getting richer, the picture doesn’t tell us anything about how those gains have
been shared across the economy. In fact, some people became a lot richer over this period,
while many others saw only small gains, and some became poorer.
We see this uneven distribution very clearly when the economy shrinks. When that happens,
one of the things we also observe is that more people in the economy are unemployed—that is,
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they are looking for a job but unable to find one. The burden of an economic downturn is
borne disproportionately by those who lose their jobs.
Although this figure displays the history of the US economy over these 50 years, similar
figures can be constructed for other countries around the world. They do not all look identical,
but the pattern of uneven growth that we observe for the United States is one that we also see
for most other countries. However, it is not true everywhere. We will also see examples of
countries that have become poorer rather than richer in recent decades.
Real GDP is the most frequently watched indicator of economic performance. A second key
indicator is the one in the top right screen of Figure 2.1: the inflation rate. The Bureau of
Labor Statistics (BLS) collects information on prices on an ongoing basis; each month it
releases information on how fast prices are changing. The rate at which prices are changing is
the inflation rate. Other countries similarly have government agencies entrusted with
gathering information about the inflation rate and other economic indicators.
It may seem that the job of the BLS is pretty easy: get information on prices and report it.
Their task is, in fact, rather complex. In part, it is difficult because there are so many goods
and services in the economy. So when we say that prices are increasing, we must decide which
goods and services we are talking about. In addition, new goods appear, and obsolete goods
disappear; the BLS must take this into account. And the quality of goods changes as well. If
the price of a computer increases, is this an example of inflation or does it reflect an increase
in the quality of the computer?
What are the implications of an inflation announcement? All else being the same, higher
prices mean that we are unable to afford goods and services we were able to buy when prices
were lower. But “all else” is not the same. Generally when prices increase, wages also increase.
This means that the overall effects of inflation on our ability to buy goods and services are not
self-evident.
Another implication of inflation is the policy response it elicits. The monetary authorities in
the United States and many other countries are focused on ensuring that inflation does not get
out of control. A report of inflation might therefore lead to a response by a monetary
authority. Inflation affects us directly through the prices we pay and the wages we receive and
indirectly through the policy response it induces.
Though not included in our screens, another significant variable also indicates the state of the
macroeconomy: the rate of unemployment. The BLS
(http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm) reports the unemployment rate on a
monthly basis. It measures the fraction of people in the labor force who do not have a job.
When real GDP is relatively high, then the unemployment rate tends to be lower than average,
but when real GDP decreases, more people find themselves out of a job.
The Making of Fiscal and Monetary Policy
The top screens in Figure 2.1 provide information that flows to the policymakers in an
economy. These policymakers carefully watch the state of the economy and then, if
appropriate, take actions. The bottom screens in Figure 2.1 show policy in action.
Fiscal Policy
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For individuals and firms paying taxes in the United States, April 15 is an important day
because tax forms are due for the previous calendar year. Each year US citizens fill out their
tax forms and either make tax payments or receive reimbursements from the government.
The tax day differs across countries, but the experience is much the same everywhere:
individuals and firms must pay taxes to the government. This is one of the key ways in which
citizens interact with their governments.
A more complete version of the 1040EZ form for 2010 is shown in Figure 2.4 “Form 1040EZ”.
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Figure 2.4 Form 1040EZ
From the perspective of an individual filling out this form, the task is to get the data correct
and determine exactly what figures go where on the form. This is no small challenge. From the
perspective of economists working for the government, the tax form is an instrument of fiscal
policy. Embedded in the tax form are various tax rates that must be paid on the different types
of income you earn.
Where do these tax revenues go? The government collects taxes to finance its purchases of
goods and services in the economy—such as roads, schools, and national defense—and also to
make transfers to households, such as unemployment insurance.
The tax forms we fill out change each year, sometimes quite significantly. The tax rates
households and firms confront are changed by governmental decisions. The government
alters tax rates to affect the level of economic activity in the economy. It uses these tools when,
in its judgment, the level of economic activity (as measured by real GDP, the unemployment
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rate, and other variables we will learn about) is insufficient. This is a delicate assessment that
requires an understanding of the meaning and measurement of satisfactory economic
performance and a deep understanding of how the economy works.
For example, consider the winter of 2008. Policymakers working in the White House and on
Capitol Hill kept careful track of the state of the economy, looking as we just did at
announcements from the BEA and the BLS on output and inflation. Eventually, they
concluded that economic activity was not at a high enough level. They took actions to increase
output by reducing taxes through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
(http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=204335,00.html). The idea is as follows: when
people pay less in taxes, they have more income available to spend, so they will purchase more
goods and services. The link between the legislation and you as an individual is through tax
forms like the one shown in Figure 2.4 “Form 1040EZ”.
Monetary Policy
The bottom right screen in Figure 2.1 shows a decision of the Federal Open Market Committee
(FOMC) to reduce a key interest rate by three-fourths of a percentage point to 2.25 percent. As
we shall see in our study of monetary policy, a reduction in interest rates is a tool to increase
economic activity. Lower interest rates make it cheaper for households and firms to borrow,
so they spend more on goods and services. The FOMC action was taken on account of weak
economic conditions in the United States, but its consequences were felt worldwide.
Other monetary authorities likewise look at the state of their economies and adjust their
monetary policy. The following is part of a statement from the European Central Bank (ECB),
the monetary policy authority for the European Union. It was part of a press conference held
in April 2005 in which Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the ECB, and Lucas Papademos, vice
president of the ECB, provided a statement about economic outlook for Europe and the stance
of monetary policy.
All in all, we have not changed our assessment of risks to price stability over the medium
term. So far, we have seen no significant evidence of underlying domestic inflationary
pressures building up in the euro area. Accordingly, we have left the key ECB interest
rates unchanged. Both nominal and real rates are at exceptionally low levels, lending
ongoing support to economic activity. However, upside risks to price stability over the
medium term remain and continued vigilance is therefore of the essence.
I shall now explain our assessment in more detail, turning first to the economic
analysis. Recent data and survey indicators on economic activity have been mixed. In
general they point to ongoing economic growth at a moderate pace over the short term,
with no clear signs as yet of a strengthening in underlying dynamics.
Looking further ahead, the conditions remain in place for moderate economic growth to
continue. Global growth remains solid, providing a favourable environment for euro
area exports. On the domestic side, investment is expected to continue to be supported
by very favourable financing conditions, improved profits and greater business
efficiency. Consumption growth should develop in line with real disposable income
growth. However, at the same time, persistently high oil prices in particular pose
downside risks to growth.
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[…] [2]
Statements such as this are reported in the business press and widely read. Businesspeople all
over the world closely follow the actions of central banks. That is, the people interested in this
statement by the ECB were not only European citizens but also individuals in the United
States and other countries. Likewise, when the Fed takes action, the news shows up on
televisions and computer screens across the world.
The ECB quotation mentions several key economic variables: inflation, real interest rates,
nominal interest rates, economic activity, investment, exports, consumption growth, and real
disposable income growth. These variables are also important indicators of the state of the
economy, as we can tell from the fact that they play such a prominent role in the ECB
assessment.
The economists at the ECB need to know the current state of the economy when deciding on
what policies to pursue. But there are compelling reasons for others to care about these
variables as well. Suppose, for example, that you are an investor contemplating an investment
in Spain. Your interest is in making profit from producing a good in Spain and selling it in that
country and others. The profitability of the investment in Spain depends on the overall state of
the Spanish economy and its neighbors in the European Union who are the target group for
your sales.
For you as an investor, the ECB statement contains vital information about the state of the
European economy. It also contains information on the likely conduct of monetary and fiscal
policy in Europe. These factors matter for you simply because they impact the profitability of
your investment. Thus you want to understand the statements from the ECB, starting with the
definitions of key macroeconomic variables.
By now, you may well have a number of questions. What exactly are these monetary
authorities in Europe and the United States? Where do they come from and what are their
powers? How exactly do their actions have so much influence on our lives? Answering these
questions is one of our tasks in this book. We devote two full chapters to the determination
and the influence of monetary policy in the economy.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Real GDP has grown on average over the past 50 years, but the growth is not always
constant: sometimes the economy grows quickly and sometimes real GDP grows
slowly (or not at all).
The inflation rate measures the percent change in prices. If prices are increasing, then
a unit of currency, such as a dollar, buys fewer goods and services. During a period of
inflation, the monetary authority may take action to reduce the inflation rate.
Each year, the income taxes we pay to the government reflect its choice of fiscal
policy. The policy meetings of the FOMC in the United States, the ECB of the
European Monetary Union, and other central banks around the world are examples of
monetary policy.
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Checking Your Understanding
Which of the macroeconomic variables discussed would a fiscal authority pay attention
to?
Do the ECB and the FOMC always make the same policy decision?
Is a change in the tax code an example of fiscal or monetary policy?
[1] In the bottom right of the picture, you can see the phrase Data in 1996 dollars. This
means that the numbers in the table are based on how much a dollar would have bought in
1996. Donot worry if you do not understand exactly what this phrase means right
now. Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy” will provide much more detail.
[2] “Introductory Statement with Q&A,” European Central Bank, April 7, 2005, accessed
June 27, 2011, http://www.ecb.int/press/pressconf/2005/html/is050407.en.html.
2.2 Between News and Policy: The Framework of Macroeconomics
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the methodology of macroeconomics?
2. What is the role of models in the making of macroeconomic policy?
We have seen the news and policy in action. But there is a vital piece missing: given the
economic news, how do policymakers know what to do? The answer to this question is at the
heart of this book. The basic methodology of macroeconomics is displayed in Figure 2.5
“Macroeconomics Methodology”. Macroeconomics involves the interplay of theory, data, and
policy. We have already seen two of these components in Figure 2.1. Two screens highlighted
data we have on the macroeconomy, and two screens highlighted policy actions.
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Figure 2.5 Macroeconomics Methodology
The answer to the question “how do policymakers know what to do?” is on the top left
ofFigure 2.5 “Macroeconomics Methodology”: theory. Macroeconomists typically begin by
observing the world and then try to develop a theoretical framework to explain what they have
seen. (An old joke says that the definition of an economist is “someone who sees something
happen in practice and wonders whether on earth it is possible in theory.”) Usually, a theory
developed by economists has a mathematical foundation—expressed by either equations or
diagrams. There is even a bit of art here: the theoretical framework must be simple enough to
work with yet realistic enough to be useful.
We hinted at these theories in our earlier discussion when we explained that both monetary
policy and fiscal policy affect the economy by changing the willingness of households and
firms to purchase goods and services. In our applications chapters, we develop these ideas and
explain the frameworks that policymakers use when deciding on their policies.
Our frameworks—or models, as they are often called—are tested by their ability to match
existing data and provide accurate predictions about new data. Models are constantly refined
so that they can do a better job of matching facts. After many rounds of interaction between
theory and data, a useful framework emerges. This then becomes the basis for policymaking.
How do policymakers know about the theories devised by economists? Politicians are typically
not expert economists. In most countries, a large number of trained economists are employed
as advisors to the government. These individuals have studied economic theory and are also
familiar with economic statistics, allowing them to provide the link between the economic
frameworks and the actual implementation of policy.
The big challenge for economists is to understand the links from policy to the aggregate
economy. When you first learned to drive, you were presumably introduced to all the
instruments in the car: the steering wheel, the accelerator, the brake, the mirrors, and so
forth. At the same time, you were learning the rules of the road. For many, the instruments of
the car are easy enough to grasp, and the rules of the road are reasonably intuitive. The
difficulty (and this is why driving schools make money) is in making the connection between
the controls in the car and the outcome you wish to achieve while driving. The same is true of
economic modeling: policy tools are not very difficult to understand, yet it can take decades of
experience to truly understand how to use these tools effectively.
Economists and businesspeople hope, for example, that the current chairman of the Federal
Reserve, Ben Bernanke, has this understanding, as discussed in the following news article
excerpt.
Economic View: Bernanke’s Models, and Their Limits
In terms of intellect, Ben S. Bernanke may be to the Federal Reserve what John G. Roberts Jr.
is to the Supreme Court. And like Chief Justice Roberts, Mr. Bernanke, the nominee to replace
Alan Greenspan at the Fed, has left a paper trail worth studying. What can it tell us about the
sort of Fed chairman he would be?
In general, Mr. Bernanke’s work has been solidly in the mainstream—a mainstream he has
helped define since he began publishing papers in major economic journals since 1981. He has
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written repeatedly about ways of using mathematical models of a dauntingly complex
economy to set monetary policy. When he has strayed from that subject, his conclusions have
sometimes raised eyebrows.
[…]
These topics, however, are not at the core of what Mr. Bernanke would be concerned with at
the Fed. There, his opinions about domestic monetary policy would be more important. One
tenet of Mr. Bernanke’s philosophy could not be clearer: that the central bank should use a
model, not just hunches, to decide about interest rates and the money supply.
This is how he put it in 1997 in a paper with Michael Woodford, now a professor of political
economy at Columbia: “We conclude that, although private-sector forecasts may contain
information useful to the central bank, ultimately the monetary authorities must rely on an
explicit structural model of the economy to guide their policy decisions.”
[…] [1]
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The methodology of macroeconomics involves the interplay between data and models.
Abstract models provide policymakers with a framework to understand what is
happening in the macroeconomy and also a way to predict the effects of policy
actions.
Checking Your Understanding
Why are economic models always being refined?
If a theory is inconsistent with some but not all observations, could it still be useful for
policymaking purposes?
[1] Daniel Altman, “Economic View: Bernanke’s Models, and Their Limits,” New York Times,
October 30, 2005, accessed June 27,
2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/business/yourmoney/30econview.html.
2.3 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
Our book is built around economic topics, such as the income tax code, the social security
system, the determination of monetary policy in Europe, and the contrasting economic health
of different countries.
Throughout this book, we will emphasize the measurement and interpretation of economic
data. Understanding how to read charts and tables of economic data is a critical skill for
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anyone who wants to be a sophisticated consumer of economic and political news. We also
explain both policy tools and their links to economic outcomes. Understanding these links
requires a model of the economy. We introduce models as needed, in the context of their
applications. Mastering macroeconomics involves both understanding the tools that
macroeconomists use and knowing how and when those tools should be applied. In this book,
you will learn about these tools by example: you will see them in use as we study different
questions in economics. At the same time, you will learn about many topics that should
interest you as engaged and aware citizens of the world. We hope that, after reading this book,
you will both better understand what it is that economists do and be better informed about
the world in which we all live.
As you proceed through the chapters, you will often see reference to our toolkit. This is a
collection of some of the most important tools that we use over and over in different chapters.
Each tool is fully introduced somewhere in the book, but you can also use the toolkit as a
reference when working through different chapters. In addition, it can serve as a study aid
when you are preparing for quizzes and examinations.
We try to avoid getting too hung up on the mathematical expression of our theories (although
the math will usually be lurking in the background where you can’t quite see it). In particular,
our applications chapters contain very little mathematics. This means that you can read and
understand the applications without needing to work through a lot of mathematics. Compared
to our applications chapters, our toolkit contains slightly more formal versions of the
frameworks that we develop. You will refer to the tools over and over again as we progress
through the book, for the same tool is often used to shed light on all sorts of different
questions.
Key Links
Bureau of Economic Analysis: http://www.bea.gov
Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System:http://www.federalreserve.gov
European Central Bank: http://www.ecb.int/home/html/index.en.html
EXERCISES
1. Provide updated information for at least one of the four screens in .
2. Use the Internet to find an article (for example, magazine, newspaper, publication of
an economics research group) that contains a graph of real GDP for a country other
than the United States. What purpose does the picture serve in the article? Why do
you think it was included?
3. Find a statement about monetary policy from the monetary authority in the United
States, Canada, or Australia. What are some of the indicators of the state of the
economy that are used in the policy statement?
4. The article on Bernanke’s model contained the following quote: “We conclude that,
although private-sector forecasts may contain information useful to the central bank,
ultimately the monetary authorities must rely on an explicit structural model of the
economy to guide their policy decisions.” What do you think is meant by this
statement?
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http://www.bls.gov/
http://www.federalreserve.gov/
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Chapter 3
The State of the Economy
The IMF Comes to Town
In early 2002, a team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) flew to Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Argentina had been prospering during most of the 1990s, but more recently it had
begun to run into economic problems. The IMF is an organization that attempts to help
countries having financial difficulties.
An IMF team consists of professionally trained economists. These teams visit many countries,
such as Argentina, on a regular basis. In this chapter, we imagine that the IMF added you to
this mission and asked you to report back on the state of the Argentine economy. As we
proceed, we think about how you might have approached this task.
You arrive at Aeropuerto Internacional Ministro Pistarini de Ezeiza Airport, which is a clean
and modern airport on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. You ride into the city in a new car along
modern highways lined with fancy billboards. When you get to the city center, you notice that
there are luxurious shopping malls. You see high-end stores selling luxury brands, such as
Louis Vuitton, Versace, Hermes, and Christian Dior. The city seems prosperous, reminiscent
of Paris or New York. Just looking around, you see immediately that you are not in one of the
really poor countries of the world.
Figure 3.1
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Source: Image taken by authors.
As you explore the city, though, you begin to look more closely and notice that things are not
quite what they seemed at first glance. The luxury stores do not have many customers in
them. Some buildings show signs of a lack of maintenance; it has been a while since they were
repainted. Some stores are boarded up or bear signs saying that they are going out of
business. There seem to be a lot of people who are not working or who are making a living
selling goods on the street.
Reflecting on these conflicting clues to Argentina’s prosperity, you quickly realize that it is
difficult to assess the health of an economy by casual observation. In addition, you have seen
almost nothing of the country. Argentina covers over one million square miles; it is almost
one-third of the size of the United States and has a population of nearly 40 million. The more
you think about this, the harder the problem seems. Forty million people are buying things,
selling things, making things, and consuming things every day. It seems an impossible task to
make sense of all this activity and say anything useful about the economy as a whole. That
challenge is the subject of this chapter.
How can we evaluate the overall performance of something as complicated as an
economy?
Road Map
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If you think about this question for a bit, you will realize that it has more than one dimension.
First, we need measurement. We must summarize the economy in a manageable way,
which is impossible unless we find some way of measuring what is going on in the
economy. One of the primary tasks of economics is accounting. That leads to other
questions: what should we count, and how should we count it?
Data are not enough. Measurement will not take us very far unless we can combine it
with some understanding of how the economy works. We need to know how to
interpret the things we count. We need to know what our numbers mean. For this, we
need frameworks that help us make sense of the economy.
These two ideas guide our discussion in this chapter.
Think for a moment in very general terms about what happens in an economy. An economy
possesses some resources. These include the time and abilities of the people who live in the
economy, as well as natural resources, such as land or mineral deposits. An economy also
possesses various means of changing, or transforming, one set of things into other things (see
the following figure). For example, we have a process for making tea. We produce tea by
taking cold water, energy, and dried leaves and transforming those inputs into a hot beverage
that people like to drink. The simple act of making a cup of tea is an example of production.
Figure 3.2 From Inputs to Output
One of the main economic activities is production: the transformation of inputs (raw
materials, labor time, etc.) into output (goods and services that people value).
We are interested in measuring how much production occurs in an economy. Obviously,
however, we cannot hope to count all the times that people drop a teabag into a cup, and it
would not make much sense to do so. Economic activity typically involves more than
production; it also includes the notion of exchange—buying and selling. If you make a cup of
tea for yourself at home, we do not think of this as economic activity. If you buy a cup of tea at
your local coffee shop, we do think of this as economic activity. A very rough definition of
economic activity is as follows.
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Economic activity is the production of goods and services for sale.
Any definition this straightforward is bound to be too simple, and we will see that there are
several subtleties in the actual measurement of economic activity, particularly since some
goods and services are not actually bought and sold. Still, if you keep this idea in mind, it will
help you as we progress through the basics of economic measurement in this chapter.
3.1 Measuring Economic Activity
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the measure of total output of an economy?
2. What is the difference between real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP)?
Macroeconomics is data driven. Government statisticians and other organizations gather vast
amounts of data on the performance of various aspects of the macroeconomy, and
macroeconomists try to make sense of all this information.
If we want to explain economic data, then we first have to get the measurement right, and a
big part of this is ensuring that we get the accounting right. To make sure that we do, we begin
by constructing simple examples. This is not because a simple example is enough to describe
an economy; but because cannot hope to understand the complicated accounting unless we do
the simple accounting correctly.
The Pizza Economy
To understand the economic health of Argentina—or any other country—we begin by looking
at production in the economy. Let us imagine that Argentina produces a single good—pizza.
Each pizza is sold for 10 pesos (which is about US$3.33). To be concrete, suppose that every
worker in the economy works in a pizza factory in which (1) each hour worked produces 1
pizza, (2) each worker works 40 hours per week, and (3) each worker works 50 weeks per
year. Suppose there are about 15 million workers in the economy.
We measure total economic activity by determining the total value of the pizzas producedin
this economy. We obtain this by multiplying the previous numbers together. There are
40 pizzas per worker per week,
so there are
2,000 pizzas per worker per year (= 40 × 50),
which means that there are
30,000,000,000 pizzas per year (= 40 × 50 × 15,000,000).
The value of those pizzas is
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300,000,000,000 pesos per year (= 40 × 50 × 15,000,000 × 10).
The total value of all the production in the economy is called
nominal gross domestic product (nominal GDP). The word nominal indicates that
something is being measured in terms of money—in this case, Argentine pesos. For this
economy, nominal GDP is 300 billion pesos per year.
The economy we have just described is extremely stylized and somewhat dull from a culinary
perspective. We begin with such a simple economy because it allows us to understand the
basic workings of the economy without getting bogged down in a lot of details. We did,
however, choose numbers that are the right order of magnitude for the Argentine economy in
2002: the total number of workers in Argentina in 2002 was about 15 million, and nominal
GDP was about 300 billion pesos. In 2010, estimated GDP for Argentina was 1.4 trillion pesos,
and the workforce was over 16 million.
Measuring Nominal GDP
We now consider a more formal definition of nominal GDP and go through it term by term.
Nominal GDP is the market value of the final goods and services produced by an
economy in a given period of time.
Market Value
Our example pretended that there was only a single good produced in the economy—pizza. In
real economies, millions of different goods and services are produced, ranging from cars at an
assembly plant to haircuts sold by a local barber. If our goal is to measure the overall output of
an economy, we are faced with the problem of how to add together these goods and services.
How do you add 60,000 cubic meters of natural gas, 1,000 trucks, and 2,000 head of cattle
(to pick just a few examples of goods produced in Argentina)?
We need a common denominator. Economists use the market value of the goods and services.
This means that the common denominator is dollars in the United States, pesos in Argentina,
kroner in Sweden, euros in Portugal, and so on. Nominal GDP equals total output produced in
a year, valued at the actual market prices prevailing in that year. We choose market value for
two reasons. One is simplicity: data on the market prices of goods and services are relatively
easy to come by. The second reason is much more important. Market value tells us how much
people are willing to pay for different goods and services, which gives us a measure of the
relative value of different commodities. For example, if a new laptop computer costs $2,000
and a new hardcover novel costs $20, then the market is telling us that people are willing to
trade off these goods at the rate of 100 novels to 1 laptop. In effect, the market is telling us that
the laptop is 100 times more valuable than the novel. [1]
Let’s look at an example of the calculation. Table 3.1 “Calculating Nominal GDP”considers a
very small economy that produces three goods and services: T-shirts, music downloads, and
meals. We show data for two years. To calculate GDP in 2012, we take the market value of the
T-shirts ($20 × 10 = $200), the market value of the music downloads ($1 × 50 = $50), and the
market value of the meals ($25 × 6 = $150). Adding these, we discover that nominal GDP is
$400:
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($20 × 10) + ($1 × 50) + ($25 × 6) = $200 + $50 + $150 = $400.
Doing the same operations for 2013, we find that nominal GDP is $442:
($22 × 12) + ($0.80 × 60) + ($26 × 5) = $264 + $48 + $130 = $442.
We can see that lots of things changed between the two years. The price of T-shirts and meals
slightly increased, while music downloads became cheaper. Firms produced more T-shirts
and music downloads but fewer meals.
Table 3.1 Calculating Nominal GDP
Year T-shirts Music
Downloads
Meals Nominal
GDP ($)
Price
($)
Quantity Price
($)
Quantity Price
($)
Quantity
2012 20.00 10 1.00 50 25.00 6 400.00
2013 22.00 12 0.80 60 26.00 5 442.00
On the surface, 2013 appears to have been a good year in this economy. Nominal GDP
increased substantially relative to 2012. Dig a little deeper, however, and it is harder to
interpret this change. Production increased for some products and decreased for others. Some
prices increased, and others decreased. Was 2013 really better than 2012? We come back to
this question shortly.
Final Goods and Services
In Table 3.1 “Calculating Nominal GDP”, we assumed that all of the goods and services
purchased were purchased by their final users. That is, the T-shirts, music downloads, and
meals were all purchased by households for consumption purposes. (Households are not the
only group that consumes final goods and services in an economy. Firms, the government,
and households in other countries can also be final consumers.) We term these final goods (T-
shirts) and final services (music downloads and restaurant meals).
In contrast, intermediate goods and services are products such as raw materials and
energy that are used—and completely used up—in the production of other goods and
services. [2] We do not include intermediate goods in GDP. Think about a bottle of wine, for
example. It might be bought by a consumer at a wine store, in which case it is counted in GDP.
Alternatively, it might be bought by a restaurant to sell with its meals. In this case, the cost of
the meal is included in GDP, and the cost of the wine is already included in the cost of the
meal. The restaurant may have purchased the wine from a supplier, but that purchase
is not included as part of GDP. If both the sale of wine to the restaurant and the sale of that
wine to a customer of the restaurant were counted in GDP, the same bottle of wine would be
counted twice. By excluding the sale of intermediate goods in calculating GDP, we avoid such
double counting.
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Being intermediate is therefore not a feature of the good itself. It depends on how the good is
used. Wine sold to a consumer directly is a final good; wine sold to a restaurant is an
intermediate good. This fits with the idea that we want GDP to measure goods as they are
valued by consumers.
Produced by an Economy
Most of the time when we talk about an economy, we are speaking of a particular country.
Thus we talk about US GDP, Argentine GDP, Indian GDP, or Uruguayan GDP. Similarly, most
of the statistics that are collected refer to economic activity within a country. The
term economy can be much more general, though, for it simply means a particular set of
households and firms. We can speak of the world economy, the North Dakota economy, the
Buenos Aires economy, or even the economy of a street of your hometown. The basic concepts
are the same no matter what region we choose to discuss.
Over a Given Period
GDP is measured over a specified period of time. In principle, that time period could be
anything—a week, a month, a quarter (three months), or a year. In the United States and
many other countries, GDP is measured on a quarterly basis. However, it is typically
reported on an annual basis. In other words, government statisticians might measure GDP for
the first three months of 2012 and find that it was $4 trillion. That is, over that three-month
period, $4 trillion worth of goods and services was produced. The number would typically be
reported as “$16 trillion on an annual basis.”
It does not make any sense to talk about US GDP at the instant the clock strikes noon on
February 29, 2012. The amount of GDP produced at any instant of time is, for all intents and
purposes, zero. Instead, we think of GDP as a flow. We can count the number of pizzas
produced only if we specify some interval of time. Other variables can be sensibly measured
even at a given instant. For example, we could—in principle at least—count the number of
pizza ovens in existence at any given time. The number of pizza ovens at a point in time is an
example of a stock.
The requirement that we count goods and services produced in a certain period means that we
should also ignore the resale of goods produced in earlier periods of time. If a construction
company builds a new house and sells it to you, the production of that home is counted as part
of GDP. By contrast, if you buy a house that is 10 years old, the sale of that house is not
counted in GDP. (However, if you employed a real estate company to find the old house for
you, payment to that company would be included as part of GDP.) In the same way, if you
purchase a used textbook that was produced 3 years ago, that purchase is not counted in GDP.
Nominal GDP in the United States and Argentina
In macroeconomics, our data come to us in the form of time series. Time series are a sequence
of dated variables: GDP in 2000, GDP in 2001, GDP in 2002, and so on. Usually these data
are annual, but they could also be quarterly or monthly (or even daily or hourly). If we go to
the Economic Report of the President(http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop), we can find data for
nominal GDP. In the United States, the Bureau of Economic Analysis
(BEA; http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm) in the Department of Commerce is
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responsible for calculating nominal GDP. Table 3.2 “Nominal GDP in the United States,
2000–2010” gives an example of a time series.
Table 3.2 Nominal GDP in the United States, 2000–2010
Year Nominal GDP
(Billions of Dollars)
2000 9,951.5
2001 10,286.2
2002 10,642.3
2003 11,142.1
2004 11,867.8
2005 12,638.4
2006 13,398.9
2007 14,061.8
2008 14,369.1
2009 14,119.0
2010 14,660.2
It is often more revealing to show a time series as a picture rather than a list of
numbers.Figure 3.3 “Nominal GDP in the United States, 2000–2010” shows the data
from Table 3.2 “Nominal GDP in the United States, 2000–2010” in a graph. Looking at this
figure, we see immediately that the US economy grew over these years. The level of nominal
GDP (in billions) was $9.8 trillion in 2000 and $13.2 trillion in 2006.
Figure 3.3 Nominal GDP in the United States, 2000–2010
Nominal GDP in the United States grew for most of the last decade but declined in 2009.
Source: 2011 Economic Report of the President, accessed July 29,
2011,http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/tables11.html, Table B-1.
Let us return to your International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission in Argentina. From talking
to other members of the team, you learn that the Argentine government has statistics on
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nominal GDP. This is good news, for it means you do have information on the total value of
production in the economy. Figure 3.4 “Nominal GDP in Argentina, 1993–2002” shows
nominal GDP for Argentina over the decade prior to your arrival (1993–2002). In 1993, it was
237 billion pesos. In 2002, it was 313 billion pesos. Thus nominal GDP grew by about one-
third over the course of the decade.
Figure 3.4 Nominal GDP in Argentina, 1993–2002
The graph shows nominal GDP in Argentina between 1993 and 2002. Nominal GDP grew
overall during this period, although it decreased for several years in the second half of the
decade.
Source: International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook database
(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/index.htm).
Now suppose that in your hotel room one morning you hear on the radio that government
statisticians in Argentina forecast that nominal GDP next year will be 300 million pesos
greater than this year. How should you interpret this news? Without some context, it is
difficult to make any judgment at all.
The first thing to do is to work out if 300 million pesos is a big number or a small number. It
certainly sounds like a big number or looks like a big number if we write it out in full
(300,000,000). If we stacked 300 million peso bills on top of each other, the pile would be
over 100 miles high. But the real question is whether this is a big number relative to existing
nominal GDP. We have been told that the change in nominal GDP is 300 million, but we
would like to know what this is as a growth rate, which is a percentage change.
Toolkit: Section 16.11 “Growth Rates”
A growth rate is a percentage change in a variable from one year to the next. That is, a growth
rate is the change in a variable over time divided by its value in the beginning period.
For example, the growth rate of GDP is calculated as follows:
growth rate of GDP =
changeinGDP
GDP
.
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In our example for Argentina, the percentage change is equal to the change in nominal GDP
divided by its initial value. Remember than nominal GDP in 2002 was about 300 billion
pesos, so
percentagechange in GDP =
changein nominal GDP
initial value of nominalGDP
=
$300,000,000
$300,000,000,000
= 0.001
= 0.1 percent.
When we express this change in nominal GDP as a percentage, therefore, we see that it is in
fact very small—one-tenth of 1 percent. If you heard on the radio that nominal GDP was
expected to grow by 300 million pesos in a 300-billion peso economy, the correct conclusion
would be that nominal GDP would hardly change at all. By contrast, if the news announced a
projected increase in nominal GDP of 30 billion pesos, the percentage change is 30
billion/300 billion = 0.1 = 10 percent. This is a substantial change in nominal GDP.
Measuring Real GDP
In your bid to understand the economy of Argentina, you have seen that nominal GDP
increased by one-third between 1993 and 2002. One possibility is that Argentina is producing
one-third more pizzas than it was a decade ago—30 billion pizzas instead of 22.5 billion
pizzas. This would be good news. Producing more pizzas is something we would normally
think of as a good thing because it means that we are experiencing economic growth: there are
more goods and services for people to consume.
In talking to people about the Argentine economy, however, you learn something
disconcerting. They tell you that the prices of goods and services are greater this year than
they were last year and much greater than they were a decade ago. You begin to wonder:
perhaps Argentina is producing no more pizzas than before but instead pizzas have become
one-third more expensive than they formerly were. We would typically feel very differently
about this outcome. Yet another possibility is that there has been an increase in both the
number of pizzas produced and the price of pizza, and the combined effect doubled nominal
GDP. We need a way of distinguishing among these different possibilities.
Separating Nominal GDP into Price and Output
In our pizza economy, it is easy to tell the difference between an increase in production and an
increase in prices. We can measure increased production by counting the number of pizzas,
and we can measure increased prices by looking at the price of a pizza. We call the number of
pizzas real gross domestic product (GDP) (the word real here indicates that we are
effectively measuring in terms of goods and services rather than dollars), and we call the price
of a pizza the price level in the economy.
Then it follows that
nominal GDP = price level × real GDP.
In our example, the price level is 10 pesos, and real GDP is 30 billion pizzas. Multiplying these
numbers together, we find that nominal GDP is indeed 300 billion pesos. Sometimes, for
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shorthand, we use the term price to mean the price level in a given year and the
term output to mean real GDP in a given year.
Real GDP is the variable that most interests us because it measures the quantity of goods and
services produced in an economy. We would therefore like to find a way to decompose
nominal GDP into the price level and the level of real GDP in actual economies. But real
economies produce lots of different goods and services, the prices of which are continually
changing. In addition—unlike our fictional economy, where it makes sense to measure real
GDP as the number of pizzas—there is no “natural unit” for real GDP in an actual economy.
In fact, even in our pizza economy, there is still an arbitrariness about the units. Imagine that
we cut each pizza into 10 slices. Then we could just as easily say that real GDP is 300 billion
pizza slices instead of 30 billion pizzas, but that the price level—the price per slice—is 1 peso.
We would still conclude that nominal GDP—the number of slices multiplied by the price per
slice—was 300 billion pesos.
So is it possible to say, in a real economy producing multiple goods and services, that nominal
GDP is equal to the product of the price level and the level of real GDP? Does it still make
sense to write
nominal GDP = price level × real GDP
as we did for the pizza economy? The answer, as it turns out, is yes.
To see how this works, we begin by looking at how prices and output change from one year to
another. Specifically, we divide 2013 nominal GDP by 2012 nominal GDP. This is one measure
of the growth in nominal GDP from 2012 to 2013. [3] Remember that nominal GDP equals
total output produced in a year, valued at the prices prevailing in that year. Comparing
nominal GDP in 2012 and 2013 therefore gives us
nominalGDPin 2013
nominalGDPin 2012
=
output in2013 valued at 2013prices
output in2012 valued at 2012 prices
.
Now we use a trick. Multiply above and below the line by “output in 2013 valued at 2012
prices” and then rearrange:
nominal GDPin 2013
nominal GDPin 2012
=
output in 2013 valued at 2013prices
output in 2012 valued at 2012 prices
×
output in 2013valued at 2012 prices
output in 2013valued at 2012 prices
=
output in 2013valued at 2013 prices
output in 2013valued at 2012 prices
×
output in 2013valued at 2012 prices
output in 2012valued at 2012 prices
.
Look carefully at this calculation to make sure you understand what we did here.
Now examine the two ratios on the right-hand side of the second line. The first compares the
cost of the same bundle of goods (output in 2013) at two different sets of prices—those
prevailing in 2013 and those prevailing in 2012. Think of the bundle as being a grocery cart
full of goods. If you compare how much it costs to buy exactly the same collection of goods at
two different times, you have a measure of what has happened to prices.
The second ratio on the right-hand side is a measure of the increase in real GDP. It uses the
same prices to compare the value of output in 2012 and 2013. In other words, it tells you how
much it costs to buy two different collections of goods at exactly the same prices.
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To reiterate, the first ratio compares the same bundle of goods at two different sets of prices.
The second ratio compares two different bundles of goods at the same prices. We have
succeeded in separating the change in nominal GDP into two components: a price change and
a change in real GDP.
Measuring Real GDP and the Price Level
We can illustrate this technique using the data in Table 3.1 “Calculating Nominal GDP”. In
that example, the growth in nominal GDP equals 10.5 percent because
output in2013 valued at 2013prices
output in2012 valued at 2012 prices
=
$442
$400
= 1.105.
Now we choose an arbitrary year that we call the base year. For the base year, we set the price
level equal to 1. In our calculations, we choose 2012 as our base year. Because nominal GDP
equals the price level times real GDP, this means that real GDP in 2012 is $400.
When we choose 2012 as our base year, we use the prices of T-shirts, music downloads, and
meals in 2012 for our calculations of real GDP for 2012 and 2013. Table 3.3 “Real GDP Using
2012 as the Base Year” shows what we find. The first row is exactly the same as in Table 3.1
“Calculating Nominal GDP”. Nominal GDP in 2012 is—by definition—the same as real GDP in
2012 because we are using 2012 as the base year. The second row of the table calculates real
GDP for 2013; it uses 2013 quantities but 2012 prices. Notice also the heading in the final
column of the table: “Real GDP (Year 2012 dollars).” The term in parentheses tells us that
everything is being measured according to the prices that prevailed in our base year of 2012.
Table 3.3 Real GDP Using 2012 as the Base Year
Year T-shirts Music
Downloads
Meals Nominal
GDP ($)
2012
Price
($)
Quantity 2012
Price
($)
Quantity 2012
Price
($)
Quantity
2012 20 10 1 50 25 6 400
2013 22 12 1 60 25 5 425
We previously calculated that 2013 nominal GDP—output in 2013 valued at 2013 prices—was
$442. By contrast, Table 3.3 “Real GDP Using 2012 as the Base Year” shows that, when valued
in year 2012 dollars, the total output of this economy in 2013 is $425. In other words,
output in2013 valued at 2013prices
output in2012 valued at 2012 prices
=
$425
$400
= 1.0625.
Nominal GDP increased by 10.5 percent between the two years, but real GDP is increased by
only 6.25 percent. From this we see that not all of the increase in nominal GDP is due to
increased output. Some of the increase is because prices increased between 2012 and 2013.
In our pizza economy, we said that nominal GDP was equal to the price per pizza multiplied
by the quantity of pizza. In our example here, we have calculated something very similar.
Nominal GDP equals the price level multiplied by real GDP. In the base year, the price level
equals 1 (that is what it means to choose the base year), and so real GDP equals nominal GDP
in that year. Because we can calculate the increase in the price level and the increase in real
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GDP from one year to the next, we can obtain a time series for the price level and a time series
for real GDP. In each year, nominal GDP equals the price level in that year times real GDP in
that year.
There is, however, one difference between the calculation for our pizza economy and
measurement in real economies. In the pizza economy, because there was a single good, we
were able to measure real GDP in physical units—the number of pizzas. In real economies,
there is no single good, and so we measure real GDP in base year dollars rather than as a
physical quantity. The price level in, say, 2013 is not, strictly speaking, the price of real GDP in
terms of 2013 dollars but rather is the price of a base year dollar in terms of 2013 dollars.
But this is a technical difference. From an intuitive point of view, it is simplest to think about
real GDP as being a physical quantity—a number of pizzas. In this book we therefore imagine
that real GDP is actually a bundle of goods and services all melded together to create a
composite good. We call that good “units of real GDP,” and we call the price level the price of a
unit of GDP. In fact, we could think about the pizza economy in that same way. Even a basic
pizza is itself composed of dough, sauce, and cheese: it is a bundle of items melded into one.
So when we talk about the physical quantity of pizza, we are really talking about the number
of bundles of these ingredients. Likewise, when we talk of real GDP, we are talking about a
bundle of goods that we measure in base year dollars.
Real GDP is our most basic measure of economic performance. It is a very broad measure
because it tells us how much economic activity of any kind (at least, any kind that we can
measure) is going on in our economy. Real GDP tells us how much we have produced of all the
different goods and services that people enjoy and want to consume. For this reason, real GDP
statistics are among the most closely watched of all the figures released by a government.
Real GDP in the United States and Argentina
Figure 3.5 “Real GDP in the United States, 1929–2009” shows real GDP for the US economy
from 1929 to 2008 in year 2000 dollars. The figure shows that the US economy grew
substantially over those years. The level of real GDP was $865.2 in 1929 and $10,842 in 2008
(in billions of $2000). [4]
Figure 3.5 Real GDP in the United States, 1929–2009
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Source: http://www.bea.gov/national/Index.htm
Figure 3.6 “Real GDP (in 1993 Pesos) in Argentina in the 10 Years Prior to 2002” shows real
GDP in Argentina and thus reveals that our earlier data for nominal GDP were indeed
misleading. Nominal GDP may have increased between 1993 and 2002, but real GDP in 2002
was at the same level as in the previous decade. Moreover, real GDP had been decreasing for
the prior four years before the IMF visit.
Figure 3.6 Real GDP (in 1993 Pesos) in Argentina in the 10 Years Prior to 2002
Real GDP in Argentina was essentially flat between 1993 and 2002.
Source: International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook database
(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/index.htm).
This helps you to make sense of your contradictory impressions of Buenos Aires. Argentina
became poorer, not richer, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The presence of luxury goods
stores, for example, is a reminder that Argentina was a relatively rich country, but the absence
of shoppers in those stores tells you that people are not feeling very rich at this time.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
Economists and policymakers measure output as GDP. This is a measure of the total
value of all production in an economy.
Nominal GDP measures the total value of all production using current prices, while
real GDP measures total output and corrects for changes in prices relative to a base
year.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Why is there no “natural unit” for calculating real GDP in an actual economy compared
to the pizza economy?
2. If your income is currently $150 each week and you received a raise of $50, what is the
percentage change in your weekly income?
[1] We take as given here that the market price—which tells us how much people are willing to
spend—is a reasonable measure of the value of a good or a service. More precisely, it measures
the value of the good or service “at the margin,” meaning it measures the value of having one
more unit of the good or the service. Explaining why this is usually a sensible interpretation of
the market price (and when it is not) is a topic covered in microeconomics courses.
[2] There are two kinds of goods used in the production of other goods. Intermediate goods
are completely used up as part of the production process. Capital goods—such as factories and
machines—are not completely used up but live to produce another day. We discuss capital
goods in more detail in Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”.
[3] Specifically, this measures the gross growth rate of nominal GDP. It is equal to 1 + the
percentage change in nominal GDP. See the toolkit for details of the mathematics of growth
rates.
[4] If you look at this figure, you will see that real GDP is listed as “chain weighted.” This
method of calculating real GDP averages growth rates by using different base years. By
averaging, this measure has the virtue that calculations of real GDP are less sensitive to the
selection of an arbitrary base year. For more information on chain-weighted measures, see
Charles Steindel, “Chain-Weighting: The New Approach to Measuring GDP,” Current Issues
in Economics and Finance 1, no. 9 (1995): 1–6, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/current_issues/ci1-9 .
3.2 Measuring Prices and Inflation
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
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How are price indices such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) calculated?
What is the difference between the CPI and gross domestic product (GDP) deflator?
What are some of the difficulties of measuring changes in prices?
If nominal GDP increased in Argentina but real GDP did not, then prices must have increased.
So now we look in more detail at the measurement of prices.
The Price Index
Remember that we defined the change in prices as follows:
output in 2013valued at 2013 prices
output in 2012valued at2012 prices
.
We can use the data in Table 3.1 “Calculating Nominal GDP” to calculate this ratio as well.
This time, however, we compare the cost of the same basket of goods (in this case, output in
2013) according to the prices prevailing at two different times. The basket of goods in 2013 is
shown in Table 3.4 “Calculating the Price Index” as the quantities of the three goods and
services produced that year: 12 T-shirts, 60 music downloads, and 5 meals. As we saw earlier,
the cost in dollars of this basket of goods and services is $442.
Table 3.4 Calculating the Price Index
Year T-shirts Music
Downloads
Meals Cost of
2013
Basket
($)
Price
Index
Price
($)
Quantity Price
($)
Quantity
Price
($)
Quantity
2012 20 12 1 60 25 5 425 1.00
2013 22 12 0.80 60 26 5 442 1.04
Table 3.4 “Calculating the Price Index” also shows the total cost of consuming the 2013 basket
in 2012, which we already know is $425. Thus the price index for 2012 is $425/$425 = 1, and
the price index for 2013 is $442/$425 = 1.04. [1] For the simple three-good economy
described in Table 3.1 “Calculating Nominal GDP”, we therefore have the following:
nominalGDPin 2013
nominalGDPin 2012
=
output in 2013valued at 2013 prices
output in 2013valued at 2012 prices
×
output in 2013valued at 2012prices
output in 2012 valued at 2012prices
= (
442
425 )
× (
425
400
)
= 1.04×1.0625
= 1.105 .
Prices increased by 4 percent, real GDP increased by 6.25 percent, and nominal GDP
increased by 10.5 percent.
To summarize, the basic principle for calculating inflation is as follows: (1) We decide on a
bundle of goods and look at how much it costs in a given year. (2) Then we look at the same
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bundle of goods in the following year and see how much it costs. (3) The ratio of the two is
called a price index and provides a measure of one plus the inflation rate.
Toolkit: Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
A price index for a given year is calculated as the cost of a bundle of goods in that year divided
by the cost of the same bundle in the base year. The growth rate of the price index from one
year to the next is a measure of the inflation rate.
Different Price Indices
There are many different price indices that are constructed and used for different purposes.
They can be constructed for particular categories of goods or regions, for example. If you
listen to the news, you may hear references to the Producer Price Index or the Wholesale Price
Index. Ultimately, the differences among different price indices simply come down to the
bundle of goods that is chosen.
Figure 3.7 “An Example of a Price Index” shows an example of a very particular price index
that was used by a supermarket in Thailand to advertise its prices. The store placed two
supermarket carts at the entrance with the same bundle of goods in each. The one on the left,
with the black label, showed the cost of this cartload of goods at the old prices. It used to cost
1,059.50 Thai baht (approximately US$28). The one on the right, with the red label, showed
that the cost of this same bundle of goods was now 916.00 Thai baht. The reduction in price
for the basket of goods was 143.50 Thai baht, or about 13.5 percent.
Figure 3.7 An Example of a Price Index
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A supermarket in Phuket, Thailand, used an actual basket of groceries to show that its prices
had been reduced. This is an example of a price index.
Source: Image taken by the authors.
The Consumer Price Index
In this book, we use price indices that measure the general level of inflation. There are several
such measures, but we do not need to worry about this. The differences among these different
measures are usually small and typically unimportant for our basic understanding of the
economy. The measure of inflation that we have used so far is called the GDP deflator, a
price index that uses as the bundle of goods everything that goes into GDP. A more common
measure of inflation is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which uses as the bundle of
goods the typical purchases of households.
The CPI is the most familiar measure of prices. When economic commentators speak of
inflation, they usually mean the percentage change in the CPI. As the name suggests, the CPI
is intended to measure inflation as consumers experience it. The bundle of goods included in
the CPI is supposed to correspond to the bundle of goods purchased by a typical household.
This means that certain goods that are included in GDP do not show up in the CPI. For
example, an increase in the price of stealth bombers does not show up in the CPI because (we
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hope!) households do not buy stealth bombers. However, stealth bombers do show up in the
GDP deflator. At the same time, certain goods that are not part of GDP are included in the
CPI—most importantly, consumer goods that are imported from other countries. Because
imported goods are not produced in the domestic economy, they do not show up in the GDP
deflator; however, because domestic consumers purchase imported goods, they do show up in
the CPI.
Households differ dramatically in their consumption patterns, so different households have
very different experiences of inflation. An individual who drives 100 miles daily to get to work
views variations in the price of gasoline very differently from someone who rides a bicycle to
work. The CPI captures the average experience of all households, which can be quite different
from the actual experience of an individual household.
Figure 3.8 “The Inflation Rate in the United States, 1914–2008” shows the CPI inflation rate
(that is, the percentage change of the CPI) from 1914 to 2008 in the United States. [2]In some
early years, prices actually decreased from one year to the next, meaning that the inflation
rate was negative. Since 1960, however, the United States has experienced a positive inflation
rate.
Figure 3.8 The Inflation Rate in the United States, 1914–2008
Source: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt
Figure 3.9 “The Price Level in Argentina” shows the price level in Argentina between 1993 and
2002. The most striking thing about this picture is that there was very little inflation for most
of this period. In the final year, however, prices increased substantially. Notice that our
picture for the United States shows the inflation rate, whereas for Argentina we are looking at
the level of prices. Either way of presenting the data is valid, but it is critical to understand the
difference between them. Make sure you understand the difference between the level of prices
and the percentage change in prices.
Figure 3.9 The Price Level in Argentina
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The price level in Argentina was roughly constant between 1993 and 2001. However, there
was a big jump in the price level in 2002.
Source: International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook database
(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/index.htm).
Calculation of the CPI in Practice
The actual calculation of the CPI is more complicated than our example suggests. The Bureau
of Labor Statistics (BLS; http://www.bls.gov/cpi) is the US government agency that is
responsible for this calculation, while other countries have similar agencies. The BLS
procedure is, in essence, the one we have described: it compares the cost of the same bundle
of goods in different years. However, the BLS confronts several difficulties that we have
ignored so far.
1. Quality changes. Imagine that you now work for the BLS (you took this job after you left
the International Monetary Fund [IMF]) and are asked to look at changes in the price of
laptop computers. You decide to use the IBM ThinkPad computer. [3] You discover that in
1992 a ThinkPad cost $4,300 on average. Then you find that it is possible to purchase a
ThinkPad in 2011 for $899. You calculate the percentage change in the price as ($899 −
$4,300)/$4,300 = −$3,401/$4,300 = −0.79 and conclude that the ThinkPad is 79 percent
cheaper than two decades previously. You report this to your boss and then go home.
But then you start to worry. The 2011 ThinkPad is nothing like the 1992 version. The 1992
computer had 120 MB of memory and weighed over 5.5 pounds. The 2011 ThinkPad has 4
GB of memory and weighs 2 pounds less. It has a vastly bigger hard drive, wireless
Internet connection, and a superior display. In short, there were huge quality
improvements over this period. A computer with the specifications of the 1992 ThinkPad
would be worth much less than $899. By ignoring the improvements in quality, you have
understated how much the price of computers has fallen.
This problem is particularly acute for computers, but it applies to all sorts of different
goods. The new car that you purchase today is very different from a car that your mother
or your grandfather might have bought. Cars today come equipped with computerized
braking systems, global positioning system (GPS) navigational tools, and numerous other
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sophisticated engineering features. They are also much more reliable; your grandparents
will tell you that cars used to break down all the time, whereas now that is a relatively rare
event. It would be a big mistake to say that a 2012 automobile is the same as a 1961
automobile.
2. New goods and old goods. The typical basket of goods bought by consumers is
changing. In 1970, no one had a mobile phone, an MP3 player, or a plasma television.
Similarly, people today are not buying vinyl records, videocassette recorders, or Polaroid
cameras. The BLS needs to keep up with every change. As the economy evolves and new
goods replace old ones, they must change the basket of goods.
3. Changes in purchasing patterns. The bundle purchased by the typical household also
changes over time because of changes in the prices of goods and services. The typical
household will substitute away from expensive goods to relatively cheaper ones. If the
basket of goods is held fixed, the calculation of the CPI will overstate the increase in the
cost of living. This effect is most severe if there are two goods that are very close
substitutes and the price of one increases significantly relative to another.
Perhaps these seem like minor details in the calculation of the CPI. They are not. A
government commission chaired by the economist Michael Boskin provided an extensive
report on biases in computing the CPI in 1996. The Boskin Commission concluded the
following: “The Commission’s best estimate of the size of the upward bias looking forward is
1.1 percentage points per year. The range of plausible values is 0.8 to 1.6 percentage points per
year.” That is, the Boskin Commission concluded that if inflation as measured by the CPI was,
say, 3.1 percent, the true inflation rate was only 2 percent. In response to these concerns with
measurement, the BLS responded by taking actions to reduce the biases in the measurement
of the CPI and deal more effectively with the introduction of new goods. [4]
Correcting for Inflation
The data on nominal and real GDP in Argentina illustrate the dangers of looking at nominal
rather than real variables. Had you looked at only nominal GDP, you would have concluded
that the Argentine economy had been growing between 1993 and 2002, when it was actually
stagnating.
But many economic statistics—not only nominal GDP—are typically quoted in terms of dollars
(pesos, euros, ringgit, or whatever the currency of the country is). To make sense of such
statistics, we must understand whether changes in these statistics represent real changes in
the economy or are simply a result of inflation.
Toolkit: Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
If you have some data expressed in nominal terms (for example, in dollars) and you want to
covert them to real terms, use the following steps.
1. Select your deflator. In most cases, the CPI is the best deflator to use.
2. Select your base year. Find the value of the index in that base year.
3. For all years (including the base year), divide the value of the index in that year by the
value in the base year. (This means that the value for the base year is 1.)
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4. For each year, divide the value in the nominal data series by the number you calculated
in Step 3. This gives you the value in base year dollars.
Here is an example of how to correct for inflation. Suppose that a sales manager wants to
evaluate her company’s sales performance between 2000 and 2005. She gathers the sales data
shown in Table 3.5 “Sales, 2000–2005”.
Table 3.5 Sales, 2000–2005
Year Sales (Millions
of Dollars)
2000 21.0
2001 22.3
2002 22.9
2003 23.7
2004 24.1
2005 24.7
At first glance, these numbers look reasonably encouraging. Sales have grown every year
between 2000 and 2005. But then she remembers that these data are in nominal terms, and
there was also some inflation over this time period. So she decides to correct for inflation. She
first goes to the Economic Report of the President and downloads the data in Table 3.6
“Consumer Price Index, 2000–2005”. [5] She decides to use 2000 as the base year—she
wants to measure sales in year 2000 dollars. So there are two steps to her calculations, as
shown in Table 3.7 “Sales Data Corrected for Inflation, 2000–2005”. First, she takes the CPI
series and divides every term by the 2000 value (that is, 172.2). This gives the third column
of Table 3.7 “Sales Data Corrected for Inflation, 2000–2005”, labeled “Price Index.” Then she
divides each of the sales figures by the corresponding price index to obtain the real (that is,
corrected for inflation) value of sales. These are given in the final column of the table.
Table 3.6 Consumer Price Index, 2000–2005
Year CPI
2000 172.2
2001 177.1
2002 179.9
2003 184.0
2004 188.9
2005 195.3
Source: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt
Table 3.7 Sales Data Corrected for Inflation, 2000–2005
Year CPI Price Index Sales Real Sales
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(Base =
2000)
(Millions of
Dollars)
(Millions of Year
2000 Dollars)
2000 172.2 1.00 21.0 21.0
2001 177.1 1.03 22.3 21.7
2002 179.9 1.04 22.9 21.9
2003 184.0 1.06 23.7 22.2
2004 188.9 1.10 24.1 22.0
2005 195.3 1.13 24.7 21.8
We can see that the sales data are much less rosy after we account for inflation. Sales were
increasing between 2000 and 2003 in real terms, but real sales decreased in 2004 and 2005.
Had she just looked at the dollar measure of sales, she would have completely missed the fact
that the business had experienced a downturn in the last two years.
Economic statistics reported in the news or used by businesspeople are very often given in
nominal rather than real terms. Perhaps the single most important piece of “economic
literacy” that you can learn is that you should always correct for inflation. Likewise, you
should be on your guard for misleading statistics that fail to make this correction. Here is an
example from an article that appeared in the Washington Post. “The Clinton recovery has
been far less egalitarian than the much-criticized Reagan ‘era of greed.’ Between 1990 and
1995, the [real average] family income actually declined slightly while the number of people
with a net worth over $1 million more than doubled.” [6]
Can you see why this sentence is so misleading? It mixes together a real measure and a
nominal measure in the same sentence. Real family income—that is, family income corrected
for inflation—declined in the first half of the 1990s. But the number of millionaires is a
nominal measure. In a time of inflation, we would expect to have more millionaires, even if
people are not really getting any richer.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
A price index is created by calculating the cost of purchasing a fixed basket of goods in
different years.
The CPI is a price index for goods and services, including imported goods, consumed
by households, while the GDP deflator is based on all the goods and services that
compose GDP.
Calculating a price index is difficult due to the introduction of new products, quality
changes, and changes in purchasing patterns.
Checking Your Understanding
1. The BLS has an inflation calculator on its website (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl),
which is shown in Figure 3.10 “BLS Inflation Calculator”.
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Figure 3.10
BLS Inflation Calculator
You enter an amount and two different years, and then it tells you the other amount.
Explain the calculation that this program performs.
2. In Table 3.7 “Sales Data Corrected for Inflation, 2000–2005”, calculate the inflation rate
(that is, the percentage change in the price index) and the growth rate of sales in each year.
What is the relationship between these two variables (a) when real sales are increasing and
(b) when real sales are decreasing?
[1] Frequently, the value for the price index is multiplied by 100, so the price index for 2013
would be given as 104.
[2] Inflation data and more details about the construction of price indices can be found at the
website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS; http://www.bls.gov).
[3] For the history of the ThinkPad, see “ThinkPad: A Brand That Made History,” Lenovo,
accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.pc.ibm.com/ca/thinkpad/anniversary/history.html; for
the 2011 specifications and prices, see “Lenovo Announces Premium ThinkPad Edge E220s,
E420s SMB Notebooks,” ThinkPads.com, January 3, 2011, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.thinkpads.com/2011/01/03/lenovo-announces-premium-thinkpad-edge-
e220s-e420s-smb-notebooks.
[4] For the complete Boskin Commission Report, see Advisory Commission to Study the
Consumer Price Index, “Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living,” Social
Security Administration, December 4, 1996, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html. For the BLS response to the report,
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see “Consumer Price Index: Executive Summary,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 16,
2011, accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpi0698b.htm.
[5] See Economic Report of the President, 2011, Table B-60, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop.
[6] See J. Kotkin and D. Friedman, “Keep the Champagne on Ice,” The Washington Post,
reprinted in The Guardian Weekly, June 7, 1998. In fact, the quote in the newspaper was even
more misleading because it did not even make it clear that the family income figure was
adjusted for inflation.
3.3 The Circular Flow of Income
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
What is the circular flow of income?
What is the national income identity?
Looking at some basic measurements of the economy has allowed you to be more concrete
about the problems in Argentina. You report back to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
team that production has been declining in recent years. You also report that there was a
recent increase in the price level. As yet, though, you do not know anything about either the
causes or the consequences of these events. Measurement of the economy tells you what has
happened, but it tells you neither why it happened nor what it means. Measurement is not
enough. We need frameworks to help us make sense of the data that we gather.
Economists use many different kinds of frameworks to make sense of an economy. One of the
most important is called the circular flow of income. To understand the circular flow,
recall our working definition of economic activity: “goods and services produced for sale.” So
far, we have focused on production. Now we think about the “for sale” part.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
As individuals and firms buy and sell goods and services, money flows among the different
sectors of the economy. The circular flow of income describes these flows of dollars. From a
simple version of the circular flow, we learn that, as a matter of accounting,
gross domestic product (GDP) = income = production = spending.
This relationship lies at the heart of macroeconomic analysis.
There are two sides to every transaction. When you purchase a piece of computer software,
you give money to the seller, and the seller gives the software to you. (You might literally hand
over dollar bills and receive a CD, or you might enter a credit card number into a website
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entitling you to a download. The idea is the same either way.) There is a flow of money from
you to the seller and a flow of goods or services from the seller to you. This is true for all
transactions: as individuals and firms buy and sell goods and services, money flows among the
different sectors of the economy. Macroeconomists follow the money. By tracking these flows,
we can understand the links between different markets; by understanding these links, we gain
insight into the functioning of an economy.
One linkage is between income and spending. The spending by households on goods and
services is funded by the income that households earn. But this income comes from firms, and
they get their income from the spending of households. Thus there is a circular flow of income
in an economy as a whole.
Household income comes from two main sources: (1) Households contain workers who sell
their time to firms and receive wages in return. (2) Households are the ultimate owners of the
firms—shareholders live in houses too—and thus any profits that firms make are returned to
households. All firms in an economy are owned by someone, and any profits they make do not
vanish into thin air but must eventually show up as someone’s income.
Households take this income and do one of two things: they either spend it or save it. To start,
let us figure out what would happen if no household income is saved. Households spend all
their income, and this money becomes the revenue of firms. Firms send these revenues back
to households, either as labor income or profits, and so the circular flow continues.
The Simplest Version of the Circular Flow
We can make this idea more precise, using the pizza economy to illustrate. Imagine that our
economy is composed of two sectors, which we call households and firms. Households supply
labor to firms and are paid wages in return. Firms use that labor to produce pizzas and sell
those pizzas to households. There is a flow of goods (pizzas) from firms to households and a
flow of labor services (worker hours) from households to firms. Because there are two sides to
every transaction, there is also a flow of dollars from households to firms, as households
purchase pizza, and a flow of dollars from firms to households, as firms pay workers.
For now, think of firms as very simple entities that pay out all the income they receive in the
form of wages to workers. As a result, 300 billion pesos flow from the household sector to the
firm sector (the purchase of pizzas) each year, while 300 billion pesos flow from the firm
sector to the household sector (the payment of wages). These flows of pesos are illustrated
in Figure 3.11 “The Simplest Version of the Circular Flow”. Think of this diagram as
representing the interaction of many households with many firms. A particular household
works for one (or perhaps a few firms) but purchases goods and services from many firms. (If
you like, imagine that different firms specialize in different kinds of pizza.) A feature of
modern economies is that individuals specialize in production of goods and services
but generalize in consumption by consuming many varieties of goods and services.
Figure 3.11 The Simplest Version of the Circular Flow
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The circular flow of income follows the money in an economy. In the pizza economy, firms
produce pizzas and sell them to households, while households sell labor to firms and
purchase pizzas from them.
The circular flow reveals that there are several different ways to measure the level of economic
activity. From the household perspective, we can look at either the amount of income earned
by households or their level of spending. From the firm perspective, we can look at either the
level of revenues earned from sales or the amount of their payments to workers and
shareholders. In all cases, the level of nominal economic activity would be measured at 300
billion pesos.
Corresponding to the flows of pesos shown in Figure 3.11 “The Simplest Version of the
Circular Flow”, there are flows of goods and services between these sectors, as shown inFigure
3.12 “The Flows of Goods and Labor within the Circular Flow”. The wage income received by
consumers is payment for labor services that flow from households to firms. The consumption
spending of households is payment for the goods that flow from firms to households.
Figure 3.12 The Flows of Goods and Labor within the Circular Flow
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There are flows of goods and labor services that correspond to the flows of pesos shown
in Figure 3.11 “The Simplest Version of the Circular Flow”. Three hundred billion pesos worth
of pizza flows from firms to households, and 300 billion pesos worth of labor services flow
from households to firms.
Of course, there are also flows of dollars within the household and firm sectors as well as
between them. Importantly, firms purchase lots of goods and services from other firms. One
of the beauties of the circular flow construct is that it allows us to describe overall economic
activity without having to go into the detail of all the flows among firms.
Figure 3.13 “Income, Spending, Payments to Inputs, and Revenues in the Simple Circular
Flow” shows us that the flows in and out of each sector must balance. In the household sector,
total spending by the household equals total income for the household. If spending equals
income for each individual household, then spending also equals income for the household
sector as a whole. Similarly, each firm has a balance sheet. Accounting rules ensure that all of
a firm’s revenues must ultimately show up on the other side of the balance sheet as payments
for the inputs that the firm uses (in our simple example, the firm’s only input is labor). As this
is true for each individual firm, it is also true for the sector as a whole.
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Figure 3.13 Income, Spending, Payments to Inputs, and Revenues in the Simple Circular
Flow
In each household, and thus in the household sector as a whole, income must equal spending.
In each firm, and thus in the firm sector as a whole, revenues must equal payments to inputs.
GDP measures the production of the economy and total income in the economy. We can use
the terms production, income, spending, and GDP interchangeably.
Although this version of the circular flow is simple, it teaches us four key insights that remain
true (albeit in slightly refined forms) in more sophisticated versions as well.
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1. Spending = production. The total value of all spending by households becomes an
inflow into the firm sector and thus ends up on the revenue side of a firm’s balance sheet.
The revenues received by firms provide us with a measure of the total value of production
in an economy.
2. Production = payments to inputs. Flows in and out of the firm sector must balance.
The revenues received by firms are ultimately paid out to households.
3. Payments to inputs = income. Firms are legal entities, not people. We may talk in
common speech of a firm “making money,” but any income generated by a firm must
ultimately end up in the hands of real people—that is, in the household sector of an
economy. The total value of the goods produced by firms becomes an outflow of dollars
from the firm sector. These dollars end up in the hands of households in the form of
income. (This ownership is achieved through many forms, ranging from firms that are
owned and operated by individuals to giant corporations whose ownership is determined
by stock holdings. Not all households own firms in this way, but in macroeconomics it is
sufficient to think about the average household that does own stock in firms.)
4. Income = spending. We complete the circle by looking at the household sector. The
dollars that flow into the household sector are the income of that sector. They must equal
the dollars that flow out of the household sector—its spending.
The circular flow of income highlights a critical fact of national income accounting:
GDP = income = spending = production.
Earlier, we emphasized that GDP measures the production of an economy. Now we see that
GDP is equally a measure of the income of an economy. Again, this reflects the fact that there
are two sides to each transaction. We can use the terms income, spending,production,
and GDP completely interchangeably.
What does this mean for your assessment of Argentina? For one thing, it tells you that the
decline in real GDP implies a corresponding decline in income. Economists pay a great deal of
attention to real GDP statistics for exactly this reason: such statistics provide information on
the total amount of income earned in an economy.
The Complete Circular Flow
Figure 3.14 “The Complete Circular Flow” shows a more complete version of the circular flow.
It includes five sectors: the household and firm sectors that we have seen already, a
government sector, a financial sector, and a foreign sector. In every sector of the circular flow,
accounting rules tell us that the flow of money in must equal the flow of money out. When we
look at this sector by sector, we discover five accounting relationships, each playing an
important role in macroeconomics. For now, we take a very quick look at each one in turn. [1]
Figure 3.14 The Complete Circular Flow
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The circular flow of income describes the flows of money among the different sectors of an
economy. This representation includes the five main sectors: households, firms, government,
the financial sector, and the rest of the world.
The Firm Sector
The flows in and out of the firm sector of an economy must balance. The total flow of dollars
from the firm sector measures the total value of production in the economy. The total flow of
dollars into the firm sector equals total expenditures on GDP, which we divide up into four
categories.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
The national income identity is the condition that
production = consumption + investment + government purchases + net exports.
It is the most fundamental relationship in the national accounts.
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Consumption refers to total expenditures by households on final goods and
services.Investment refers to the purchase of goods and services that, in one way or another,
help to produce more output in the future. Government purchases are all the purchases of
goods and services by the government. Net exports are the difference between exports and
imports: they measures the total expenditure flows associated with the rest of the world.[2]
The Household Sector
Households receive income from firms. They also receive money from the government
(transfers) and must pay money to the government (taxes). Households spend some of their
disposable income and save the rest. In other words,
income + transfers − taxes = consumption + private savings.
There are many different ways of saving, but we do not focus on these differences. We simply
imagine that households take their savings to financial markets to purchase interest-bearing
assets. Some individual households are net borrowers, but, overall, the household sector
saves. There is, on net, a flow of dollars from the household sector to the financial sector of an
economy. These dollars are then available for firms to borrow to build new factories, install
up-to-date equipment, and so on. That is, they are available for investment. [3]
The Government Sector
From a macroeconomic perspective, the key functions of government are as follows:
It purchases goods and services.
It collects revenues through personal and corporate taxes and other fees.
It gives transfers to households.
The amount that the government collects in taxes does not need to equal the amount that it
pays out for government purchases and transfers. If the government spends more than it
gathers in taxes, then it must borrow from the financial markets to make up the shortfall.
Figure 3.14 “The Complete Circular Flow” shows two flows into the government sector and
one flow out. Since the flows in and out of the government sector must balance, we know that
government purchases = tax revenues − transfers + government borrowing.
Government borrowing is commonly referred to as the budget deficit. It is also possible that
the government takes in more than it spends, in which case the government is saving rather
than borrowing, so there is a budget surplus rather than a deficit. [4]
The Financial Sector
The financial sector of an economy is at the heart of the circular flow. It summarizes the
behavior of banks and other financial institutions. Most importantly, this sector of the circular
flow shows us that the savings of households provide the source of investment funds for firms.
On the left-hand side, the figure shows a flow of dollars from the household sector into
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financial markets, representing the saving of households. (Though we have not included it
in Figure 3.14 “The Complete Circular Flow”, firms also save, by means of profits that they
retain to finance new investment rather than distribute to their shareholders. As far as the
national accounts are concerned, it is as if firms sent these funds to the financial market and
then borrowed them back again.) When we borrow from other countries, there is a second
flow of dollars into the financial markets. On the right-hand side, there is a flow of money
from the financial sector into the firm sector, representing the funds that are available to firms
for investment purposes. The linkage between the saving of households and the investment of
firms is one of the most important ideas in macroeconomics.
The financial sector is also linked to the government sector and the foreign sector. These flows
can go in either direction. As we have already seen, if the government runs a deficit, it does so
by borrowing from the financial markets. There is a flow from the financial sector to the
government sector. This is the case we have drawn in Figure 3.14 “The Complete Circular
Flow”. If the government were to run a surplus, the flow would go in the other direction:
government would provide an additional source of saving. The foreign sector can provide an
additional source of funds for investment, if those in other countries decide they want to use
some of their savings to purchase assets in our economy. In this case, there is a flow from the
foreign sector into the financial sector. Again, this is the case we have drawn. If we lend to
other countries, then the flow goes in the other direction.
The flows in and out of the financial sector must balance, so
investment + government borrowing = private savings + borrowing from other countries.
The Foreign Sector
The foreign sector is perhaps the hardest part of the circular flow to understand because we
have to know how international transactions are carried out.
Some of the goods produced in an economy are not consumed by domestic households or
firms in an economy but are instead exported to other countries. Whenever one country sells
something to another country, it acquires an asset from that country in exchange. For
example, suppose a US movie company sells DVDs to an Australian distributor. The simplest
way to imagine this is to suppose that the distributor hands over Australian dollar bills to the
movie company. The movie company—and, more generally, the US economy—has now
acquired a foreign asset—Australian dollars.
Because these Australian dollars can be used to purchase Australian goods and services at
some time in the future, the US economy has acquired a claim on Australia. In effect, the
United States has made a loan to Australia. It has sent goods to Australia in exchange for the
promise that it can claim Australian products at some future date.
Similarly, some of the goods consumed in our economy are not produced locally. For example,
suppose that a US restaurant chain purchases Argentine beef. These are imports. We could
imagine that the restaurant chain hands over US dollars to the Argentine farmers. In this case,
the United States has borrowed from Argentina. It has received goods from Argentina but has
promised that it will give some goods or services to Argentina in the future.
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Of course, international transactions in practice are more complicated than these simple
examples. Yet the insight we have just uncovered remains true no matter how intricate the
underlying financial transactions are. Exports are equivalent to a loan to the rest of the world.
Imports are equivalent to borrowing from the rest of the world.
If we import more than we export, then we are borrowing from the rest of the world. We can
see this by looking at the flows in and out of the foreign sector:
borrowing from abroad = imports − exports.
If we export more than we import, then—on net—we are lending to the rest of the world, and
there is a flow of dollars from the financial markets to the rest of the world.
The Causes of a Decrease in Real GDP
We saw that, in Argentina, real GDP decreased between 1998 and 2002. The circular flow of
income tells us that when real GDP decreases, it must also be the case that real production
decreases and real spending decreases. The IMF team in 2002 wanted to understand why real
GDP decreased. We are not going to answer that question in this chapter—after all, we are still
at the very beginning of your study of macroeconomics. Still, the circular flow still teaches us
something very important. If real GDP decreased, then there are really only two possibilities:
1. For some reason, firms decided to produce less output. As a consequence, households
reduced their spending.
2. For some reason, households decided to spend less money. As a consequence, firms
reduced their production.
Of course, it could be the case that both of these are true. This insight from the circular flow is
a starting point for explaining what happened in Argentina and what happens in other
countries when output decreases.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The circular flow of income illustrates the links between income and spending in an
economy. In its simplest form, revenue earned by firms by selling their output
ultimately flows to households, which spend this income on the output produced by
firms.
The national income identity says that total spending must equal total output and also
must equal total income.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What changes in Figure 3.14 “The Complete Circular Flow” if the government takes in
more revenue than it spends?
2. We said that borrowing from abroad equals imports minus exports. Is there an
analogous relationship that holds for an individual?
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[1] When we revisit each sector in different chapters of this book, we include more precise
definitions and more detailed discussion of the individual flows (such as consumption or
government purchases).
[2] These terms are explained in detail in Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”.
[3] The flows in and out of the household sector are discussed in Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”.
[4] Government finances are discussed in Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”.
3.4 The Meaning of Real GDP
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. When the focus is on real gross domestic product (real GDP), what aspects of
economic welfare are then missed?
2. What are some other useful measures of economic welfare?
As you leave Argentina, you might well find yourself wondering about the implications of your
work. You know that real GDP decreased, and from your study of the circular flow, you know
that income decreased as well. Argentines have become poorer, as you might have guessed
from the boarded-up stores you saw when you arrived in the country. You hope that, with the
help of your observations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Argentine
government will together find a way to enact good policies to increase the welfare—that is,
happiness—of the individuals who live and work in the economy.
Our happiness is surely influenced by our material well-being—our ability to live in comfort;
enjoy good food; have access to books, music, computers, and videogames; and so forth. In
addition, it depends on our having the leisure time to enjoy these comforts; socialize with our
friends; and go to movies, plays, and restaurants. However, our happiness depends on many
other factors that are beyond the purview of economics and the influence of economic
policymakers. Our happiness depends on our friends, families, health, and much more.
Economics cannot help us very much with such matters. So, you wonder, is it enough to look
at real GDP?
Real GDP and Economic Welfare
Real GDP is certainly a useful indicator of how well an economy is performing. This does not
necessarily mean that it tells us about the welfare of those who live there. Some countries,
such as China or India, have a large real GDP simply because they have large populations.
Living standards in these countries are nonetheless relatively low because the large GDP must
be shared by a very large number of people. To correct for this, we look at real GDP per
person, which measures how much GDP would be available if we shared it equally across the
entire population.
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If two countries have substantially different levels of real GDP per person, we can fairly
reliably infer that the richer country, by this measure, is also the country with higher living
standards. Real GDP per person in Germany is about 25 times greater than real GDP per
person in Kenya. Even a few minutes spent in the streets of Nairobi and Berlin would confirm
that Germany enjoys much higher material living standards. However, when we compare
countries with similar levels of real GDP per person, it is rash to assume that a richer country
necessarily enjoys a higher standard of living. This is because there are several ways in which
real GDP per person is flawed as an indicator of economic welfare.
Remember, first, that GDP measures market transactions only. National income accounts can
measure activities that are traded only in markets. If people clean their own homes, tend their
own gardens, repair their own cars, or cook their own meals, these activities are not included
in our measurement of GDP. (There are a few exceptions. Most notably, GDP statistics impute
a value to owner-occupied housing: GDP statistics effectively pretend that homeowners rent
their houses from themselves.)
This leads to some unfortunate inconsistencies in GDP accounting. Suppose you and your
neighbor both work as auto mechanics. If you each maintain and repair your own cars, these
activities do not show up in GDP. But if you hire your neighbor to maintain your car, and she
hires you to repair her car, then GDP does include this economic activity. Yet another
possibility is that you barter with your neighbor, so she looks after your car and you look after
hers but no money changes hands. Again, this work goes unrecorded in national accounts.
Barter is more prevalent in developing countries than in developed countries and causes more
of a problem for measurement of GDP in poorer countries. It is a particular source of difficulty
when we want to compare economic activity in different countries.
People also value their leisure time. GDP measures the goods and services that people
consume but does not tell us anything about how much time they must give up to produce
those goods. For example, people in the United States are richer, on average, than people in
Spain. But people in the United States work longer hours than people in Spain, and Spanish
workers also enjoy much longer vacations. If we use measures of GDP to compare welfare in
the United States and Spain, we will capture the fact that Americans can afford more DVD
players, but we will miss the fact that they have less time to watch DVDs. GDP
measures material well-being rather than overall welfare.
The economic activity that goes into the production of GDP also often has negative
consequences for economic welfare that go unmeasured. A leading example is pollution. Coal-
generated power plants generate sulfur dioxide as a by-product of the production of
electricity. When sulfur dioxide gets into the atmosphere, it leads to acid rain that damages
forests and buildings. This damage is not accounted for in GDP. Emissions from automobiles
contribute to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, contributing to global
climate change. They also generate smog (technically, particulate matter) that is damaging to
health. These adverse effects are not accounted for in GDP. [1]
Critics sometimes argue that GDP not only fails to measure negative effects from production
but also erroneously includes measures taken to offset those measures. This criticism is
misplaced. Consider the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The environmental damage from
that spill is not included in GDP, which is indeed a problem with using GDP to measure
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welfare. The costs of cleaning up the gulf are included in GDP, and the inclusion of cleanup
costs does make GDP a better measure of welfare. To clean up means to produce a cleaner
environment from a dirty environment, which increases economic welfare. The problem is the
failure to include the original environmental damage, not the inclusion of the cleanup costs.
Finally, real GDP is an aggregate measure. It does not reflect the ways in which goods and
services are distributed across the many households of an economy. In comparing two
economies, we may feel differently about an economy in which resources are distributed
relatively equitably compared to one in which some people are very rich and others are very
poor, even if overall real GDP per person is the same. Similarly, we may feel quite differently
about changes in real GDP depending on who is reaping the benefit of those changes.
In summary, real GDP is far from a perfect measure of economic welfare, but then again it is
not designed to be. It is designed to measure economic activity, and it is—at best—an
imperfect measure of material well-being. Nevertheless, when we want to understand what is
happening to overall economic well-being or get an idea of comparative welfare in various
countries, we begin with real GDP per person. For all its flaws, it is the best single indicator
that we have.
Other Indicators of Societal Welfare
Because real GDP is an imperfect a measure of well-being, we look at other statistics as well to
gauge overall economic welfare. Here are some examples of economic statistics that we also
use as indicators of economic welfare.
Unemployment
The unemployment rate is one of the most frequently cited statistics about the
macroeconomy; it is the percentage of people who are not currently employed but are actively
seeking a job. It signals the difficulty households face in finding employment. GDP data are
reported on a quarterly basis only, but unemployment statistics are reported monthly and so
contain more up-to-date information than GDP. [2]
Figure 3.15 “The Unemployment Rate in the United States” shows the unemployment rate in
the United States from 1940 to 2010. On average, the rate of unemployment over this period
was 6.0 percent. The unemployment rate was at its highest—14.6 percent—in 1940 and its
lowest—1.2 percent—in 1944. The low unemployment in 1944 was largely due to World War II
(and is an indication that low unemployment is not always a sign that all is well in an
economy). From 1995 to 2008, the unemployment rate was never above 6 percent, but it
jumped to 9.3 percent in the major recession of 2008 and by mid-2011 had still not fallen
back below 9 percent.
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Figure 3.15 The Unemployment Rate in the United States
Source: http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm
In the United States, defining and measuring the unemployment rate and other labor market
variables is the job of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
(BLS;http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm). Each month, about 60,000 households are asked
about their recent employment experience. The BLS takes care to be sure that the sample is
representative of the entire population of the United States. Notice that it is householdswho
are interviewed, not people. So when a household is interviewed, information is acquired
about all household members age 16 and over. [3] As a consequence of the interview,
individuals are placed in one of three categories: (1) out of the labor force, (2) in the labor
force and working, and (3) in the labor force and looking for a job. Similar surveys are
conducted to measure unemployment in other countries.
The (civilian) labor force is all individuals who are either working or actively looking for
work. That is, it comprises all employed and unemployed workers. Individuals who are not in
the labor force are neither employed nor looking for a job. These include those at school or
choosing to stay at home. Individuals in the labor force are either employed or seeking work.
Employment can be temporary or even part time; as long as someone has a job, he or she is
counted as employed. Those who are not at work due to vacation, illness or family issues but
who still have jobs are also counted as employed.
The other group in the labor force is a bit more problematic: what exactly does it mean to be
looking for a job? The BLS considers you unemployed if you do not have a job and have been
seeking one during the past four weeks. Here, “seeking” is intended to be active (going out for
job interviews), not passive (reading want ads). Individuals on temporary layoff are
considered to be unemployed even if they are not actively looking for a new job. The BLS does
not directly ask individuals to classify themselves into one of these three categories. Instead,
BLS interviewers ask a series of questions to facilitate the classification. The sum of the
civilian labor force and those out of the labor force equals the civilian working age
population. Figure 3.16 “The Unemployment Rate in Argentina”shows the unemployment rate
in Argentina between 1993 and 2002. Unemployment was quite high throughout this period:
it was in excess of 10 percent in every year from 1994 onward. In addition, the unemployment
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rate increased substantially in the period when real GDP was decreasing, from 12.8 percent in
1998 to almost 20 percent in 2002. The economic distress you witnessed on the streets of
Buenos Aires is reflected in this statistic.
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Figure 3.16 The Unemployment Rate in Argentina
The unemployment rate in Argentina was about 10 percent in 1993. It increased sharply
over the next two years, decreased somewhat in the mid to late 1990s, and then increased
again to almost 20 percent in 2002.
Source: Ministra de Economía y Producción de Argentina.
Real Wages
Average real GDP figures tell us nothing about how GDP is shared in an economy. They tell us
how big the pie is but not who has the largest and smallest slices. Economists therefore also
look at other measures that tell us about the economic environment as it is experienced by
workers and households.
Wages in an economy provide a sense of how workers are doing. However, the wage in
dollars—the nominal wage—is not the best indicator. While salaries and pay scales for jobs are
quoted in dollar terms, decisions on whether or not to take a job and how many hours to work
at that job depend on what those dollars can buy in terms of goods and services. If all prices in
the economy were to double, then $10 would buy only half as much as it used to, so a job
paying $10 an hour would seem much less attractive than it did before.
For this reason, we instead look at the real wage in the economy. As with real GDP, real here
refers to the fact that we are correcting for inflation. It is real wages—not nominal wages—that
tell us how an economy is doing. To convert nominal wages to real wages, we need a price
index, and because we are looking at how much households can buy with their wages, we
usually choose the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as the index.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market”
The real wage is the wage corrected for inflation. To obtain the real wage, simply divide the
wage in dollars—the nominal wage—by the price level:
real wage =
nominal wage
price level
.
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Figure 3.17 “Real and Nominal Wages” shows the nominal (hourly) wage paid to private sector
industrial workers from 1964 to 2010. Over this period, the nominal wage rate increased
almost eightfold from a low of $2.50 in January 1964 to nearly $19.00 by the end of the
period. [4] The real wage series in Figure 3.17 “Real and Nominal Wages”shows the nominal
wage divided by the CPI (times 100 so that the real and nominal wages are equal in the base
year of the CPI). The nominal wage increased over this period by over five times, but the real
wage actually decreased at times. It peaked at near $9.50 in 1973, decreased to $7.62 in 1995,
and has risen only slowly since that time.
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Figure 3.17 Real and Nominal Wages
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,
http://stats.bls.gov/lpc/data.htm
It is a remarkable fact that, even though US real GDP is now more than 150 percent greater
than it was in the early 1970s, real wages are still significantly lower than they were at that
time. What is going on here? Part of the story is that other forms of nonwage compensation
have become increasingly significant over the past few decades. The most important of these
are health-care benefits. When these and other benefits are included, we find that overall
compensation has increased reasonably steadily and is about 50 percent greater now than in
the early 1970s. [5] Total compensation is, in fact, a better measure than real wages. Even so,
total compensation has been increasing at a far slower rate than real GDP over the last few
decades.
Noneconomic Indicators of Welfare
We turn finally to some noneconomic measures of societal welfare, such as statistics on health
and education. Table 3.8 “Noneconomic Indicators of Welfare” shows some examples of
indicators for four countries. [6] Large differences in GDP per person, such as the difference
between the United States and Argentina, are reflected in these other measures. GDP per
person is about three times greater in the United States than in Argentina, and the United
States also has higher adult literacy, higher secondary school enrolment, lower infant
mortality, and higher life expectancy.
Table 3.8 Noneconomic Indicators of Welfare
Indicator United
States
United
Kingdom
Greece Argentina
GDP per person, 2005
($US)
42,000 30,900 22,800 13,700
Infant mortality rate,
2006 (deaths per
1,000 live births)
6.43 5.08 5.43 14.73
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Life expectancy at
birth, 2006 (years)
77.85 78.54 79.24 76.12
Adult literacy rate,
2003 (%)
99.0 99.0 97.5 97.1
Secondary school
enrollment ratio,
2002–3 (%)
88 95 86 81
Differences in GDP per person are a much less reliable guide when we compare relatively rich
countries. For example, the United States has greater GDP per person than the United
Kingdom or Greece. But both of those countries have lower infant mortality rates and higher
life expectancy. They also have similar rates of literacy and school enrollment. In fact, based
on these measures, the United Kingdom looks like a more attractive country to live in than the
United States, even though its GDP per person is 25 percent lower.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Real GDP measures total output and thus total income in an economy, but it does not
measure economic activity at home, ignores income distribution, and excludes the
effects of economic activity on the environment.
Measures of unemployment, real wages, and indicators of health and education are
also useful indicators of economic welfare.
Checking Your Understanding
1. If there is an increase in investment and an associated increase in real GDP, why does
this increase economic welfare?
2. If there is a decrease in real wages and an offsetting increase in a firm’s profits, does
this affect overall household income? If not, what effect does it have on the household
sector?
[1] There have been many attempts by economists to amend the GDP measure to take
environmental issues into account. For an early discussion on this issue, see William D.
Nordhaus and James Tobin, “Is Growth Obsolete?” Yale University, Cowles Foundation paper
398, accessed June 28, 2011, http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p03b/p0398a .
[2] Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy” contains more discussion of the definition and
measurement of the unemployment rate.
[3] To be more precise, in addition to being age 16 or older, the survey excludes people in an
institution (such as prison) or in the armed forces.
[4] “Average Hourly Earnings: Total Private Industries” from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, The Employment Situation, which is seasonally adjusted. The CPI is the “Consumer
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Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items CPIAUCNS,” Bureau of Labor Statistics
Consumer Price Index, 1982 − 84 = 100.
[5] More precisely, real hourly compensation in the nonfarm business sector increased by 51.7
percent between 1970 and 2007. See “Labor Productivity and Costs,” Bureau of Labor
Statistics, accessed June 28, 2011, http://stats.bls.gov/lpc/data.htm.
[6] “The World Factbook,” Central Intelligence Agency, accessed June 28,
2011,https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html; “The
Complete World Development Report Online,” World Bank, accessed June 28,
2011,http://wdr2011.worldbank.org/WDR2011_Data.
3.5 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
Understanding the meaning and measurement of macroeconomic variables is vital for your
ability to evaluate the abundance of information you receive through various forms of the
media about the state of the aggregate economy. The difficulties faced by the team of
International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists with which we opened the chapter are not
that different from the problems each of us faces in understanding what is happening in the
economy.
The concepts and variables you have discovered in this chapter are used over and over again
in the various applications discussed in this book. We use the concepts of real gross domestic
product (real GDP), the inflation rate, the unemployment rate, and so forth almost
everywhere in our study of macroeconomics.
Key Links
Economic Report of the President:http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/tables06.html
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): http://www.bls.gov
Unemployment: http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm
CPI: http://www.bls.gov/cpi
Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA): http://www.bea.gov
World Economic Outlook, International Monetary
Fund:http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/01/weodata/index.aspx
World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org
EXERCISES
1. Which of the following variables are stocks? Which are flows?
a) The number of cars parked on the street where you live.
b) The number of cars that drive past your house every day.
c) The number of people losing their jobs and becoming unemployed.
d) The blue jeans on the shelves of a GAP store.
e) The amount of water in a reservoir.
f)The amount of money you have on your person right now.
g) The amount of money you spent this week.
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http://wdr2011.worldbank.org/WDR2011_Data
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/tables06.html
http://www.bls.gov/
http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm
http://www.bls.gov/cpi
http://www.bea.gov/
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/01/weodata/index.aspx
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2. Suppose an economy produces at least as much—and maybe more—of every good and
service this year compared to last year. Also suppose that the price of every single good
and service is at least as high this year as it was last year. What, if anything, can you
conclude about nominal GDP, real GDP, and the price level between the two years?
3. Why do we exclude intermediate goods when calculating GDP?
4. Redo Table 3.3 “Real GDP Using 2012 as the Base Year” assuming that 2013 is the base
year.
5. Suppose that Australia had nominal GDP last year equal to 1 trillion Australian dollars
and that in the first quarter of this year, its nominal GDP is 252 billion Australian
dollars. What is Australia’s annualized growth rate of nominal GDP?
6. Suppose that, between 2012 and 2013, a country experiences 3 percent negative
inflation (this is known as deflation). In other words, prices are on average 3 percent
lower in 2013 compared to 2012. However, the economy also experiences real economic
growth of 5 percent. Is nominal GDP in 2013 greater or less than in 2012?
7. If nominal GDP in country A grows faster than nominal GDP in country B, what, if
anything, can you conclude about the inflation rates in the two countries?
8. Suppose that the price of Brazilian coffee decreases. What does that imply for the
Consumer Price Index (CPI) in Germany? What does that imply for the GDP deflator in
Japan?
9. Is it possible for prices to be increasing and the inflation rate to be decreasing at the
same time? Explain why or why not.
10. Is it possible for an economy’s production to increase at the same time that total
income in the economy decreases? Explain why or why not.
11. Which of the following people are classified as unemployed?
a) A full-time student who also works part time in a store selling Cds.
b) A worker who would like a job but has given up looking because she was unable
to find one.
c) An autoworker who was recently laid off and is looking for a new job.
d) A member of the military who is not currently on active duty.
e) A woman on maternity leave from her job.
f) A 70-year-old man who is actively applying for jobs.
12. Give three reasons why real GDP is an imperfect measure of economic welfare.
Economics Detective
1. Update Table 3.2 “Nominal GDP in the United States, 2000–2010” and Figure 3.3
“Nominal GDP in the United States, 2000–2010” using data from the Bureau of
Economic Analysis (BEA). Using the IMF World Economic Outlook Database
(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/weodata/index.aspx), create
tables to show nominal GDP, the GDP price deflator, and real GDP for Argentina.
2. A version of GDP that takes into account environmental effects is called
“environmental accounting” or “green accounting.” Use the Internet to find a
discussion of this alternative way of calculating GDP. List some of the differences
between the usual way of calculating GDP and the environmental or green accounting
method. Do other countries employ these alternative measures?
3. Try to find out whether people in richer countries are happier than those in poorer
countries.
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Spreadsheet Exercise
TABLE 3.9 DATA
Year T-shirts Music
Downloads
Meals
Price
($)
Quantity Price
($)
Quantity
Price
($)
Quantity
2012 20 12 1 60 25 5
2013 30 10 1.80 50 23 2
Using the data in the preceding table, reconstruct Table 3.1 “Calculating Nominal
GDP” to calculate nominal GDP, Table 3.3 “Real GDP Using 2012 as the Base Year” to
calculate real GDP, and Table 3.4 “Calculating the Price Index” to calculate a price
index and the inflation rate.
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Chapter 4
The Interconnected Economy
A Financial Crisis in the News
Here are some headlines from the fall of 2008. If you were following the news during this time
period, you probably saw stories like these. The first excerpt talks about houses in the United
States.
Fallout from Financial Crisis Hammers Housing
The nation is on track to build fewer homes this year than at any time since the end of World
War II, adding to the woes of an economy that analysts said Friday has almost certainly
entered a recession.
[…]
David Seiders, chief economist for the group, said builders are being hit by a double whammy
from the financial turmoil: It’s harder for them to get loans to pursue new houses, and more
difficult to sell those they do build.
[…] [1]
The next excerpt also concerns housing but this time in the United Kingdom.
Financial Crisis: House-Price Slump to Cost Economy £50 Billion
House prices are set to fall 35 per cent from last year’s peak, as the property slump costs the
wider economy almost £50bn as people stop buying homes, economists warned.
With house prices predicted to make their biggest fall in British history by dropping 35 per
cent by autumn next year, the associated consumer spending is expected to plunge, they said.
[…]
This is expected to have a huge impact on the wider economy as each house sale triggers
around £4,000 in new spending on household goods, on items such as washing machines and
other white goods.
[…]
The lack of spending in these areas will hit employment, with some analysts forecasting that
the construction sector alone could see a loss of up to 350,000 jobs within the next five years.
[…] [2]
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Taking these excerpts together, we notice four things: (1) There was a housing slump—fewer
houses being bought and sold, and house prices decreasing—in both the United Kingdom and
the United States at around the same time. (2) Both are linked to a financial crisis. (3) These
slumps affect other parts of the economy. (4) The housing problems lead to job losses.
The next excerpt tells us that the crisis also affected the value of the US dollar.
Financial Crisis Has One Beneficiary: The Dollar
The great market upheaval of 2008 has stripped 45 percent from the value of global equities,
led bank lending to nearly dry up and caused commodity prices to crash from stratospheric
heights. And now, paradoxically, it is helping to lift the long-suffering dollar.
[…] [3]
This excerpt tells us that the financial crisis has also affected other prices in the economies of
the world. The price of equities—shares in companies—decreased, as did the price of goods
such as basic minerals (copper and tin, for example) and basic foods (rice and coffee, for
example). But even as these items became less valuable, the US dollar became more valuable.
The price of the US dollar increased.
The Chinese economy was also affected by the crisis:
Agricultural Products Export Growth Slows Down in 2008
China’s agricultural products exports rose 9.8 percent year-on-year in 2008 to $40.19 billion,
the General Administration of Customs said on Wednesday.
According to the statistics, export growth declined 8.2 percentage points from a year earlier.
Exports in the last two months of 2008 fell 6.9 percent and 7.2 percent to $3.47 billion and
$3.76 billion respectively over the same period of 2007.
Although the country has increased export rebates for some agricultural products and lowered
or even canceled the export tax, exports are unlikely to see a quick rebound in the near future.
Poor overseas demand and falling prices in the international market amid the financial crisis,
as well as the increasing distrust in China’s food quality are likely to stifle export growth, the
General Administration of Customs said.
[…] [4]
The excerpt tells us that China’s exports of agricultural products have been growing rapidly,
reaching a growth rate of nearly 10 percent in 2008. But they had been growing even faster in
the previous year. The effects of the financial crisis and the economic downturn are clear: the
amount of exports decreased at the end of 2008 (and in fact fell throughout 2009 as well).
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We have shown a few headlines about the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. We could have
picked thousands of others. For example, if you enter into a search engine the terms financial
crisis and XYZ, where XYZ is just about any product or international currency, you will
probably find dozens, perhaps hundreds, of articles. The financial crisis of 2008 affected just
about every market—all around the world.
Our task in this chapter is certainly not to fully understand these events. Our goals here are
much more modest. First, we want to develop the supply-and-demand framework—perhaps
the most basic tool in economics—to understand how an event affecting some good or service
leads to changes in the price of that good or service as well as changes in the quantity that is
bought and sold. Second, we want to explore some of the ways in which different markets in
the economy are linked, for linkages across markets are among the most important features of
macroeconomic analysis. The financial crisis is a good illustration because this single event
affected so many markets.
Understanding the sources and consequences of changing prices and quantities in the
economy is one of the key tasks of an economist. There is an almost endless list of such
analyses in economics. In fact, most of the applications in this textbook ultimately come down
to understanding, explaining, and predicting changes in prices and quantities. The two
questions that motivate this chapter are as follows:
What determines price and quantity in a market?
How are markets interconnected?
Road Map
The story of the crisis of 2008 is fascinating and worth understanding in some detail. We
begin with the basics of supply and demand, looking at a single market—the market for
houses. We explain how the equilibrium price and quantity in this market are determined,
which allows us to understand why the price of housing changes. This is a first step to
understanding the crisis of 2008 because the housing market was central to that story.
The story began in the housing market but did not end there. It spread across the economy
and across the world. Hence we next look at three significant markets in the economy: the
labor market, the credit market, and the foreign exchange market. Understanding how these
three markets work is necessary for a good understanding of macroeconomics. We use these
markets to provide more illustrations of supply and demand in action. Finally, we look at how
markets are linked together to see how what might have seemed like a minor problem in one
market turned into a cataclysmic event for the world’s economies.
Throughout this chapter, we use the term “the crisis of 2008” as shorthand, but the first signs
of the crisis emerged well before that year, and the effects of the crisis are still being felt
several years later. The crisis was a complex event, and right now, at the beginning of your
studies of macroeconomics, we are not yet ready to delve deeply into a detailed analysis of
those events. We return to the crisis in Chapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”, which is a
capstone chapter that brings together most of the tools of macroeconomics from this book.
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[1] Martin Crutsinger, “Fallout from Financial Crisis Hammers Housing,” USA Today, Money,
October 17, 2008, accessed June 28,
2011, http://www.usatoday.com/money/topstories/2008-10-16-3784489146_x.htm.
[2] Myra Butterworth, “Financial Crisis: House-Price Slump to Cost Economy £50
Billion,” The Telegraph, October 21, 2008, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/houseprices/3235741/Financial-crisis-
House-price-slump-to-cost-economy-50-billion.html.
[3] See David Jolly, “Global Financial Crisis Has One Beneficiary: The Dollar,” New York
Times, October 22, 2008, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/business/worldbusiness/22iht-
dollar.4.17174760.html.
[4] See Tong Hao, “Agricultural Products Export Growth Slows Down in 2008,” China Daily,
February 11, 2009, accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-
02/11/content_7467089.htm.
4.1 Housing Supply and Demand
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What factors underlie the demand for housing?
2. What factors underlie the supply of housing?
3. What determines the amount of housing traded and the price of housing?
The first two articles we quoted from made it clear that the housing market was heavily
affected by the financial crisis. More than that, it was where the crisis began—and so it is
where we begin our story.
We start with the market for new homes, which are part of real gross domestic product (real
GDP). (The buying and selling of existing homes is not counted in GDP.) New homes are
supplied by construction firms and demanded by families wishing to live in a new home. New
homes are also bought by speculators who purchase houses in the hope that they can resell
them for a higher price in the future.
Toolkit: Section 16.6 “Supply and Demand”
Supply and demand is a framework we use to explain and predict the equilibrium price and
quantity of a good. A point on the market supply curve shows the quantity that suppliers are
willing to sell for a given price. A point on the market demand curve shows the quantity that
demanders are willing to buy for a given price. The intersection of supply and demand
determines the equilibrium price and quantity that will prevail in the market.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/houseprices/3235741/Financial-crisis-House-price-slump-to-cost-economy-50-billion.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/houseprices/3235741/Financial-crisis-House-price-slump-to-cost-economy-50-billion.html
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The toolkit contains a presentation of supply and demand that you can use for reference
purposes in this and the following chapters.
The supply-and-demand framework applies to the case that economists call
acompetitive market. A market is said to be competitive, or, more precisely, to exhibit
perfect competition, under two conditions:
1. There are many buyers and many sellers, all of whom are small relative to the market.
2. The goods that sellers produce are perfect substitutes.
In a competitive market, buyers and sellers take the price as given; they think their actions
have no effect on the price in the market.
Demand
The market demand for housing is shown in Figure 4.1 “The Market Demand for Houses”. We
call this the market demand curve because it reflects the choices of the many households
in the economy. In macroeconomics, we typically look at markets at this level of aggregation
and do not worry much about the individual decisions that underlie curves such as this one.
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Figure 4.1 The Market Demand for Houses
The market demand curve shows the quantity of houses demanded at each price.
As the price of housing decreases, the quantity demanded increases. This is an example of the
law of demand, which derives from two effects:
1. As the price of a good or service decreases, more individuals choose to buy a positive
quantity rather than zero.
2. As the price of a good or a service decreases, individuals choose to buy a larger quantity.
In the case of the market for housing, the first of these is more important. Most people own
either zero houses or one house. As houses become cheaper, more people decide that they can
afford a house, so the quantity demanded increases. A few people might decide to buy an
additional house, but they would presumably be in the rich minority. For other goods, such as
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chocolate bars or shoeshines, the second effect is more important: as price decreases, people
increase the quantity that they buy.
Shifts in Demand
When we draw a demand curve, we are varying the price but holding everything else fixed. In
particular, we hold fixed the level of income, the prices of other goods and services in the
economy, and the tastes of households. If these other factors change, then the market demand
curve will shift—that is, the quantity demanded will change at each price.
A leftward shift of the market demand curve for houses, as indicated in Figure 4.2 “A Shift in
the Market Demand Curve”, could be caused by many factors, including the following:
A decrease in the incomes of households in the market
Concerns about the future health of the economy
A reduction in the price of a typical apartment rental
An increase in the interest rates for mortgages
A change in social tastes so that buying a house is no longer viewed as a status symbol
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Figure 4.2 A Shift in the Market Demand Curve
If there is a decrease in demand for houses, then fewer houses are demanded at each price.
The demand curve shifts leftward.
Supply
The counterpart to the market demand curve is the market supply curve, which is obtained
by adding together the individual supply curves in the economy. The supply curve slopes
upward: as price increases, the quantity supplied to the market increases. As with demand,
there are two underlying effects.
1. As price increases, more firms decide to enter the market—that is, these firms produce
some positive quantity rather than zero.
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2. As price increases, firms increase the quantity that they wish to produce.
Figure 4.3 The Market Supply of Houses
The market supply curve shows the quantity of houses supplied at each price. It has a
positive slope: as the price of houses increases, the number of houses supplied to the market
increases as well.
Shifts in Supply
When we draw a supply curve, we again vary the price but hold everything else fixed. A change
in any other factor will cause the market supply curve to shift. A leftward shift of the market
supply curve for houses, as indicated in Figure 4.4 “A Shift in Supply of Houses”, could be
caused by many factors, including the following:
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Increases in the costs of production, such as wages, the cost of borrowing, or the price of
oil
Bad weather that delays or damages construction in process
Changes in regulations that make it harder to build
Figure 4.4 A Shift in Supply of Houses
If there is a decrease in supply of houses, then fewer houses are supplied at each price. The
supply curve shifts leftward.
Market Equilibrium: What Determines the Price of Housing?
We now put the market demand and market supply curves together to give us the supply-and-
demand picture in Figure 4.5 “Market Equilibrium”. The point where supply and demand
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meet is the equilibrium in the market. At this point, there is a perfect match between the
amount that buyers want to buy and the amount that sellers want to sell.
Toolkit: Section 16.6 “Supply and Demand”
Equilibrium in a market refers to an equilibrium price and an equilibrium quantity and has
the following features:
Given the equilibrium price, sellers supply the equilibrium quantity.
Given the equilibrium price, buyers demand the equilibrium quantity.
Figure 4.5 Market Equilibrium
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In a competitive market, equilibrium price and quantity are determined by the intersection
of the supply and demand curves.
We speak of equilibrium because there is a balancing of the forces of supply and demand in
the market. At the equilibrium price, suppliers of the good can sell as much as they wish,
and demanders of the good can buy as much of the good as they wish. There are no
disappointed buyers or sellers. Because the demand curve has a negative slope and the supply
curve has a positive slope, supply and demand will cross once, and both equilibrium price
and equilibrium quantity will be positive.
Table 4.1 “Market Equilibrium: An Example” provides an example of market equilibrium. It
gives market supply and market demand for four different prices. Equilibrium occurs at a
price of $100,000 and a quantity of 50 new houses.
Table 4.1 Market Equilibrium: An Example
Price ($) Market Supply Market
Demand
10,000 5 95
50,000 25 75
100,000 50 50
200,000 100 0
Economists typically believe that a perfectly competitive market is likely to reach equilibrium.
The reasons for this belief are as follows:
If price is different from the equilibrium price, then there will be an imbalance between
demand and supply. This gives buyers and sellers an incentive to behave differently. For
example, if price is less than the equilibrium price, demand will exceed supply.
Disappointed buyers might start bidding up the price, or sellers might realize they could
charge a higher price. The opposite is true if the price is too high: suppliers might be
tempted to try cutting prices, while buyers might look for better deals.
There is strong support for market predictions in the evidence from experimental markets.
When buyers and sellers meet individually and bargain over prices, we typically see an
outcome very similar to the market outcome in Figure 4.5 “Market Equilibrium”.
The supply-and-demand framework generally provides reliable predictions about the
movement of prices.
Pictures like Figure 4.5 “Market Equilibrium” are useful to help understand how the market
works. Keep in mind, however, that firms and households in the market do not need any of
this information. This is one of the beauties of the market. All an individual firm or household
needs to know is the prevailing market price. All the coordination occurs through the
workings of the market.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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The primary factor influencing demand for housing is the price of housing. By the law
of demand, as price decreases, the quantity of housing demanded increases. The
demand for housing also depends on the wealth of households, their current income,
and interest rates.
The primary factor influencing supply of housing is the price of housing. As price
increases, the quantity supplied also increases. The supply of housing is shifted by
changes in the price of inputs and changes in technology.
The quantity and price of housing traded is determined by the equilibrium of the
housing market.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What would be the impact of a decrease in the cost of borrowing on the market supply
curve of housing? What would be the impact of a decrease in the cost of borrowing on
the market demand curve?
2. Name two events that would cause the housing market supply curve to shift rightward.
Name two events that would cause the housing market demand curve to shift rightward.
4.2 Comparative Statics: Changes in the Price of Housing
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are exogenous and endogenous events?
2. How does the equilibrium of a market respond to changes in exogenous variables?
3. What is comparative statics, and how is it used?
A driving factor in the crisis of 2008 was a decrease in the price of new housing. We can use
our supply-and-demand tool to help us understand that. We use the framework to make
predictions about the effects of events on economic outcomes. More precisely, economists
predict the effects of exogenous events on equilibrium prices and quantities.
Toolkit: Section 16.8 “Comparative Statics”
An exogenous variable is something that comes from outside a model and is not explained in
our analysis. An endogenous variable is one that is explained within our analysis. When
using the supply-and-demand framework, price and quantity are endogenous
variables; everything else is exogenous.
A Shift in Demand for Housing
The following is a typical account of the housing market crisis in 2008:
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The immediate cause or trigger of the crisis was the bursting of the United States
housing bubble which peaked in approximately 2005–2006. High default rates on
“subprime” and adjustable rate mortgages (ARM), began to increase quickly thereafter.
An increase in loan incentives such as easy initial terms and a long-term trend of rising
housing prices had encouraged borrowers to assume difficult mortgages in the belief
they would be able to quickly refinance at more favorable terms. […] However, once
interest rates began to rise and housing prices started to drop moderately in 2006–
2007 in many parts of the U.S., refinancing became more difficult. Defaults and
foreclosure activity increased dramatically as easy initial terms expired, home prices
failed to go up as anticipated, and ARM interest rates reset higher. Falling prices also
resulted in 23% of U.S. homes worth less than the mortgage loan by September 2010,
providing a financial incentive for borrowers to enter foreclosure. [1]
This quote identifies two forces that influenced the demand for housing in 2007–8. The first
was expectations of future home prices. One of the gains from owning a house is the
possibility that you can sell it at a higher price in the future. Prior to 2007, there had been a
fairly consistent tendency for house prices to increase, but the quote seems to indicate that
people began to doubt that this trend would continue. As a consequence, the demand for new
homes decreased. The second force in the market for new housing was the availability of
credit. Most households buy a new home by obtaining a loan (a mortgage) to cover some of
the price of the house. During 2007 and 2008, it became increasingly difficult to obtain a
mortgage. This was in contrast to a few years earlier when lending standards were easier, and
many households easily qualified for mortgages.
These forces affect market demand. The anticipation of lower home prices in the future
implies that fewer individuals will choose to buy a home now. Further, if financing is more
expensive, then less housing will be purchased. These effects operate given the current price
of housing. That is, at any given current price of houses, a smaller quantity of houses is
demanded. The market demand curve shifts leftward: at each given price, market demand is
lower.
The shift in demand is shown in Figure 4.6 “A Decrease in Demand for Housing”. Once the
demand curve shifts, the market for new houses is no longer in equilibrium. At the original
price, there is now an imbalance between supply and demand: at that price, buyers want to
purchase fewer homes than sellers wish to sell. To restore equilibrium in the market, there
needs to be a reduction in housing prices and a reduction in the quantity of new houses
produced. The decrease in production comes about because the lower price of houses makes
suppliers less willing to produce houses for the market. The shift in the demand curve leads to
a movement along the supply curve.
Figure 4.6 A Decrease in Demand for Housing
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A decrease in demand for houses means that the demand curve shifts leftward, leading to a
decrease in both the price of houses and the quantity of houses that are produced and sold.
Shifts in a Curve versus Movements along a Curve
Understanding the distinction between moving along a curve (either supply or demand) and
shifting the curve is the hardest part about learning to use the supply-and-demand
framework. Journalists and others frequently get confused about this—and no wonder, for it
requires practice to learn how to use supply and demand properly.
First, consider the market demand curve. As the price of houses increases, the quantity
demanded will decrease. This is a movement along the market demand curve. Changes in
anything else—anything other than price—that affects the quantity demanded appears as
a shift in the market demand curve. That is, at each given price, the quantity demanded
changes.
Analogously, as the price of houses increases, the quantity supplied will increase. This is
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a movement along the market supply curve. If a change in anything else leads to a change in
the quantity supplied, this appears as a shift in the market supply curve. That is, at each given
price, the quantity supplied changes.
Comparative Statics
The example that we just discussed is an illustration of a general technique used by
economists for two purposes. First, we use it to explain changes in prices and quantities that
we have observed in the past. Second, we use it to predict what will happen to market prices
and quantities in the future. The technique is called comparative statics.
Toolkit: Section 16.8 “Comparative Statics”
Comparative statics is a technique that allows us to describe how market equilibrium prices
and quantities depend on exogenous events. As such, much of economics consists of exercises
in comparative statics. In a comparative statics exercise, you must do the following:
1. Begin at an equilibrium point where the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded.
2. Based on a description of an event, determine whether the change in the exogenous factor
shifts the market supply curve or the market demand curve.
3. Determine the direction of this shift.
4. After shifting the curve, find the new equilibrium point.
5. Compare the new and old equilibrium points to predict how the exogenous event affects
the market.
The most difficult part of a comparative statics exercise is to determine, from a description of
the economic problem, whether it is the supply or demand curve (or both) that shifts. Once
you conquer the economics of determining which curve is shifting, then it is a matter of
mechanically using the framework to find the new equilibrium. A comparison of the old and
new equilibrium points allows you to predict what will happen to equilibrium prices and
quantities following an exogenous change.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Exogenous variables are determined from outside a framework, while endogenous
variables are determined within the framework.
Changes in exogenous variables lead to shifts in market supply and/or market
demand curves. These shifts in supply and demand then lead to changes in quantities
and prices.
Comparative statics is a technique that describes how changes in exogenous variables
influence equilibrium quantities and prices. It is used to answer questions about how
markets respond to changes in exogenous variables.
Checking Your Understanding
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1. Name two exogenous variables that might affect the equilibrium outcome in the market
for used cars.
2. Draw the market for housing when there is a decrease in supply and a decrease in
demand. What happens to the price? Why can you not say for sure what happens to the
quantity of houses bought and sold?
[1] “Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” Wikipedia, accessed June 28,
2011,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis.
4.3 Three Important Markets
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the credit market, and what determines the interest rate?
2. What is the labor market, and what determines the real wage?
3. What is the foreign currency market, and what determines the exchange rate?
The financial crisis of 2008 began in the housing market. But as the excerpts at the beginning
of this chapter make clear, its effects rapidly spread beyond that market. Those excerpts
talked of credit, jobs, and the impact of the crisis on foreign countries. We now look at the
knock-on effects of the crisis and, in the process, describe three key macroeconomic markets:
the credit market, the labor market, and the foreign exchange market. [1]
The Credit Market
A credit market (or loan market) is a market in which credit is extended by lenders to
borrowers. These credit arrangements, also called loans, are a specific kind of contract. A
simple credit contract specifies three things: (1) the amount being borrowed, (2) the date(s) at
which repayment must be made, and (3) the amount that must be repaid. [2]
To be specific, suppose you go to your bank to inquire about a loan for $1,000, to be repaid in
one year. In this case the lender—the bank—is a supplier of credit, and the borrower—you—is
a demander of credit. The higher is the repayment amount, the more attractive this loan
contract will look to the bank. Conversely, the lower is the repayment amount, the more
attractive this loan contract looks to you. The relationship between the current price and the
future repayment can be summarized in a single number, known as
thenominal interest rate.
Toolkit: Section 16.4 “The Credit (Loan) Market (Macro)”
The nominal interest rate is the number of additional dollars that must be repaid for every
dollar that is borrowed. It is generally specified in annual terms; that is, it is the amount that
must be paid per year.
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For the one-year loan we are considering,
repayment amount
loan amount
= 1 + nominal interest rate.
For example, suppose the repayment amount is $1,050. Then the left-hand side of this
expression is 1,050/1,000 = 1.05. It follows that the nominal interest rate is 0.05, or 5 percent.
Financial markets are typically good examples of competitive markets. Loans are
homogeneous, and there are potentially many buyers and sellers. So if we imagine that there
are lots of banks that might be willing to supply credit, and lots of people like you who might
demand credit, then we could draw supply and demand curves as in Figure 4.7 “A Market for
$1,000 Loans”. In this case, the units on the quantity axis are one-year $1,000 loans. The
price on the vertical axis is the interest rate, which tells us the amount of the repayment per
dollar loaned. The higher the repayment is, the more willing are banks to supply credit, so the
supply curve slopes upward. The higher the repayment, the less willing are people to take out
these loans, and so the demand curve slopes downward. If the repayment price were
acceptable to you, you would “buy” one of these $1,000 loans. The equilibrium nominal
interest rate is shown at the crossing of supply and demand.
Figure 4.7 A Market for $1,000 Loans
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In this credit market, lenders offer $1,000 loans to borrowers. The equilibrium nominal
interest rate is where the quantity of credit supplied equals the quantity of credit demanded.
The Credit Market in the 2008 Crisis
At the height of the financial crisis of 2008, credit became much more expensive—that is,
interest rates increased. Why? As housing prices collapsed in the United States and elsewhere,
a substantial number of mortgage loans became nonperforming. This means that borrowers
were unable or unwilling to repay these loans and defaulted on them instead. In addition,
because banks had sold and resold some of these mortgage loans, it was hard to identify which
loans would be repaid and which would not. Some financial institutions that were holding a
lot of bad loans went bankrupt, and others were in danger of going under as well.
As a consequence, lenders became much more cautious about the types of loans they made—
not only in mortgage markets but also throughout the economy. They were more careful about
evaluating the likelihood that borrowers would repay their loans. This led to a reduction in the
market supply of credit. The reduced supply of loans in the mortgage market was particularly
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acute. This appears as a leftward shift of the supply curve inFigure 4.8 “A Reduction in Supply
in the Mortgage Market”. Nominal interest rates increased, and the quantity of mortgages
extended decreased. (The full story of what happened in credit markets is more complicated
because central banks around the world also took actions to offset these changes and keep
interest rates low.)
Figure 4.8 A Reduction in Supply in the Mortgage Market
As lenders became more cautious about making loans, the supply of mortgage loans shifted
leftward. Interest rates in the economy increased, and the quantity of mortgages decreased.
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Nominal Interest Rates and Real Interest Rates
Mortgage rates and other interest rates are based on underlying dollar amounts; the interest
rate tells you how many dollars borrowers must pay to lenders for each dollar that they
borrow. Because they are based on dollar amounts, they are called nominal interest rates.
When you see a mortgage rate quoted by a bank or a rate on a credit card, it is a nominal rate.
The nominal rate does not tell us the true cost of borrowing, or return on lending, when there
is inflation in an economy. For example, suppose that the nominal interest rate is 5 percent,
but inflation is also 5 percent. If you took out a $1,000 loan, you would have to pay back
$1,050 next year. But that $1,050 would buy exactly the same amount of
real gross domestic product (real GDP) next year as $1,000 does this year—that is what
it means to have 5 percent inflation. So, in terms of actual goods and services, you have to pay
back the same amount that you borrowed. The real interest rate—that is, the interest rate
corrected for inflation—is zero.
Toolkit: Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
The Fisher equation is a formula for converting from nominal interest rates to real interest
rates, as follows:
real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − inflation rate.
The real interest rate gives the true cost of borrowing and lending; it is the real interest rate
that actually matters for the decisions of savers and borrowers. [3] That doesn’t mean, by the
way, that our previous two diagrams were incorrect because they used the nominal interest
rate. Provided that the inflation rate doesn’t change, a comparative static exercise using the
nominal interest rate will give you exactly the same conclusion as one using the real interest
rate.
Individual Credit Markets and the Aggregate Credit Market
We have described a market for a particular kind of loan, but more generally we know that
there are all kinds of different ways in which credit is offered in an economy. Households
borrow from banks to buy houses or cars. Households and firms make purchases using credit
cards. Firms borrow from financial institutions to buy new equipment. The government
borrows to finance its spending, and so on. There is a very large number of credit markets in
the economy, each offering a different kind of credit, and each with its own equilibrium
interest rate.
These different credit markets are linked because most households and firms buy or sell in
more than one market. Financial institutions in particular trade in large numbers of different
credit markets. For much of what we do in macroeconomics, however, the distinctions among
different kinds of credit are not critical, and it is sufficient to imagine a single aggregate credit
market and a single real interest rate. [4] Figure 4.9 “The Aggregate Credit Market” shows the
credit market for an entire economy. This is the market where all the savers in the economy
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bring funds to financial intermediaries, who then lend those funds to firms, households, and
governments. The supply of credit increases as the interest rate increases. As the interest rate
increases, other things being equal, households will generally save more and thus supply more
to the credit market. The quantity of credit demanded decreases as the interest rate increases.
When it is expensive to borrow, households and firms will borrow less.
Figure 4.9 The Aggregate Credit Market
In the credit market, the equilibrium real interest rate is where the quantity of credit
supplied equals the quantity of credit demanded.
Toolkit: Section 16.4 “The Credit (Loan) Market (Macro)”
The credit market brings together suppliers of credit, such as households who are saving, and
demanders of credit, such as businesses and households who need to borrow. The real interest
rate is the price that brings demand and supply into balance. At the equilibrium interest rate,
the amount of credit supplied and the amount of credit demanded are equal.
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Two of the most important players in the credit market are the government and the monetary
authority. If the US federal government borrows more, this shifts the demand for credit
outward and increases the interest rate. (Notice that the government is a big player in this
market, so its actions affect the interest rate.) The monetary authority, meanwhile, buys and
sells in credit markets to influence interest rates in the economy. [5] In the 2008 crisis, the
Federal Reserve Bank, which is the monetary authority in the United States, took many
actions to increase the supply of credit and ease the problems in the credit market.
The Labor Market
The story about the housing market in the United Kingdom at the beginning of this chapter
contained some dire predictions about employment:
The lack of spending in these areas will hit employment, with some analysts forecasting
that the construction sector alone could see a loss of up to 350,000 jobs within the next
five years.
To understand this prediction, we need to look at another market—the labor market.
In the markets for goods and services, the supply side usually comes from firms, and the
demand side comes from households. In the labor market, by contrast, firms and households
switch roles: firms demand labor, and households supply labor. Supply and demand curves
for construction workers are shown in Figure 4.10 “Equilibrium in the Market for
Construction Workers”. Here the price of labor is the hourly real wage that is paid to
workers in this industry.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market”
The real wage is the wage corrected for inflation. To obtain the real wage, simply divide the
wage in dollars—the nominal wage—by the price level:
real wage =
nominal wage
price level
.
The individual demand for labor by firms comes from the fact that workers’ time is an input
into the production process. This demand curve obeys the law of demand: as the real wage
increases, the quantity of labor demanded decreases. At a higher real wage, a firm will
demand less labor services (by hiring fewer workers and/or reducing the hours of workers)
and will respond to the higher labor cost by reducing production.
Workers care about the real wage because it tells them how much they can obtain in terms of
goods and services if they give up some of their time. The supply of labor comes from
households who allocate their time between work and leisure activities. In Figure 4.10
“Equilibrium in the Market for Construction Workers”, the supply of labor is upward sloping.
As the real wage increases, households supply more labor because (1) higher wages induce
people to work longer hours, and (2) higher wages induce more people to enter the labor force
and look for a job.
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Figure 4.10 Equilibrium in the Market for Construction Workers
This picture shows the supply of and demand for hours of work in the construction industry.
Figure 4.11 A Decrease in Demand for Construction Workers
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Because builders are building fewer houses, they hire fewer construction workers, causing
the labor demand curve to shift leftward.
The Labor Market in the 2008 Crisis
In the United Kingdom, there was a leftward shift in demand for housing (just like we showed
in Figure 4.6 “A Decrease in Demand for Housing”). The response of homebuilders to such a
shift is to build fewer homes and, therefore, demand less labor. As a result, there is a leftward
shift in the demand curve for construction workers. Based on the supply-and-demand
framework, we predict both lower wages and a reduction in employment in the construction
sector of the economy, as shown in Figure 4.11 “A Decrease in Demand for Construction
Workers”.
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Similar reductions in demand for labor occurred in the United States and many other
countries around the world. There was a consequent reduction in employment and an
increase in unemployment. The crisis was not restricted just to financial markets, in other
words. It had consequences for the “real” economy as well.
Individual Labor Markets and the Aggregate Labor Market
Because there are many different jobs and many different kinds of workers, there is no single
labor market and no single wage. Instead, you can think of there being many different labor
markets just as there are many different credit markets. Like different credit markets,
different labor markets are linked: households may participate in more than one labor
market, and most firms purchase many different kinds of labor. As with the credit market, we
sometimes look at the market for a particular kind of labor and the economy as a whole. Most
of the time in macroeconomics, it is sufficient to think about an aggregate labor market, as
shown in Figure 4.12 “Equilibrium in the Labor Market”. [6] As the real wage increases,
households supply more hours, and more households participate in the labor market. For
both of these reasons, as the real wage increases, the quantity of labor supplied also increases.
Labor demand comes from firms. As the real wage increases, the cost of hiring extra labor
increases, and firms demand fewer labor hours. That is, the firm’s labor demand curve is
downward sloping.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market”
The labor market is the market in which labor services are traded. The supply of labor comes
from households. At the equilibrium real wage, the number of hours supplied and the number
of hours demanded are equal.
Figure 4.12 Equilibrium in the Labor Market
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The labor market is the market in which firms hire workers. The equilibrium real wage is
the price where the quantity of labor supplied equals the quantity of labor demanded.
The Foreign Exchange Market
The excerpts at the beginning of this chapter reveal that the financial crisis also impacted
other countries. For example, we included an excerpt about the effects of the crisis on the
value of a dollar and also an excerpt about exports from China. We could have also cited
effects of the crisis on other countries: for example, India’s information technology sector and
Canada’s lumber industry were both affected. To understand the transmission of the crisis to
other countries, we have to learn about another market—the market where different
currencies are bought and sold.
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If you travel abroad, you must acquire the currency used in that region of the world. For
example, if you take a trip to Finland, Russia, and China, you will buy euros, rubles, and yuan
along the way. To do so, you need to participate in various foreign exchange markets.
Toolkit: Section 16.10 “Foreign Exchange Market”
The foreign exchange market is the market where currencies are traded. The price in this
market is the price of one currency in terms of another and is called the
nominal exchange rate.
Dollars are supplied to foreign exchange markets by US households, firms, and governments
who wish to purchase goods, services, or financial assets that are denominated in the currency
of another economy. For example, if a US auto importer wants to buy a German car, it must
sell dollars and buy euros. As the price of a dollar increases, the quantity supplied of that
currency will increase.
Foreign currencies are supplied by foreign households, firms, and governments that wish to
purchase goods, services, or financial assets (such as stocks or bonds) denominated in the
domestic currency. For example, if a Canadian bank wants to buy a US government bond, it
must sell Canadian dollars and buy US dollars. The law of demand holds: as the price of a
dollar increases, the quantity of that currency demanded decreases.
Figure 4.13 “Equilibrium in the Foreign Exchange Market Where Dollars and Euros Are
Exchanged” shows an example of a foreign exchange market: the market in which euros are
bought with and sold for US dollars. The horizontal axis shows the number of euros bought
and sold on a particular day. The vertical axis shows the exchange rate—the price of a euro in
dollars. This market determines the dollar price of euros just like the gasoline market
determines the dollar price of gasoline.
Figure 4.13 Equilibrium in the Foreign Exchange Market Where Dollars and Euros Are
Exchanged
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Currencies are traded in foreign exchange markets, such as the market shown here in which
dollars and euros are exchanged. The equilibrium exchange rate is the price where the
quantity of euros supplied equals the quantity of euros demanded.
On the supply side, there are households and firms in Europe who want to buy US goods and
services. To do so, they need to buy dollars and, therefore, must supply euros to the market.
This supply of euros need not come only from European households and firms. Anyone
holding euros is free to sell them in this market. On the demand side, there are households
and firms who are holding dollars and who wish to buy European goods and services. They
need to buy euros.
There is another source of the demand for and the supply of different currencies. Households
and, more importantly, firms often hold assets denominated in different currencies. You
could, if you wish, hold some of your wealth in Israeli government bonds, in shares of a South
African firm, or in Argentine real estate. But to do so, you would need to buy Israeli shekels,
South African rand, or Argentine pesos. Likewise, many foreign investors hold US assets, such
as shares in Dell Inc. or debt issued by the US government. Thus the demand for and the
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supply of currencies are also influenced by the asset choices of households and firms. In
practice, banks and other financial institutions conduct the vast majority of trades in foreign
exchange markets.
As well as households and firms, monetary authorities also participate in foreign exchange
markets. For example, the US Federal Reserve Bank monitors the value of the dollar and may
even intervene in the market, buying or selling dollars in order to influence the exchange rate.
Foreign Exchange Markets in the 2008 Crisis
One of the articles we used to open this chapter dealt with changes in the value of the dollar in
the fall of 2008. The article pointed out that the dollar was getting stronger relative to other
currencies, such as the euro. This means that the price of a dollar in euros was increasing or,
equivalently, the price of a euro in dollars was decreasing. In fact, the euro price of a dollar
was about 0.67 in late September 2008; the price increased to nearly 0.81 by late October and
then decreased again through December 2008.
We can use the foreign exchange market to understand these events. Figure 4.14
“Comparative Statics in the Euro Market” shows the dollar market for euros once again. The
increase in the value of the dollar discussed in the article is seen here as a rightward shift in
the supply of euros, which decreases the value of the euro and—equivalently—increases the
value of the dollar.
Figure 4.14 Comparative Statics in the Euro Market
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The rightward shift in the supply of euros leads to a decrease in the price of a euro in terms
of dollars.
There are two consequences of this shift in the supply curve. First, the shift in supply
decreases the dollar price of the euro. So people in the United States who are planning to visit,
say, France will find that they can obtain more euros for a given amount of dollars. Second,
the quantity of euros actually bought and sold is higher. This is not inconsistent with the lower
dollar price of a euro since the supply curve shifts along the demand curve for euros.
Individual Foreign Exchange Markets and the Aggregate Foreign Exchange
Market
We sometimes look at an individual exchange rate (e.g., dollar-euro) by thinking of the market
where dollars are exchanged for euros. However, there are many different currencies that are
exchanged for the US dollar. There are markets where dollars are exchanged for British
pounds, Japanese yen, and so on. We can combine these into an aggregate foreign exchange
market. Think of this as being the market where US dollars are bought with and sold for all
the other currencies in the world. In this market, there is an aggregate exchange rate, which
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you can think of as an average of the exchange rates in all the individual markets. [7] We show
this market in Figure 4.15 “Foreign Exchange Market Equilibrium”.
Figure 4.15 Foreign Exchange Market Equilibrium
Currencies are traded in foreign exchange markets, such as the market shown here in which
dollars are bought and sold.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The credit market brings together the suppliers of credit (households) with those who
are demanding credit (other households, firms, and the government). The interest
rate adjusts to attain a market equilibrium.
The labor market is where labor services are traded. Households supply labor, and
firms demand labor. The real wage adjusts to attain a market equilibrium.
The foreign exchange market brings together demanders and suppliers of foreign
currency. The exchange rate, which is the price of one currency in terms of another,
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adjusts to attain a market equilibrium.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Figure 4.13 “Equilibrium in the Foreign Exchange Market Where Dollars and Euros
Are Exchanged” shows the market where euros are bought and sold using dollars. We
could equivalently think about this as the market where dollars are bought and sold
using euros. Draw the graph for this market. How are the supply and demand curves in
the two markets related to each other?
[1] These markets are used in several places in the book. In particular, we look at labor
in Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy”, and credit and foreign exchange in Chapter 9
“Money: A User’s Guide”.
[2] Of course, since credit contracts are legal documents, lots of other details will be written
into the contract as well. Here we focus on the most important features of the contract.
[3] We derive the Fisher equation more fully in Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”.
[4] In Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”, we look in more detail at the different kinds of
credit—and the associated different interest rates—that we see in an economy. We also
investigate in more detail how these markets are linked together.
[5] We study the actions of the Federal Reserve and other monetary authorities in Chapter 10
“Understanding the Fed”.
[6] In Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy”, we pay more attention to the fact that workers
and jobs are not all identical.
[7] More precisely, you should think of a weighted average. Because the United States trades
much more with Canada than with, say, South Africa, movements in the US dollar–Canadian
dollar exchange rate matter more than movements in the US dollar–South African rand
exchange rate. Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide” has more on exchange rates.
4.4 Linkages across Markets
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How are the markets for goods, labor, credit, and foreign currency linked?
2. How do we use those links to understand the crisis that began in 2008?
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In Section 4.3 “Three Important Markets”, we talked about the markets for credit, labor, and
foreign exchange. We explained that we sometimes look at individual examples of these
markets and sometimes at versions of these markets that apply to the economy as a whole.
But the story of the economic crisis in 2008 was not about a single market. Instead, what
started as a problem in the US mortgage market was felt in the housing market in England,
the labor market in China, the foreign exchange market in Europe, and many other markets.
These different markets are connected; in this section, we explore these linkages. We do so
through the circular flow of income, shown in Figure 4.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”.
That model of the economy reveals the linkages across markets that the global financial crisis
made so evident.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
You can review the circular flow of income in the toolkit.
Figure 4.16 The Circular Flow of Income
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We know from the circular flow that the production of goods and services generates income in
an economy. Some of that income is paid to the government in the form of taxes, but the rest
finds its way to households. Much of the flow of dollars from firms to households takes place
through the labor market because firms demand labor to produce goods. If firms are
producing large quantities of goods and services, then they demand lots of labor, and income
from the sale of labor services in the economy is high.
Some of the income that households earn from selling labor services is saved. There is
therefore a link, through the household sector, between the labor market and the credit
market. So we can follow a connection from the production of goods and services to the supply
of credit: if firms produce more, they generate more labor income, so there is more saving
supplied by households to the credit market. There is also a link from the markets for goods
and services to the demand for credit: firms borrow to purchase investment goods.
These markets are also linked—directly or indirectly—to foreign exchange markets. Whenever
firms purchase imported goods, such as oil, this generates a demand for foreign exchange.
When firms expand output, demand more labor, and so generate additional household
income, households spend some of this income on imports, again generating a demand for
foreign exchange. When households and firms in other countries want to buy our goods and
services, that generates a supply of foreign exchange. And many transactions in credit markets
also generate a demand for or supply of foreign exchange.
Comparative Statics in an Interconnected World
We could go on, but the point should be clear: the markets in every economy are intimately
interconnected. This has a critical implication for our study of macroeconomics, which is that
it both complicates and enriches our comparative static analyses. When a shift in supply or
demand in one market affects the equilibrium price and quantity in that market, there are
changes in other markets as well. [1] In this section, we show how these interactions across
markets help us understand the propagation of the 2008 crisis from the US housing market to
the economies of the world. We have already hinted at some of these linkages, but now we
make them more explicit.
Housing and Credit Markets in the 2008 Crisis
The story began with the first comparative static example that we looked at: a leftward shift in
demand for housing. Potential buyers of houses started worrying that the futureprice of
houses would decrease. This made people more reluctant to buy houses. Meanwhile, a
tightening of lending standards made it harder for people to obtain loans. Both of these
caused the demand for housing to shift leftward. Part (a) of Figure 4.17, which we already saw
earlier in the chapter, shows us that this led to a decrease in both the price and the quantity of
houses.
Figure 4.17
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A decrease in demand for housing led to a decrease in supply of credit. (a) Worsening
expectations about future house prices, together with tighter lending conditions, led to a
decrease in demand for housing. (b) In the credit market, banks and other lending
institutions found themselves with bad debt, so the supply of credit decreased.
Part (b) of Figure 4.17 also appeared earlier in the chapter. The decrease in housing prices,
combined with the complicated way in which mortgages had been sold and resold by financial
institutions, meant that many financial institutions found themselves in trouble. Some went
bankrupt. This made financial institutions cautious about lending to each other, so the supply
of credit shifted to the left. Interest rates rose. (Interest rates in the crisis were also affected by
the actions of the US Federal Reserve and other monetary authorities around the world. [2])
A Shift in the Supply of Goods
If you run a business, you often have to rely on credit (loans) to finance the purchase of your
inputs into the production process. For example, suppose you run a boutique clothing store.
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You have to buy the clothes to put on display first, and you get your revenues only when you
sell the clothes. Weeks or even months may pass between the time you incur your costs and
the time you get your revenues. Unless you have the funds available to buy all your stock up
front, you will need to borrow. The same is true in many other businesses. Firms regularly
take out short-term loans to pay for some of their costs of operation.
When interest rates increase, businesses see their costs increase. Higher costs make it less
profitable to produce at any given price, so most businesses cut back on their production.
Some may even leave the market altogether. As a consequence, the supply curve for most
goods and services shifts leftward, as shown in Figure 4.18. We see that the equilibrium price
increases, and the equilibrium quantity decreases. Going back to an individual producer, what
does this mean? The producer sees costs increase. In the new equilibrium, the producer also
obtains a higher price. However, the increase in price is not as big as the increase in cost.
Figure 4.18
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Higher interest rates lead to higher prices and lower quantities for most goods and services.
Higher interest rates increase the cost of doing business, so the supply curve for a typical
good or service shifts leftward.
A Shift in Demand for Labor
The effect of the higher interest rates on the output decisions of firms also leads them to
demand less of all their inputs, including labor. Decreases in production lead to decreases in
labor demand, as shown in Figure 4.19 “A Decrease in Demand for Labor”. In turn, decreases
in wages and employment (more generally, a decrease in income) lead to decreased demand
for goods.
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Figure 4.19 A Decrease in Demand for Labor
A decrease in demand for labor causes the labor demand curve to shift leftward.
A Shift in Demand for Goods
Notice the connection back and forth between households and firms. As firms reduce their
demand for labor services, less income flows to households. This reduction in income leads to
a reduction in the demand for goods and services, leading firms to reduce output and
employment even further. The interaction between income and spending on goods and
services can lead to much larger reductions in output and employment than the original shift
in demand in the original market (in this case, the housing market). This means that Figure
4.18 does not tell the whole story of goods markets. That figure shows the effects of interest
rates on the supply of goods but does not include the reduction in demand stemming from the
interaction of income and spending in the circular flow.Figure 4.20 completes the story by
adding the shift in demand.
Figure 4.20
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Higher interest rates lead to a leftward shift in supply, and lower income leads to a leftward
shift of demand, resulting in lower quantities for most goods and services. Higher interest
rates increase the cost of doing business. Lower income decreases the demand for goods and
services.
The following from 2008 story illustrates such a connection across markets.
How to Tell Business Is Cutting Back
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From fewer shoe shines to a slowdown in corporate art purchases, subtle bellwethers can help
take the temperature of business activity.
Nelson Villanova doesn’t need to watch the stock market indexes…or gross domestic product
to gauge the health of the economy. He just has to look down. If he sees scuffed shoes, then he
knows things are bad.
Villanova, general manager of Eddie’s Shoe Repair in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, has
seen business drop 25% to 30% since August. The 15-year-old company employs 40 people
across five locations in the sprawling train station, shining and repairing shoes and luggage.
But lately, selling $4 shines seems to be as hard as unloading mortgage-backed securities.
[…] [3]
Figure 4.21 “A Decrease in Demand for Shoeshines” shows the shoeshine market. Traders
working on Wall Street started purchasing fewer shoeshines. This was not because shoeshines
became more expensive. Rather, it was a shift in the demand for shoeshines because these
traders saw that their incomes were decreasing.
Figure 4.21 A Decrease in Demand for Shoeshines
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A decrease in income leads to a decrease in demand (a leftward shift) for shoeshines.
Trade Flows and a Shift in the Demand for Foreign Exchange
One of the excerpts we used to introduce this chapter touched on the effects of the crisis on
exports from China. We now broaden our discussion to include those effects as well. Looking
back at Figure 4.19 “A Decrease in Demand for Labor”, recall that part of household spending
goes toward the purchase of goods and services produced in other countries. A significant
fraction of imports to the United States come from China. China also sells goods and services
to Japan, Europe, and most of the world.
When demand from these economies slumps, as it did in 2008, exports from China also
decrease. Since exports are a part of overall spending, this leads firms in China to cut back
their production and employment. Thus the Chinese economy was also slowed down by the
effects of the financial crisis.
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The reduced demand for imports has another effect. Because the demand for foreign currency
is partly motivated by the desire to buy goods from that country, a decrease in the import of
Chinese goods to the United States and other countries leads to a decrease in demand for the
Chinese yuan. There is a leftward shift in the demand for that currency and thus a lower price
in dollars. (As with all comparative static exercises, this assumes that nothing else is changing
to offset these effects on the demand for the yuan.)
The current account balance is (roughly speaking) the difference between the value of
exports and imports of goods and services. A country has a current account surplus if the
value of exports of goods and services exceeds the value of its imports. A country has a current
account deficit if the value of imports of goods and services exceeds the value of its exports.
Looking at the United States and China, one sees very different behavior for the current
account. [4] In recent years, the United States has run a current account deficit of nearly 5
percent of its gross domestic product (GDP). China, in contrast, has run a current account
surplus of about 6.1 percent of its GDP since 2002.
The reduced demand for imports from China has an effect on the current account balance of
China. We would expect to see a reduction in the current account surplus of China due to the
reduction in economic activity of its trading partners.
You might also wonder how the persistent deficits of the United States are paid for. When a
country runs a current account deficit, it is borrowing from other countries. This is just like a
household that pays for consumption above its income by means of borrowing. The rules of
national income accounting tell us that the flows in and out of each sector must always be in
balance. If we look at the flows in and out of the foreign sector we see that
borrowing from abroad = imports − exports
or
lending to abroad = exports − imports.
Net exports (sometimes called the trade surplus) equal exports minus imports. So lending to
other countries equals net exports.
The circular flow of income tells us something powerful: whenever we import more than we
export, we must, on net, be borrowing from abroad. On reflection, this is not so surprising.
Other countries are giving us more goods and services than we are giving to them. This is not
done out of generosity; they do so because they expect to be repaid at some point in the future.
If we export more than we import, then this flow goes in the other direction, and we are
lending to abroad.
Both China and the United States trade with many other countries, so this pattern of trade
holds true bilaterally (that is, between them) as well. China has run systematic current
account surpluses with the United States, meaning that China is lending to the United States.
Those loans take many forms, with commentators highlighting Chinese purchases of US
government debt. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton alluded to this connection between the
two economies during a visit to China in early 2009.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday urged China to keep buying US debt as
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she wrapped up her first overseas trip, during which she agreed to work closely with
Beijing on the financial crisis.
[…]
By continuing to support American Treasury instruments the Chinese are recognizing
our interconnection… [5]
The Crisis of 2008: A Brief Summary
The crisis began with a reduction in the demand for houses and a consequent decrease in the
value of houses. This reduced the value of assets, particularly mortgage-backed securities, and
meant that the supply of credit in the economy shifted inward. The consequence was higher
interest rates and reduced credit. Since many firms in the economy borrow to finance
production, the increased interest rates increased their marginal costs of production. Supply
curves throughout the economy shifted inward, leading to lower output. Firms needed fewer
workers, so there was a reduction in employment.
The spread to other countries came through a couple of avenues. First, households and firms
in other countries were one source of credit to the US economy. When asset prices decreased,
the portfolios of foreign banks were also adversely affected. This led to higher interest rates
and lower output in those countries. In addition, as the US economy went into recession, it
purchased fewer imports from other countries. This led to lower production in those
countries.
Our description of the crisis is of necessity a simple one. We have neglected many details, and
we have not discussed how government policies also affected interest rates and the demand
for goods and services. Later chapters in the book provide more tools for understanding these
aspects of the crisis, so when we return to the topic in Chapter 15 “The Global Financial
Crisis”, we can provide a more complete analysis of the crisis.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Markets are linked because supply and demand in one market generally depend on
the outcomes in other markets. The circular flow of income illustrates some of these
connections across markets.
Although the crisis in 2008 may have started in the housing market, it did not end
there. Instead, the crisis impacted markets for labor, credit, and foreign exchange.
Checking Your Understanding
1. We have explained that increases in interest rates shift the supply of goods leftward,
and decreases in incomes shift the demand for goods leftward. Draw diagrams with both
shifts at once and show that the quantity definitely decreases, but the price may increase
or decrease.
2. Can you think of a good for which the demand curve might shift rightward when
incomes decrease?
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[1] There is a second, more abstract implication: we have to worry about whether all the
markets in the economy are in equilibrium at the same time. In our analyses, we have looked
at only one market at a time. But we now know that the outcome in one market (for example,
the real wage) can affect supply and demand in other markets (for example, the supply of
credit). In advanced studies in economics, we use complicated mathematics to see if there are
prices that are consistent with all the markets being in equilibrium at once. The bottom line is
good news: we can usually be confident that there is an equilibrium for all markets. But
because this is such an advanced area of economics, we do not worry about it further in this
book.
[2] We discuss such policies in detail when we return to the crisis in Chapter 15 “The Global
Financial Crisis”.
[3] John Tozzi, “How to Tell Business Is Cutting Back,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, October 21,
2008, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2008/sb20081020_372369.htm?c
han=top$+$news_top+news+index+-+temp_small+ business.
[4] This discussion draws on data from the International Monetary Fund. See Stephan
Danninger and Florence Jaumotte, “Divergence of Current Account Balances across Emerging
Economies,” World Economic Outlook, Chapter 6, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2008/02/pdf/c6 .
[5] “Keep Buying US Treasury Bills, Clinton Urges China,” Taipai Times, February 23, 2009,
accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/print/2009/02/23/2003436802.
4.5 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
The supply-and-demand framework is almost certainly the most powerful model in the
economist’s toolkit. Armed with an understanding of this framework, you can make sense of
much economic news, and you can make intelligent predictions about future changes in
prices.
A true understanding of this framework is more than just an ability to shift curves around,
however. It is an understanding of how markets and prices are one of the main ways in which
the world is interlinked. Markets are, quite simply, at the heart of economic life. Markets are
the means by which suppliers and demanders of goods and services can meet and exchange
their wares. Since exchange creates value—because it makes both buyers and sellers better
off—markets are the means by which our economy can prosper. Markets are the means by
which economic activity is coordinated in our economy, allowing us to specialize in what we
do best and to buy other goods and services.
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Economists regularly point to these features of markets, but this should not blind us to the
fact that markets can go wrong. There are many ways in which market outcomes may not be
the most desirable or efficient, as the global financial crisis revealed. In the remainder of this
book, we look in considerable detail at all the ways that markets can fail us as well as help us.
Key Links
International Monetary Fund
(IMF):www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2008/01/pdf/c3
IMF video on its response to the
crisis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0z6nWQfvuA&feature=channel_page
Federal Reserve Bank of San
Francisco:http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2008/el2008-21.html
New York University Stern blog on the financial
crisis:http://sternfinance.blogspot.com/search/label/overview/
EXERCISES
1. What would the impact be on the market demand curve for new homes if there were
an increase in the price of old homes?
2. Name two factors that cause market demand curves to shift outward.
3. Fill in the blanks in the following table. What can you say about the missing price
in the table?
TABLE 4.2 INDIVIDUAL AND MARKET DEMAND
Price
of Chocolate
Bar
Household 1’s
Demand
Household 2’s
Demand
Market
Demand
1 7 22
2 11 16
10 .5 3 3.5
.75 4 4.75
4. If the income levels of all households increase, what happens to the individual
demand curves? What happens to market demand?
5. Suppose the price of coffee increases. Household 1 always eats a chocolate bar while
drinking coffee. What will happen to Household 1’s demand for chocolate bars when
the price of coffee increases? Household 2 has either coffee or a chocolate bar for
dessert. What happens to Household 2’s demand for chocolate bars when the price of
coffee increases? What happens to the market demand for chocolate bars when the
price of coffee increases?
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6. (Advanced) In Figure 4.3 “The Market Supply of Houses” we showed the market
supply curve for new houses. Suppose that a change in government regulations makes
it easier for people to become qualified electricians. What will happen to the supply
curve for houses?
7. We said that the equilibrium price and quantity in a market is always positive. More
precisely, this is true as long as the vertical intercept of the demand curve is bigger
than the vertical intercept of the supply curve. If this is not the case, then the most
that any buyer is willing to pay is less than the least any seller is willing to accept.
Draw a version of Figure 4.5 “Market Equilibrium” to illustrate this possibility. How
much trade do you expect in this market?
8. Suppose that households become worried about losing their jobs and decide to save
more. What happens in the credit market? Do you expect interest rates to increase or
decrease?
9. When interest rates decrease, firms find it cheaper to borrow. What do you think
happens to the demand for labor? What happens to the real wage?
10. What happens to the value of the US dollar if
a) foreign investors decide they want to buy more US assets.
b) there is a recession in other countries that buy goods produced in the United
States.
11. What do you think will be the effect on the markets for used homes and apartments if
there is a reduction in expected capital gains from owning a new home? The shift in
the supply curve came from an increase in the cost of credit. Where might the
increase in the cost of credit come from?
12. Think about your hometown as an economy. What does it import (i.e., what goods
and services does it purchase from outside the town)? What does it export (i.e., what
goods and services are produced in the town and sold outside it)? What about the
street you live on—what are its imports and exports?
13. Using supply and demand, explain how an increase in Chinese demand for Australian
butter might be one of the factors causing the Australian dollar to appreciate. How
might this affect the labor markets in Australia?
14. If oil prices increase, what will this do to the demand for apartments and houses in
warm climates? What will happen to housing prices in cold climates? Use supply and
demand to illustrate.
Economics Detective
1. Find three news articles that discuss the financial crisis. Which markets are discussed
in these articles? Can you use a supply-and-demand picture to help you make sense of
anything that is discussed in the articles you find?
2. Find one example of another country where there was a major decrease in housing
prices, as in the United States and England. Find another country where housing
prices did not seem to be affected.
Spreadsheet Exercise
1. Using a spreadsheet, construct a version of Table 4.1 “Market Equilibrium: An
Example” assuming that
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market demand = 50 − 0.005 × price.
Fill in all the prices (in thousands) from 1,000 to 100,000. What is the equilibrium
price and quantity in the market? How would you explain the difference between
this equilibrium and the one displayed in Table 4.1 “Market Equilibrium: An
Example”?
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Chapter 5
Globalization and Competitiveness
Five Stories
We begin this chapter with five stories from around the world.
The United Kingdom
The following is a BBC report on Polish immigration to the United Kingdom.
So You’re Polish and Want a Job…
If there was ever any doubt that the UK is in the grips of an extraordinary revolution, then
hunt out the migrant worker recruitment fairs that are starting to spring up.
Last month, thousands of young Polish workers turned up at the third recruitment fair hosted
by Polish Express, the London-based newspaper for the diaspora, […]
As they queued to enter the hall that was filled to its legal safety capacity, they scribbled away
at resumes, going over their pitch time and time again.
Most were in their mid-20s. Some had only recently arrived, having stuffed a few belongings
into a backpack, bought a one-way no-frills airline ticket. […]
[A] willingness to do jobs that employers say British workers don’t want, was at the heart of
the boom, said Bob Owen of Polcat, a Doncaster safety training firm targeting the Polish
employees market.
“I must admit it, I have never seen a workforce like the Poles,” said Mr Owen. “They want to
work, you can see it in their eyes. But here’s the thing—they’re not in competition with the
British workforce—they are finding ways of fulfilling a need that just wasn’t being met and
that’s why they are being welcomed.”
[…] [1]
United Arab Emirates
Figure 5.1 is a screenshot from a Dubai government website that promotes business and
tourism in Dubai. [2] It details many different ways in which Dubai is a desirable place for
businesses to locate. For example, the website contains the following:
Figure 5.1
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Pro-Business Environment
Dubai offers incoming business all the advantages of a highly developed economy. Its
infrastructure and services match the highest international standards, facilitating efficiency,
quality, and service. Among the benefits are:
Free enterprise system.
Highly developed transport infrastructure.
State-of-the-art telecommunications.
Sophisticated financial and services sector.
Top international exhibition and conference venue.
High quality office and residential accommodation.
Reliable power, utilities, etc.
First class hotels, hospitals, schools, and shops.
Cosmopolitan lifestyle.
The website goes on to talk about benefits such as the absence of corporate or income taxes,
the absence of trade barriers, competitive labor and energy costs, and so on.
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Vietnam
The following is an extract from the Taipei Times, April 9, 2007.
Compal Eyes Vietnam for Factory
Compal Electronics Inc, the world’s second-largest laptop contract computer maker, is
considering building a new factory in Vietnam.
Compal could join the growing number of Taiwanese electronic companies investing in
Vietnam—such as component maker Hon Hai Precision Industry Co—in pursuit of more cost-
effective manufacturing sites outside China.
[…]
Compal forecast last month that its shipments of notebook computers would expand around
38 percent to 20 million units this year, from 14.5 million units last year. The company
currently makes 24 million computers a year at its factories in Kunshan, China.
Compal, which supplies computers to Dell Inc and other big brands, could lack the capacity to
match customers’ demand next year if its shipments increase any faster,…
Lower wages and better preferential tax breaks promised by the Vietnamese government
could be prime factors for choosing Vietnam, Compal chairman Rock Hsu said earlier this
year.
[…] [3]
Niger
In Niger, West Africa, the World Bank is funding a $300 million project to improve education:
“The Basic Education Project for Niger’s objectives are: (i) to increase enrollment and
completion in basic education programs and (ii) to improve management at all levels by
improving the use of existing resources, focusing on rural areas to achieve greater equity and
poverty reduction in the medium to long term.” [4] The World Bank website explains that the
goals of the project are to improve access to primary education (including adult literacy),
improve the quality of primary and secondary education, and improve the management
capability of the Ministry of Education.
United States
President Obama recently established the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness,
which is charged, among other things, with reporting “directly to the President on the design,
implementation, and evaluation of policies to promote the growth of the American economy,
enhance the skills and education of Americans, maintain a stable and sound financial and
banking system, create stable jobs for American workers, and improve the long term
prosperity and competitiveness of the American people.” [5] In his concern with
competitiveness, President Obama follows directly in the footsteps of President George W.
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Bush, who, in 2006, established the American Competitiveness Initiative to Encourage
American Innovation and Strengthen Our Nation’s Ability to Compete in the Global
Economy. [6]
At first reading, these five stories seem to have little to do with each other. There is no obvious
connection between the actions of the World Bank in Niger and Taiwanese computer
manufacturers in Vietnam or between the marketing of Dubai and the arrival of Polish
migrants in the United Kingdom. Yet they are indeed all connected. Think for a moment about
the consequences of the following:
An influx of workers to the United Kingdom
A superior business environment in Dubai
Improved education in Niger
A new factory opening in Vietnam
An improved banking system in the United States
Of course, each story has many different implications. But they have something fundamental
in common: every single one of them will increase the real gross domestic product (real GDP)
of the country in question. They all therefore shed light on one of the most fundamental
questions in macroeconomics:
What determines a country’s real GDP?
As we tackle this question, we will see that it is indeed connected to our stories of Dubai, the
United Kingdom, Niger, Vietnam, and the United States.
Our stories have something else in common as well. In each case, they concern not only the
country in isolation but also how it interacts with the rest of the world. The funds for Niger’s
education program are coming from other countries (via the World Bank). The US policy is
designed to ensure that America is “leading the global competition that will determine our
success in the 21st century.” [7] Dubai is trying to attract investment from other countries.
The workers in the United Kingdom are coming from Poland. The factory in Vietnam is being
built so that a Taiwanese company can supply other manufacturers throughout the world.
Road Map
Real GDP is the broadest measure that we have of the amount of economic activity in an
economy. In this chapter, we investigate the supply of real GDP in an economy. Firms in an
economy create goods and services by transforming inputs into outputs. For example, think
about the manufacture of a pizza. It begins with a recipe—a set of instructions. A chef
following this recipe might require 30 minutes of labor time to make the dough and assemble
the toppings and then might need 15 minutes use of a pizza oven to cook the pizza. The inputs
here are as follows: the pizza oven, the labor time, the skills of the chef, and the recipe. Given
15 minutes of capital time, 30 minutes of labor time, a skilled chef, and the instructions, we
can make one pizza.
In macroeconomics, we work with the analogous idea that explains how the total production
in an economy depends on the available inputs. We first explain the relationship between the
available inputs in the economy and the amount of real GDP that the economy can produce.
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Then we look at all the individual inputs in turn. If we can explain what determines the
amount of each input in an economy and if we know the link from inputs to real GDP, then we
can determine the level of real GDP. Finally, we look at a technique that allows us to quantify
the relationship between inputs and output. Specifically, we look at how increases in different
inputs translate into increases in overall GDP. Using this technique, we can see which inputs
are particularly important.
[1] See Dominic Casiani, “So You’re Polish and You Want a Job,” BBC News, September 25,
2006, accessed June 28, 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5376602.stm.
[2] See “Dubai for Business,” Government of Dubai: Department of Tourism and Commerce
Marketing, accessed July 27, 2011, http://www.dubaitourism.ae/definitely-dubai/dubai-
business.
[3] See “Compal Eyes Vietnam for Factory, Taipei Times, April 9, 2007, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/print/2007/04/09/2003355949. We have
corrected a minor grammatical error in the article.
[4] For more details, see World Bank, “Basic Education Project” World Bank, accessed June
28, 2011, http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?page
PK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=40941&menuPK=228424&Projectid=P061209.
[5] See “President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness: About the Council,” accessed July
27, 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/advisory-boards/jobs-council/about.
[6] George W. Bush, “State of the Union: American Competitiveness Initiative,” White House
Office of Communications, January 31, 2006, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/competitiveness/sou-competitiveness .
[7] “Obama Presses for an Economy in ‘Overdrive’: Will Jobs Soon Follow?,” PBS NewsHour,
January 21, 2011, accessed August 22, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-
june11/obamabusiness_01-21.html.
5.1 The Production of Real GDP
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What determines the production capabilities of an economy?
2. What is the marginal product of an input?
3. How is competitiveness related to the aggregate production function?
Economists analyze production in an economy by analogy to the production of output by a
firm. Just as a firm takes inputs and transforms them into output, so also does the economy as
a whole. We summarize the production capabilities of an economy with an
aggregate production function.
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/advisory-boards/jobs-council/about
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The Aggregate Production Function
Toolkit: Section 16.15 “The Aggregate Production Function”
The aggregate production function describes how aggregate output
(real gross domestic product [real GDP]) in an economy depends on available inputs.
The most important inputs are as follows:
Physical capital: machines, production facilities, and so forth used in production
Labor: the number of hours that are worked in the entire economy
Human capital: the skills and education embodied in the work force of the economy
Knowledge: the blueprints that describe the production process
Natural resources: oil, coal, and other mineral deposits; agricultural and forest lands; and
other resources
Social infrastructure: the general business climate, the legal environment, and any
relevant features of the culture
Output increases whenever there is an increase in one of these inputs, all else being the same.
Physical capital refers to goods—such as factory buildings, machinery, and 18-wheel
trucks—that have two essential features. First, capital goods are used in the production of
other goods. The production of physical capital does not increase our well-being in and of
itself. It allows us to produce more goods in the future, which permits us to enjoy more
consumption at some future date. Second, capital goods are long lasting, which means we
accumulate a capital stock over time. Capital goods are thus distinct from intermediate goods,
which are fully used up in the production process.
The capital stock of an economy is the total amount of physical capital in the economy. As
well as factories and machines, the capital stock includes physical infrastructure—road
networks, airports, telecommunications networks, and the like. These are capital goods that
are available for multiple firms to use. Sometimes these goods are supplied by governments
(roads, for example); sometimes they are provided by private firms (cellular telephone
networks are an example). For brevity, we often simply refer to “capital” rather than “physical
capital.” When you see the word capital appearing on its own in this book you should always
understand it to mean physical capital.
Labor hours are the total number of hours worked in an economy. This depends on the size
of the workforce and on how many hours are worked by each individual. [1]
Human capital is the term that economists use for the skills and training of an economy’s
workforce. It includes both formal education and on-the-job training. It likewise includes
technical skills, such as those of a plumber, an electrician, or a software designer, and
managerial skills, such as leadership and people management.
Knowledge is the information that is contained in books, software, or blueprints. It
encompasses basic mathematics, such as calculus and the Pythagorean theorem, as well as
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more specific pieces of knowledge, such as the map of the human genome, the formula for
Coca-Cola, or the instructions for building a space shuttle.
Natural resources include land; oil and coal reserves; and other valuable resources, such as
precious metals.
Social infrastructure refers to the legal, political, social, and cultural frameworks that exist
in an economy. An economy with good social infrastructure is relatively free of corruption, has
a functional and reliable legal system, and so on. Also included in social infrastructure are any
relevant cultural variables. For example, it is sometimes argued that some societies are—for
whatever reason—more entrepreneurial than others. As another example, the number of
different languages that are spoken in a country influences GDP.
We show the production function schematically in Figure 5.2 “The Aggregate Production
Function”.
Figure 5.2 The Aggregate Production Function
The aggregate production function combines an economy’s physical capital stock, labor
hours, human capital, knowledge, natural resources, and social infrastructure to produce
output (real GDP).
The idea of the production function is simple: if we put more in, we get more out.
With more physical capital, we can produce more output. If you want to dig a foundation
for a house, you will be more productive with a backhoe than a shovel; if you want to
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deliver documents from Chicago to St. Louis, you will be more productive using a truck
than a bicycle.
With more labor hours, we can produce more output. If there are more workers in an
economy, or if they work longer hours, the economy will produce more real GDP.
With more education and skills, we can produce more output. Skilled workers can produce
more from an hour’s work than unskilled workers can produce.
With more knowledge, we can produce more output. Inventions and innovations make an
economy more productive.
With more natural resources, we can produce more output. For example, if an economy
discovers additional oil reserves, it can produce more with given labor and capital than can
economies without such resources. Of course, this input more often decreases rather than
increases over time, as economies use up their existing stocks of natural resources.
With better institutions, we can produce more output. Economies in which it is easy to
establish businesses, where corruption is limited, and where the laws are reliable get more
out of their workers and capital.
We call the extra output that we get from one more unit of an input, holding all other inputs
fixed, the marginal product of that input. For example, the extra output we obtain from one
more unit of capital is the marginal product of capital, the extra output we get from one
more unit of labor is the marginal product of labor, and so on.
Physical capital and labor hours are relatively straightforward to understand and measure. To
measure labor hours, we simply count the number of workers and the number of hours
worked by an average worker. Output increases if we have more workers or if they work
longer hours. For simplicity, we imagine that all workers are identical. Aggregate differences
in the type and the quality of labor are captured in our human capital variable. For physical
capital, we similarly imagine that there are a number of identical machines (pizza ovens).
Then, just as we measure labor as the number of worker hours, so also we could measure
capital by the total number of machine hours. [2] We can produce more output by having
more machines or by using each machine more intensively.
The other inputs that we listed—human capital, knowledge, social infrastructure, and natural
resources—are trickier to define and much harder to quantify. Economists have used
measures of educational attainment (e.g., the fraction of the population that completes high
school) to compare human capital across countries. [3] There are likewise some data that
provide some indication of knowledge and social infrastructure—such as spending on research
and development (R&D) and survey measures of perceived corruption.
The measurement of natural resources is problematic for different reasons. Land is evidently
an input to production: factories must be put somewhere, and agriculture requires fields and
orchards, so the value of land can be measured in principle. But what about reserves of oil or
underground stocks of coal, uranium, or gold? First, such reserves or stocks contribute to real
GDP only if they are extracted from the earth. An untapped oil field is part of a nation’s wealth
but makes no contribution to current production. Second, it is very hard to measure such
stocks, even in principle. For example, the amount of available oil reserves in an economy
depends on mining and drilling technologies. Oil that could not have been extracted two
decades ago is now available; it is likely that future advances in drilling techniques will further
increase available reserves in the economy.
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We simply accept that, as a practical matter, we cannot directly measure an economy’s
knowledge, social infrastructure, and natural resources. As we see later in this chapter,
however, there is a technique for indirectly measuring the combined influence of these inputs.
One thing might strike you as odd. Our description of production does not include as inputs
the raw materials that go into production. The production process for a typical firm takes raw
materials and transforms them into something more valuable. For example, a pizza restaurant
buys flour, tomatoes, pepperoni, electricity, and so on, and transforms them into pizzas. The
aggregate production function measures not the total value of these pizzas but the extra
value that is added through the process of production. This equals the value of the
pizzas minus the value of the raw materials. We take this approach to avoid double counting
and be consistent with the way real GDP is actually measured. [4]
A Numerical Example of a Production Function
Table 5.1 “A Numerical Example of a Production Function” gives a numerical example of a
production function. The first column lists the amount of output that can be produced from
the inputs listed in the following columns.
Table 5.1 A Numerical Example of a Production Function
Row Output Capital Labor Other
Inputs
Increasing
Capital
A 100 1 1 100
B 126 2 1 100
C 144 3 1 100
D 159 4 1 100
Increasing Labor
E 100 1 1 100
F 159 1 2 100
G 208 1 3 100
H 252 1 4 100
Increasing Other
Inputs
I 100 1 1 100
J 110 1 1 110
K 120 1 1 120
L 130 1 1 130
If you compare row A and row B of Table 5.1 “A Numerical Example of a Production
Function”, you can see that an increase in capital (from 1 unit to 2 units) leads to an increase
in output (from 100 units to 126 units). Notice that, in these two rows, all other inputs are
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unchanged. Going from row B to row C, capital increases by another unit, and output
increases from 126 to 144. And going from row C to row D, capital increases from 3 to 4 and
output increases from 144 to 159. We see that increases in the amount of capital lead to
increases in output. In other words, the marginal product of capital is positive.
Similarly, if you compare rows E–H of Table 5.1 “A Numerical Example of a Production
Function”, you can see that the marginal product of labor is positive. As labor increases from 1
to 4 units, and we hold all other inputs fixed, output increases from 100 to 252 units. Finally,
rows I to L show that increases in other inputs, holding fixed the amount of capital and labor,
likewise leads to an increase in output.
Figure 5.3 “A Graphical Illustration of the Aggregate Production Function” illustrates the
production function from Table 5.1 “A Numerical Example of a Production Function”. Part (a)
shows what happens when we increase capital, holding all other inputs fixed. That is, it
illustrates rows A–D of Table 5.1 “A Numerical Example of a Production Function”. Part (b)
shows what happens when we increase labor, holding all other inputs fixed. That is, it
illustrates rows E–H of Table 5.1 “A Numerical Example of a Production Function”.
Figure 5.3 A Graphical Illustration of the Aggregate Production Function
The aggregate production function shows how the amount of output depends on different
inputs. Increases in the amount of physical capital (a) or the number of labor hours (b)—all
else being the same—lead to increases in output.
Diminishing Marginal Product
You may have noticed another feature of the production function from Figure 5.3 “A
Graphical Illustration of the Aggregate Production Function” and Table 5.1 “A Numerical
Example of a Production Function”. Look at what happens as the amount of capital
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increases. Output increases, as we already noted—but by smaller and smaller amounts.
Going from 1 unit of capital to 2 yields 26 extra units of output (= 126 − 100). Going from 2
to 3 units of capital yields 18 extra units of output (= 144 − 126). And going from 3 to 4 yields
15 extra units of output (= 159 − 144). The same is true of labor: each additional unit of labor
yields less and less additional output. Graphically, we can see that the production function
becomes more and more flat as we increase either capital or labor. Economists say that the
production function we have drawn exhibits diminishing marginal product.
The more physical capital we have, the less additional output we obtain from additional
physical capital. As we have more and more capital, other things being equal, additions to
our capital stock contribute less and less to output. Economists call this idea
diminishing marginal product of capital.
The more labor we have, the less additional output we obtain from additional
labor.Analogously, this is called diminishing marginal product of labor. As we have
more and more labor, we find that additions to our workforce contribute less and less to
output.
Diminishing marginal products are a plausible feature for our production function. They are
easiest to understand at the level of an individual firm. Suppose you are gradually
introducing new state-of-the-art computers into a business. To start, you would want to give
these new machines to the people who could get the most benefit from them—perhaps the
scientists and engineers who are working in R&D. Then you might want to give computers to
those working on production and logistics. These people would see a smaller increase in
productivity. After that, you might give them to those working in the accounting department,
who would see a still smaller increase in productivity. Only after those people have been
equipped with new computers would you want to start supplying secretarial and
administrative staff. And you might save the chief executive officer (CEO) until last.
The best order in which to supply people would, of course, depend on the business. The
important point is that you should at all times give computers to those who would benefit
from them the most in terms of increased productivity. As the technology penetrates the
business, there is less and less additional gain from each new computer.
Diminishing marginal product of labor is also plausible. As firms hire more and more labor—
holding fixed the amount of capital and other inputs—we expect that each hour of work will
yield less in terms of output. Think of a production process—say, the manufacture of pizzas.
Imagine that we have a fixed capital stock (a restaurant with a fixed number of pizza ovens).
If we have only a few workers, then we get a lot of extra pizza from a little bit of extra work.
As we increase the number of workers, however, we start to find that they begin to get in each
others’ way. Moreover, we realize that the amount of pizza we can produce is also limited by
the number of pizza ovens we have. Both of these mean that as we increase the hours
worked, we should expect to see each additional hour contributing less and less in terms of
additional output.
In contrast to capital and labor, we do not necessarily assume that there are diminishing
returns to human capital, knowledge, natural resources, or social infrastructure. One reason
is that we do not have a natural or obvious measure for human capital or technology,
whereas we do for labor and capital (hours of work and capital usage).
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Globalization and Competitiveness: A First Look
Over the last several decades, a host of technological developments has reduced the cost of
moving both physical things and intangible information around the world. The lettuce on a
sandwich sold in London may well have been flown in from Kenya. A banker in Zurich can
transfer funds to a bank in Pretoria with a click of a mouse. People routinely travel to foreign
countries for vacation or work. A lawyer in New York can provide advice to a client in Beijing
without leaving her office. These are examples of globalization—the increasing ability of
goods, capital, labor, and information to flow among countries.
One consequence of globalization is that firms in different countries compete with each other
to a much greater degree than in the past. In the 1920s and 1930s, the automobiles produced
by Ford Motor Company were almost exclusively sold in the United States, while those
produced by Daimler-Benz were sold in Europe. Today, Ford and DaimlerChrysler (formed
after the merger of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz in 1998) compete directly for customers in
both Europe and the United States—and, of course, they also compete with Japanese
manufacturers, Korean manufacturers, and others.
Competition between firms is a familiar idea. Key to this idea of competition is that one firm
typically gains at the expense of another. If you buy a hamburger from Burger King instead of
McDonald’s, then Burger King is gaining at McDonald’s expense: it is getting the dollars that
would instead have gone to McDonald’s. The more successful firm will typically see its
production, revenues, and profits all growing.
It is tempting to think that, in a globalized world, nations compete in much the same way
that firms compete—to think that one nation’s success must come at another’s expense. Such
a view is superficially appealing but incorrect. Suppose, for example, that South Korea
becomes better at producing computers. What does this imply for the United States? It does
make life harder for US computer manufacturers like Dell Inc. But, at the same time, it
means that there is more real income being generated in South Korea, some of which will be
spent on US goods. It also means that the cheaper and/or better computers produced in
South Korea will be available for US consumers and producers. In fact, we expect growth in
South Korea to be beneficial for the United States. We should welcome the success of other
countries, not worry about it.
What is the difference between our McDonald’s-Burger King example and our computer
example? If lots of people switched to McDonald’s from Burger King, then McDonald’s would
become less profitable. It would, in the end, become a smaller company: it would lay off
workers, close restaurants, and so on. A company that is unable to compete at all will
eventually go bankrupt. But if South Korea becomes better at making computers, the United
States doesn’t go bankrupt or even become a significantly smaller economy. It has the same
resources (labor, capital, human capital, and technology) as before. Even if Dell closes
factories and lays off workers, those workers will then be available for other firms in the
economy to hire instead. Other areas of the economy will expand even as Dell contracts.
In that case, do countries compete at all? And if so, then how? The Dubai government’s
website that we showed at the beginning of this chapter provides a clue. The website sings
the praises of the Emirate as a place for international firms to establish businesses. Dubai is
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trying to entice firms to set up operations there: in economic language, it wants to attract
capital and skilled labor. Dubai is not alone. Many countries engage in similar advertising to
attract business. And it is not only countries: regions, such as US states or even cities,
deliberately enact policies to influence business location.
Dubai is trying to gain more resources to put into its aggregate production function. If Dubai
can attract more capital and skilled labor, then it can produce more output. If it is successful,
the extra physical and human capital will lead to Dubai becoming a more prosperous
economy.
In the era of globalization, inputs can move from country to country. Labor can move from
Poland to the United Kingdom or from Mexico to the United States, for example. Capital can
also move. At the beginning of this chapter, we quoted from an article explaining that a
Taiwanese manufacturer was planning to open a factory in Vietnam, drawn by low wages and
preferential tax treatment. This, then, is the sense in which countries compete with each
other—they compete to attract inputs, particularly capital. Competitiveness refers to the
ability of an economy to attract physical capital.
We have more to say about this later. But we should clear up one common misconception
from the beginning. Competing for capital does not mean “competing for jobs.” People
worried about globalization often think that if a Taiwanese factory opens a factory in
Vietnam instead of at home, there will be higher unemployment in Taiwan. But the number
of jobs—and, more generally, the level of employment and unemployment—in an economy
does not depend on the amount of available capital. [5] This does not mean that factory
closures are benign. They can be very bad news for the individual workers who are laid off
and must seek other jobs. And movements of capital across borders can—as we explain
later—have implications for the quality of available jobs and the wages that they pay. But
they do not determine the number of jobs available.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The production capabilities of an economy are described by the aggregate production
function, characterizing how the factors of production, such as capital, labor, and
technology, are combined to produce real GDP.
In the aggregate production function, the marginal product is the extra amount of
real GDP obtained by adding an extra unit of an input.
One measure of competitiveness is the ability of an economy to attract inputs for the
production function, particularly capital.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Earlier, we observed that our news stories were about the following:
Improved education in Niger
A new factory opening in Vietnam
A superior business environment in Dubai
An influx of workers to the United Kingdom
A better banking system in the United States
Which input to the production function is being increased in each case?
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2. Building on part (b) of Figure 5.3 “A Graphical Illustration of the Aggregate
Production Function”, draw an aggregate production function that does not exhibit
diminishing marginal product of labor.
[1] We use the term workforce rather than labor force deliberately because the term labor
force has a precise definition—those who are unemployed as well as those who are working.
We want to include only those who are working because they are the ones supplying the labor
hours that go into the production function. Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy” discusses
this distinction in more detail.
[2] If this were literally true, we could measure capital stock by simply counting the number
of machines in an economy. In reality, however, the measurement of capital stock is trickier.
Researchers must add together the value of all the different pieces of capital in an economy.
In practice, capital stock is usually measured indirectly by looking at the flow of additions to
capital stock.
[3] We use an index of human capital in Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty”.
[4] Reserves of natural resources are not counted as raw materials. The output of the mining
sector is the value of the resources that have been extracted from the earth.
[5] Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy” and Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed” explain
what determines these variables.
5.2 Labor in the Aggregate Production Function
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What determines the amount of labor in the aggregate production function?
2. What determines the patterns of labor migration?
3. Why do real wages differ across countries?
The aggregate production function tells us how much output we get from the inputs that we
have available. Our next task is to explain how much of each input goes into this production
function. When we have done this, we will have explained the level of real gross domestic
product (real GDP). We begin with labor because it is the most familiar—almost everyone has
had the experience of selling labor services.
The Labor Market
Figure 5.4 “Equilibrium in the Labor Market” shows a diagram for the labor market. In this
picture, we draw the supply of labor by households and the demand for labor by firms. The
price on the vertical axis is the real wage. The real wage is just the nominal wage (the wage
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in dollars) divided by the price level. It tells us the amount that you can consume (measured
as the number of units of real GDP that you get) if you sell one hour of your time.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market” and Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
When we adjust the nominal wage in this way, we are “correcting for inflation.” The toolkit
gives more information. You can also review the labor market in the toolkit.
Figure 5.4 Equilibrium in the Labor Market
Equilibrium in the labor market occurs where the number of hours of labor supplied by
households equals the number of hours of labor demanded by firms.
The upward-sloping labor supply curve comes from both an increase in hours worked by
each employed worker and an increase in the number of employed workers. [1] The
downward-sloping labor demand curve comes from the decision rule of firms: each firm
purchases additional hours of labor up to the point where the extra output that it obtains
from that labor equals the cost of that labor. The extra output that can be produced from one
more hour of work is—by definition—the marginal product of labor, and the cost of labor,
measured in terms of output, is the real wage. Therefore firms hire labor up to the point where
the marginal product of labor equals the real wage.
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The marginal product of labor also depends on the other inputs available in an economy. An
economy with more physical or human capital, for example, is one in which workers will be
more productive. Increases in other inputs shift the labor demand curve rightward.
The point where the labor supply and labor demand curves meet is the point of equilibrium in
the labor market. At the equilibrium real wage, the number of hours that workers want to
work exactly matches the number of hours that firms wish to use. Figure 5.4 “Equilibrium in
the Labor Market” shows that equilibrium in the labor market tells us two things: the real
wage in the economy and how many hours of work go into the aggregate production function.
The Mobility of Labor
In November 2004, the median hourly wage in Florida was $12.50. In Washington State, it
was $16.07. On average, in other words, wages were almost 30 percent higher in the
Northwest compared to the Southeast. To take a more specific example, the median wage for
health-care support occupations (dental assistants, pharmacy aides, hospital orderlies, etc.)
was $8.14 in Mississippi and $12.81 in Massachusetts. Dental assistants who moved from
Baton Rouge to Boston could expect to see about a 50 percent increase in their hourly
wage. [2]
People in the United States are free to move from state to state, and many people do indeed
move from one state to another every year. People move for many reasons: to go to college,
join a girlfriend or boyfriend, or move to the place where they have always dreamed of living
(such as New York; Los Angeles; or Burr Ridge, Illinois). People also move to take up new
jobs, and one of the things that induces them to take one job rather than another is the wage
that it pays. Different wages in different places therefore affect the patterns of migration
across the United States.
Figure 5.5 “Labor Markets in Florida and Washington State” shows the labor markets in
Florida and Washington State for November 2004. The cost of living was different in those
two states but, to keep our story simple, we ignore these differences. That is, we assume that
there is no difference in the price level in the two states. If we set 2004 as the base year,
the price level is 1. This means that the real wage is the same as the nominal wage. A more
careful analysis would correct for differences in state taxes and the cost of living.
Figure 5.5 Labor Markets in Florida and Washington State
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These diagrams show the labor markets in (a) Florida and (b) Washington State. Real
wages are higher in Washington State than in Florida.
Part (a) of Figure 5.5 “Labor Markets in Florida and Washington State” shows the labor
market in Florida. The equilibrium wage is $12.50, and the equilibrium level of employment is
1,200 million hours. This is roughly calibrated to the actual experience in Florida, where total
employment in 2004 was just under 7.5 million individuals. Part (b) of Figure 5.5 “Labor
Markets in Florida and Washington State” shows Washington State, where the equilibrium
wage is $16.07, and employment is 400 million hours.
We expect that the higher wages in Washington State would attract people to move from
Florida to Washington State. Workers would migrate from Florida to Washington State,
causing the labor supply curve to shift leftward in Florida and rightward in Washington State.
As a consequence, wages would increase in Florida and decrease in Washington State. Figure
5.6 “Migration from Florida to Washington State” shows what would happen if the only thing
people cared about was wages: migration would stop only when wages were equal in both
states. Employment would be lower in Florida and higher in Washington State. (The exact
number of people who moved and the new equilibrium wage would depend on the slopes of
the supply and demand curves in both labor markets.)
Figure 5.6 Migration from Florida to Washington State
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Workers move from Florida to Washington State in search of higher wages. Labor supply
decreases in Florida and increases in Washington State.
If wages were the only factor affecting people’s decisions, migration would completely
equalize real wages across the different state economies. In fact, we do not expect wages to
become exactly equal in Florida, Washington State, and the other 48 states of the Union.
Differences in both state taxes and the cost of living in different states and cities lead to
persistent differences in wages. Some places are less attractive to live than others, so people
will need to be paid more to induce them to live there. Our example nevertheless illustrates a
key economic principle: people respond to incentives. Individual decisions about where to live
respond to differences in real wages. Labor tends to migrate to where it can earn the highest
return.
International Migration
People migrate between different US states because of wage differences. In China and other
developing economies, many workers migrate from rural areas to urban areas, again in search
of better wages. The same forces operate across international borders. Workers seek to
emigrate from countries where their wages are low and move to countries that pay higher
wages. Sometimes, this movement is actively encouraged. Some countries attract immigrant
workers—particularly rich economies that want to attract relatively unskilled workers to
perform low-paying and unattractive jobs.
However, there are many more barriers to movement among countries compared to
movement within countries. Some are legal barriers. Most countries strictly limit the
immigration that they permit. In the United States, a physical barrier has been constructed
along some of the US-Mexican border to prevent illegal immigration from Mexico to the
United States. Some countries also make emigration very difficult.
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Even when legal impediments to migration are absent, there are cultural and language
barriers. European Union citizens are legally free to live and work anywhere in the countries
of the Union, and we saw at the beginning of this chapter that many young Polish workers
take advantage of this by moving to the United Kingdom in search of work. But such examples
notwithstanding, most European workers remain in the country of their birth. Migration from
Portugal to Finland is very limited, for example, despite the higher wages paid in Finland. A
Portuguese worker who wants to move to Finland must learn to cope with a completely
different language and culture, not to mention a much colder climate.
To summarize, while we do see some movement of labor across national borders, people
remain, for the most part, in the country in which they were born. When we are analyzing
national economies, the main determinant of labor hours is, in the end, the number of people
in the economy and the number of hours that they choose to work. International migration
plays a limited role.
We can also turn this argument on its head. We observe huge differences in real wages in
different economies. If people were truly able and willing to migrate across economies, we
would expect most of those differences to disappear. So we can conclude that there must be
substantial barriers to migration.
Population Growth and Other Demographic Changes
Over long periods of time, the amount of labor in the production function is affected by
changes in population and other demographic changes. As a country’s population increases, it
has more workers to “plug in” to the aggregate production function. Changes in the age
structure of the population also have an effect. Much of the developed world has an aging
population, meaning that the fraction of the population that is working is decreasing. [3]
Changes in social norms can also affect the amount of labor that goes into the production
function. For example, child labor is now uncommon, whereas a century ago it was much
more usual. Another example is the increase in women’s participation in the labor force over
the last half century, both in the United States and other countries. Public health matters as
well. In some countries of the world, particularly in Africa, the HIV/AIDS crisis is having
devastating effects. Quite apart from the human misery that the disease causes, the epidemic
means that there is less labor available. The problem is particularly acute because working-
age individuals are disproportionately affected.
In an introductory economics textbook such as this one, we do not seek to explain such social
changes. To be sure, these changes are studied by economists, as well as by sociologists and
other researchers. But here we investigate the effects rather than the causes of such social
changes.
Explaining International Differences in the Real Wage
Real wages differ markedly across countries: the typical worker in Australia is paid much
more than the typical worker in Bolivia, for example. Suppose that we compare two countries,
and we find that real wages are higher in one country (country A) than in the other (country
B). This tells us that the marginal product of labor is higher in country A than in country B.
There are two basic reasons why this might be true:
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1. Hours worked are fewer in country A than in country B.
2. Other inputs are larger in country A than in country B.
Figure 5.7 “Why Real Wages May Be Different in Different Countries” illustrates these
possibilities. Part (a) compares two countries that are identical except that less labor is
supplied to the market in country A. In country A, the real wage is higher, and the equilibrium
number of hours is lower. In part (b), the two countries have identical labor supplies, but one
or more of the other inputs (physical capital, human capital, knowledge, social infrastructure,
or natural resources) is higher in country A. This means that the labor demand curve in
country A is further to the right, so the real wage is higher, and the equilibrium number of
hours is also higher.
Figure 5.7 Why Real Wages May Be Different in Different Countries
Real wages are higher in country A than in country B either because of lower labor supply in
country A (a) or greater labor demand in country A (b).
The real wage is an indicator of societal welfare because it tells us about the living standards
of the typical worker. From the perspective of workers, increases in other inputs—such as
capital stock or an economy’s human capital—are desirable because they increase the
marginal product of labor and hence the real wage.
Thus, when the World Bank helps to fund education in Niger, it is helping to increase GDP by
increasing the amount of human capital in the production function. Furthermore, this
increased GDP will appear in the form of higher wages and living standards in the economy.
Conversely, if a food processing company decides to close a factory in England, capital stock in
England decreases, and output and real wages decrease.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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The quantity of labor in the aggregate production function is determined in the labor
market.
All else being the same, labor will migrate to the place with the highest real wage.
Differences in real wages across economies reflect differences in the marginal product
of labor due to differences in the number of hours worked, technology, and capital
stocks.
Checking Your Understanding
1. To determine the patterns of labor migration, should we look at nominal or real wages?
Should we look at wages before or after taxes?
2. Building on Figure 5.7 “Why Real Wages May Be Different in Different Countries”,
suppose that country A had fewer workers than country B but more capital. Would the
real wage be higher or lower in country A than country B?
[1] We discuss labor supply in more detail in Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”.
[2] “Occupational Employment Statistics,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed June 29,
2011,http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrcst.htm.
[3] We discuss some implications of this in Chapter 13 “Social Security”.
5.3 Physical Capital in the Aggregate Production Function
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What determines the movement of investment in a country?
2. How does the capital stock of a country change?
3. What determines the movement of capital across countries?
Many of the arguments that we have just made about labor have analogies when we think
about capital. Just as the amount of labor in an economy depends on the size of the workforce,
so the amount of capital depends on the capital stock. Just as the amount of labor depends on
how many hours each individual works, so the amount of capital depends on the utilization
rate of capital.
Capital utilization is the rate at which the existing capital stock is used. For example, if a
manufacturing firm runs its production lines 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, then its
capital utilization rate is very high.
Just as labor can migrate from country to country, so also capital may cross national borders.
In the short run, the total amount of capital in an economy is more or less fixed. We cannot
make a significant change to the capital stock in short periods of time. In the longer run,
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however, the capital stock changes because some of the real gross domestic product (real
GDP) produced each year takes the form of new capital goods—new factories, machines,
computers, and so on. Economists call these new capital goods investment.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
Investment is one of the components of overall GDP.
The Circular Flow: The Financial Sector
We can use the circular flow to help us understand how much investment there is in an
economy. Figure 5.8 “The Flows In and Out of the Financial Sector” reviews the four flows of
dollars in and out of the financial sector. [1]
1. Households put their savings into the financial sector. Any income that households receive
today but wish to put aside for the future is sent to the financial markets. Although
individual households both save and borrow, there is almost always more saving than
borrowing, so, on net, there is a flow of dollars from the household sector into the financial
markets (private savings).
2. There is a flow of dollars between the financial sector and the government sector. This flow
can go in either direction. Figure 5.8 “The Flows In and Out of the Financial Sector” is
drawn for the case where the government is borrowing (there is a government deficit),
so the financial markets send money to the government sector. In the case of a government
surplus, the flow goes in the other direction. The national savings of an economy are the
savings carried out by the private and government sectors taken together:
national savings = private savings + government surplus
or
national savings = private savings − government deficit.
3. There is a flow of dollars between the financial sector and the foreign sector. This flow can
also go in either direction. When our economy exports more than it imports, we are
sending more goods and services to other countries than they are sending to us. This
means that there is a flow of dollars from the economy as foreigners buy dollars so that
they can make these purchases. It also means that we are lending to other countries: we
are sending more goods and services to other countries now in the understanding that we
will receive goods and services from them at some point in the future. By contrast, when
our economy imports more than it exports, we are receiving more goods and services from
other countries than we are sending to them. We are then borrowing from other countries,
and there is a flow of dollars into the economy. Figure 5.8 “The Flows In and Out of the
Financial Sector” illustrates the case of borrowing from other countries.
4. There is a flow of dollars from the financial sector into the firm sector. These are the funds
that are available to firms for investment purposes.
Figure 5.8 The Flows In and Out of the Financial Sector
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The flows in and out of the financial sector must balance, which tells us that investment is
financed by national savings plus borrowing from abroad.
The total flows in and out of the financial sector must balance. Because of this, as we see
from Figure 5.8 “The Flows In and Out of the Financial Sector”, there are two sources of
funding for new physical capital: savings generated in the domestic economy and borrowing
from abroad.
investment = national savings + borrowing from other countries.
Or, in the case where we are lending to other countries,
investment = national savings − lending to other countries.
Changes in the Capital Stock
Capital goods don’t last forever. Machines break down and wear out. Technologies become
obsolete: a personal computer (PC) built in 1988 might still work today, but it won’t be much
use to you unless you are willing to use badly outdated software and have access to old-
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fashioned 5.25-inch floppy disks. Buildings fall down—or at least require maintenance and
repair.
Depreciation is the term economists give to the amount of the capital stock that an economy
loses each year due to wear and tear. Different types of capital goods depreciate at different
rates. Buildings might stay standing for 50 or 100 years; machine tools on a production line
might last for 20 years; an 18-wheel truck might last for 10 years; a PC might be usable for 5
years. In macroeconomics, we do not worry too much about these differences and often just
suppose that all capital goods are the same.
The overall capital stock increases if there is enough investment to replace the worn out
capital and still contribute some extra. The overall change in the capital stock is equal to new
investment minus depreciation:
change in capital stock = investment − depreciation of existing capital stock.
Investment and depreciation are the flows that lead to changes in the stock of physical capital
over time. We show this schematically in Figure 5.9 “The Accumulation of Capital”. Notice
that capital stock could actually become smaller from one year to the next, if investment were
insufficient to cover the depreciation of existing capital.
Figure 5.9 The Accumulation of Capital
Every year, some capital stock is lost to depreciation, as buildings fall down and machines
break down. Each year there is also investment in new capital goods.
The Mobility of Capital
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Can physical capital move from place to place? A first guess might be no. Although some
capital goods, such as computers, can be transported, most capital goods are fixed in place.
Factories are not easily moved from one place to another.
New capital, however, can be located anywhere. When Toyota decides to build a new factory,
it could put it in Japan, the United States, Italy, Vietnam, or Brazil. Even if existing capital
stocks are not very mobile, investment is. In the long run, firms can decide to close operations
in one country and open in another. To understand how much capital a country has,
therefore, we must recognize that investment in one country may come from elsewhere in the
world.
Just as workers go in search of high wages, so the owners of capital seek to find the places
where capital will have the highest return. We already know that the real wage is a measure
of the marginal product of labor. Similarly, the real return on investment is the marginal
product of capital (more precisely, the marginal product of capital adjusted for depreciation).
Remember that the marginal product of capital is defined as the amount ofextra output
generated by an extra unit of capital. The owners of capital look to put their capital in
countries where its marginal product is high.
Earlier, we saw two reasons why the marginal product of labor (and thus the real wage) might
be higher in one country rather than another. There are likewise two reasons why the
marginal product of capital might be higher in one country (A) rather than in another country
(B). Holding all else the same, the marginal product of capital will be higher in country A if
The capital stock is smaller in country A than in country B.
The stock of other inputs is larger in country A than in country B.
These two factors determine the return on investment in a country. The benefits of acquiring
more capital are higher in a country that has relatively little capital than in a country that has
a lot of capital. This is because new capital can be allocated to projects that yield a lot of extra
output, but as the country acquires more and more capital, such projects become harder and
harder to find. Conversely, a country that has more of the other inputs in the production
function will have a higher marginal product of capital.
Countries with a lot of labor, other things being equal, will be able to get more out of a given
piece of machinery—because each piece of machinery can be combined with more labor time.
As a simple example, think about taxis. In a capital-rich country, there may be only one driver
for every taxi. In a poorer country, two or three drivers often share a single vehicle, so that
vehicle spends much more time on the road. The return on capital—other things being equal—
is higher in countries with a lot of labor and not very much capital to share around. Such
countries are typically relatively poor, suggesting that poor countries should attract
investment funds from elsewhere. In other words, basic economics suggests that if the return
on investment is indeed higher in poor countries, investment funds should flow to those
countries.
We certainly do see individual examples of such flows. The story at the beginning of this
chapter about a Taiwanese company establishing a factory in Vietnam is one example. The
following quotation from a British trade publication describes another.
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Less than two months into 2006 and the UK’s grocery manufacturing industry is
already notching up a growing list of casualties: Leaf UK is considering whether to close
its factory in Stockport; Elizabeth Shaw is shutting a plant in Bristol; Arla Foods UK is
pulling out of a site at Uckfield; Richmond Foods is ending production in Bude; and Hill
Station is shutting a site in Cheadle.
[…]
The stories behind these closures are all very different. But two common trends emerge.
First, suppliers are being forced to step up the pace of consolidation as retailer power
grows and that means more facilities are being rationalised. Second, production is
being shifted offshore as grocery suppliers take advantage of lower-cost facilities. [2]
This excerpt observes that food processing that used to be carried out in Britain is being
shifted to poorer Eastern European countries, such as Poland. When factories close in Britain
and open in Poland, it is as if physical capital—factories and machines—is moving from
Britain to other countries.
If the amount of capital (relative to labor) were the only factor determining investment, we
would expect to see massive amounts of lending going from rich countries to poor countries.
Yet we do not see this. The rich United States, in fact, borrows substantially from other
countries. The stock of other inputs—human capital, knowledge, social infrastructure, and
natural resources—also matters. If workers are more skilled (possess more human capital) or
if an economy has superior social infrastructure, it can obtain more output from a given
amount of physical capital. The fact that the United States has more of these inputs helps to
explain why investors perceive the marginal product of capital to be high in the United States.
Earlier we explained that even though migration could in principle even out wages in different
economies, labor is, in fact, not very mobile across national boundaries. Capital is relatively
mobile, however, and the mobility of capital will also tend to equalize wages. If young Polish
workers move from Poland to England, real wages will tend to increase in Poland and
decrease in England. If grocery manufacturers move production from England to Poland, then
real wages will likewise tend to increase in Poland and decrease in England.
In fact, imagine that two countries have different amounts of physical capital and labor, but
the same amount of all other inputs. If physical capital moves freely to where it earns the
highest return, then both countries will end up with the same marginal product of capital and
the same marginal product of labor. The movement of capital substitutes for labor migration
and leads to the same result of equal real wages. This is a striking result.
The result is only this stark if the two countries have identical human capital, knowledge,
social infrastructure, and natural resources. [3] If other inputs differ, then the mobility of
capital will still affect wages, but wages will remain higher in the economy with more of other
inputs. If workers in one country have higher human capital, then they will earn higher wages
even if capital can flow freely between countries. But the underlying message is the same:
globalization, be it in the form of people migrating from one country to another or capital
moving across national borders, should tend to make the world a more equal place.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
As an accounting identity, the amount of investment is equal to the national savings
of a country plus the amount it borrows from abroad.
The capital stock of a country changes over time due to investment and depreciation
of the existing capital stock.
Differences in the marginal product of capital lead to movements of capital across
countries.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Can investment ever be negative at a factory? In a country?
2. Explain why the movement of capital across two countries will have an effect on the
real wages of workers in the two countries.
[1] The circular flow is introduced in Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy”. We elaborate on
it inChapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”, Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”, Chapter 12
“Income Taxes”, and Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”.
[2] “Shutting Up Shop,” The Grocer, February 25, 2006, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.coadc.com/grt_article_6.htm. The Grocer is a trade publication for the
grocery industry in the United Kingdom.
[3] There are, not surprisingly, other, more technical, assumptions that matter as well.
Perhaps the most important is that the production function should indeed display
diminishing marginal product of capital, as we have assumed in this chapter.
5.4 Other Inputs in the Aggregate Production Function
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How does the amount of human capital in a country change over time?
2. How is knowledge created?
3. How do property rights influence the aggregate production function?
We have less to say about the other inputs into the aggregate production function, so we group
them together.
Human Capital
Education makes the most important contribution to human capital in an economy.
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Kindergarteners learning to count are acquiring human capital, as are high-school students
learning algebra, undergraduate students learning calculus, and experienced workers studying
for an MBA. People also acquire human capital on the job—either as a result of explicit
company training programs or simply because of practice and experience (sometimes called
“learning by doing”).
The education policy of national governments therefore plays a big part in determining how
much human capital there is in a country. In the United States and Europe, education is
typically compulsory up to age 15 or 16. In other countries, the school-leaving age is lower: 10
in Bangladesh, 11 in Iran, and 13 in Honduras, for example. In still other countries, education
is not compulsory at all. [1] One of the aims of the American Competitiveness Initiative,
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, was to “provide American children with a strong
foundation in math and science.”
There are many similarities between human capital and physical capital. Human capital, like
physical capital, is accumulated through a process of investment. Basic education is an
investment made by parents and governments. University education is an investment made
by individuals and households. When you go to college, you give up time that you could have
spent working or having fun. This is one cost of education. The other cost is the expense of
tuition. The gain from education—the return on your investment—is that sometime in the
future you will be more productive and earn more income. An individual decision to go to
college is based on an evaluation of the costs (such as tuition and foregone time) and the
benefits (such as higher salary after graduation and the joy of studying fascinating subjects
like economics).
Firms also invest in human capital. They seek to increase the productivity of their workers by
in-house training or by sending workers to external training courses. Large firms typically
devote substantial resources to the training and development of their employees. Some of the
skills that workers acquire are transferable to other firms if the worker moves to another job.
For example, workers who have attended a training course on accounting would be able to use
the knowledge they acquired from that course at many different firms. Other skills are specific
to a particular firm (such as knowing exactly where to hit a particular machine with a hammer
when it jams).
Human capital, like physical capital, can depreciate. People forget things that they learned, or
their knowledge becomes obsolete. VisiCalc was once a leading spreadsheet software, so
people skilled in its use had valuable human capital; yet knowledge of this program is of little
use today. Human capital that is specific to a particular firm is particularly prone to
depreciation because it becomes worthless if the worker leaves or if the firm goes out of
business. One reason why factory closures—such as those in the food retailing sector in the
United Kingdom—arouse such concern is that laid-off workers may see their useful human
capital decline and end up with lower paying jobs as a result.
While there are similarities between physical and human capital, there are also differences.
Most importantly, human capital is trapped inside people. Economists say that such skills are
“embodied” in the labor force. You cannot sell the human capital that you own without selling
your own labor time as well. The implication for government policy is that importing human
capital means importing people. Dubai is trying to attract human capital—so it advertises the
things that make the country attractive to individuals who own that human capital. Thus their
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website speaks of the “cosmopolitan lifestyle” in Dubai, together with the quality of the
hospitals, schools, shops, and so on.
Knowledge
Many large firms contain research and development (R&D) divisions. Employees in these
divisions engage in product development and process
development.Product development consists of developing new products and improving a
firm’s existing products. Process development consists of finding improvements in a firm’s
operations and methods of manufacture to reduce the costs of production.
An example of product development is the development and testing of a new pharmaceutical
compound to treat cancer. An example of process development is the way in which
transportation firms now use global positioning systems (GPSs) to better manage the
movements of their trucks. In either case, firms invest today in the hope of gains in the future
from lower production costs and better products.
Knowledge of this kind is also created by independent research laboratories, universities,
think tanks, and other such institutions. In many cases, governments subsidize these
institutions: policymakers actively intervene to encourage the production of new knowledge.
Governments get involved because new knowledge can benefit lots of different firms in an
economy. Think of how the invention of electric power, the internal combustion engine, the
microchip, or the Internet benefits almost every firm in the economy today.
Economists say that basic knowledge is a nonrival. A good is nonrival if one person’s
consumption of that good does not prevent others from also consuming it. A good is rival if
one person’s consumption prevents others from also consuming it. The fact that one
marketing manager is using economic theory to set a profit-maximizing price doesn’t prevent
another manager in a different firm from using the same piece of knowledge. (Contrast this
with, say, a can of Coca-Cola: if one person drinks it, no one else can drink it.)
Knowledge is also often nonexcludable. A nonexcludable good is one for which it is
impossible to selectively deny access. In other words, it is not possible to let some people
consume a good while preventing others from consuming it. An excludable good is one to
which we can selectively allow or deny access. Once a piece of knowledge is out in the world, it
is difficult to prevent others from obtaining access to it. Nobody has patents on basic
economic principles of price setting.
Together, these two properties of knowledge mean that a discoverer or inventor of new
knowledge may not get all, or even most, of the benefits of that knowledge. As a result, there is
insufficient incentive for individuals and firms to try to create new knowledge.
Social Infrastructure
Social infrastructure is a catchall term for the general business environment within a country.
Is the country relatively free of corruption? Does it possess a good legal system that protects
property rights? In general, is the economy conducive to the establishment and operation of
business?
Economists have found that social infrastructure is a critical input into the aggregate
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production function. Why does it matter so much? When a firm in the United States or
another advanced country builds a factory, there is an expectation of revenues generated by
this investment that will make the investment profitable. The owners of the firm expect to
obtain the profits generated by the activities in that plant. They also expect that the firm has
the right to sell the plant should it wish to do so. The firm’s owners may confront uncertainty
over the profitability of the plant—the product manufactured there might not sell, or the
firm’s managers might miscalculate the costs of production. But it is clear who owns the plant
and has the rights to the profits that it generates.
If the owners of firms are unsure if they will obtain these profits, however, they have less
incentive to ensure that firms are well managed, and indeed they have less incentive to
establish firms in the first place. Output in an economy is then lower. Governments take many
actions that influence whether owners will indeed receive the profits from their firms. First, in
most countries, governments tax the profits of firms. High tax rates reduce the return on
investment. Uncertainty in tax rates also matters because it effectively lowers the return on
investment activities. Economists have found that countries with high political turnover tend
to be relatively slow growing. One key reason is that frequent changes in political power lead
to uncertainty about tax rates.
Governments can also enact more drastic policies. The most extreme example of a policy that
affects the return on investment is called expropriation—the taking of property by the
government without adequate compensation. Although both domestically owned and foreign-
owned firms could be subject to expropriation, expropriation is more often about the
confiscation of the assets of foreign investors. The World Bank has an entire division
dedicated to settling disputes over expropriation. [2] For example, it is arbitrating on a $10
million dispute between a Cypriot investment firm and the government of Turkey: in 2003 the
Turkish government seized without compensation the assets of two hydroelectric utilities that
were majority owned by the Cypriot firm. Such settlements can take a long time; at the time of
this writing (mid-2011), the dispute has not yet been settled.
There are also more subtle challenges to the rights of foreign investors. Governments may
limit the amount of profits that foreign companies can distribute to their shareholders.
Governments may limit currency exchanges so that profits cannot be converted from local
currencies into dollars or euros. Or governments may establish regulations on foreign-owned
firms that increase the cost of doing business. All such actions reduce the attractiveness of
countries as places for foreign investors to put their funds.
Economists group these examples under the heading of property rights. An individual (or
institution) has property rights over a resource if, by law, that individual can make all
decisions regarding the use of the resource. The return on investment is higher when property
rights are protected. In economies without well-established property rights, the anticipated
rate of return on investment must be higher to induce firms and households to absorb the
investment risks they face.
As a consequence, countries with superior social infrastructure are places where firms will
prefer to do business. Conversely, countries that have worse infrastructure are less attractive
and will tend to have a lower output. On the website for Dubai at the beginning of the chapter,
we see that Dubai touts its free enterprise system, for example. (Dubai’s website reveals that
physical infrastructure, which is part of the Emirate’s capital stock, also plays a critical role:
the website touts the superior transport, financial, and telecommunications infrastructure to
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be found in Dubai.) As another example, Singapore has a project known as Intelligent Nation
2015 that aims to “fuel creativity and innovation among businesses and
individuals” [3] through improved information technology, including making the entire
country Wi-Fi enabled.
An illustration of the importance of social infrastructure comes from the vastly different
economic performance of artificially divided economies. At the time that North Korea and
South Korea were divided, the two countries were in very similar economic circumstances.
Obviously, they did not differ markedly in terms of culture or language. Yet South Korea went
on to be one of the big economic success stories of the past few decades, while North Korea is
now one of the poorest countries in the world. The experience of East Germany and West
Germany is similar: East Germany stagnated under communism, while West Germany
prospered.
Natural Resources
There is less to say about what determines the amount of natural resources in the production
function. The natural resources available to a country are largely accidents of geography. The
United States is fortunate to have high-quality agricultural land, as well as valuable deposits
of oil, coal, natural gas, and other minerals. South Africa has deposits of gold and diamonds.
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and other Middle Eastern countries
have large reserves of oil. The United Kingdom and Norway have access to oil and natural gas
from the North Sea. For every country, we can list its valuable natural resources.
Natural resources are divided into those that are renewable and those that are
nonrenewable. A renewable resource is a resource that regenerates over time. A
nonrenewable (exhaustible) resource is one that does not regenerate over time. Forests
are an example of a renewable resource: with proper management, forests can be maintained
over time by judicious logging and replanting. Solar and wind energy are renewable resources.
Coal, oil, and minerals are nonrenewable; diamonds taken from the ground can never be
replaced.
It is difficult to measure the natural resources that are available to an economy. The
availability of oil and mineral reserves is dependent on the technologies for extraction. These
technologies have developed rapidly over time. The economic value of these resources,
meanwhile, depends on their price in the marketplace. If the price of oil decreases, the value
of untapped oil fields decreases as well.
Economists and others sometimes use real gross domestic product (real GDP) as an indicator
of economic welfare. One problem with real GDP as an indicator of economic welfare is that it
fails to take into account declines in the stock of natural resources. [4] If the stock of natural
resources is viewed—as it should be—as part of the wealth of a country, then depreciation of
that stock should be viewed as a loss in income. (The same argument, incidentally, applies to
depreciation of a country’s physical capital stock. Real GDP also does not take this into
account. However, national accounts do report other statistics that adjust for the depreciation
of physical capital, whereas they do not report any adjustment for natural resource depletion.)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The human capital of a country can be accumulated by education, the training of
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workers, and immigration of workers into that country.
Knowledge about new products and new processes is created by R&D activities within
firms, universities, and government agencies.
Property rights influence the amount of capital in the aggregate production function.
In an economy where property rights are not well defined, there is a lower incentive to
invest and hence less capital.
Checking Your Understanding
1. How does on-the-job experience affect the human capital of an economy?
2. Why is it difficult to measure the natural resources available in an economy?
[1] “At What Age…? Comparative Table,” Right to Education Project, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.right-to-education.org/node/279.
[2] It is called the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes
(http://icsid.worldbank.org/ICSID/Index.jsp).
[3] “Singapore: An Intelligent Nation, A Global City, powered by Infocomm,” iN2015,
accessed June 29, 2011, http://www.ida.gov.sg/About%20us/20100611122436.aspx.
[4] In Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy”, we note several of these.
5.5 Accounting for Changes in GDP
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is growth accounting?
2. What are the different time horizons that we use in economics?
We have inventoried the factors that contribute to gross domestic product (GDP). The next
step is to understand how much each factor contributes. If an economy wants to increase its
GDP, is it better off trying to boost domestic savings, attract more capital from other
countries, improve its infrastructure, or what? To answer such questions, we introduce a new
tool that links the growth rate of output to the growth rate of the different inputs to the
production function.
Toolkit: Section 16.11 “Growth Rates”
A growth rate is the percentage change in a variable from one year to the next. For example,
the growth rate of real GDP is defined as
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growth rate of GDP =
change in GDP
GDP
.
You can learn more about growth rates in the toolkit.
Some of the inputs to the production function—most notably knowledge, social infrastructure,
and natural resources—are very difficult to measure individually. Economists typically group
these inputs together into technology, as shown in Figure 5.10 “The Aggregate Production
Function”. The term is something of a misnomer because it includes not only technological
factors but also social infrastructure, natural resources, and indeed anything that affects real
GDP but is not captured by other inputs.
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Figure 5.10 The Aggregate Production Function
The aggregate production function combines an economy’s physical capital stock, labor
hours, human capital, and technology (knowledge, natural resources, and social
infrastructure) to produce output (real GDP).
The technique for explaining output growth in terms of the growth of inputs is called
growth accounting.
Toolkit: Section 16.17 “Growth Accounting”
Growth accounting tells us how changes in real GDP in an economy are due tochanges in
available inputs. Under reasonably general circumstances, the change in output in an
economy can be written as follows:
output growth rate = a × capital stock growth rate
+ [(1 − a) × labor hours growth rate]
+ [(1 − a) × human capital growth rate]
+ technology growth rate.
In this equation, a is just a number. Growth rates can be positive or negative, so we can use
the equation to analyze decreases and increases in GDP.
We can measure the growth in output, capital stock, and labor hours using easily available
economic data. The growth rate of human capital is trickier to measure, although we can use
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information on schooling and literacy rates to estimate this number. We also have a way of
measuring a. The technical details are not important here, but a good measure of (1 − a) is
simply total payments to labor in the economy (that is, the total of wages and other
compensation) as a fraction of overall GDP. For most economies, a is in the range of about 1/3
to 1/2.
For the United States, the number a is about 1/3. The growth rate of output is therefore given
as follows:
output growth rate = (
1
3
× capital stock growth rate)
+ {2} over {3} ( labor hours growth rate + human capital growth rate)
+ technology growth rate .
Because we can measure everything in this equation except growth in technology, we can use
the equation to determine what the growth rate of technology must be. If we rearrange, we get
the following:
technology growth rate = output growth rate − (
1
3
× capital stock growth rate)
–
2
3
(labor hours growth rate + human capital growth rate) .
To emphasize again, the powerful part of this equation is that we can use observed growth in
labor, capital, human capital, and output to infer the growth rate of technology—something
that is impossible to measure directly.
Growth Accounting in Action
Table 5.2 “Some Examples of Growth Accounting Calculations*” provides information on
output growth, capital growth, labor growth, and technology growth. The calculations assume
that a = 1/3. In the first row, for example, we see that
growth in technology
= 5.5 − [(1/3) × 6.0] − [(2/3) × (2.0 + 1.0)]
= 5.5 − 2.0 − 2.0= 1.5.
Table 5.2 Some Examples of Growth Accounting Calculations*
Year Output
Growth
Capital
Growth
Labor
Growth
Human
Capital
Growth
Technology
Growth
2010 5.5 6.0 2.0 1.0 1.0
2011 2.0 3.0 1.5 0 0
2012 6.5 4.5 1.0 0.5
2013 1.5 0 0 2.2
2014 1.5 3.3 0 1.3
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*The figures in each column are percentage growth rates.
Growth accounting is an extremely useful tool because it helps us diagnose the causes of
economic success and failure. We can look at successful growing economies and find out if
they are growing because they have more capital, labor, or skills or because they have
improved their technological know-how. Likewise, we can look at economies in which output
has fallen and find out whether declines in capital, labor, or technology are responsible. [1]
Researchers have found that different countries and regions of the world have vastly varying
experiences when viewed through the lens of growth accounting. A World Bank study found
that, in developing regions of the world, capital accumulation was a key contributor to output
growth, accounting for almost two-thirds of total growth in Africa, Latin America, East Asia,
and Southeast Asia. [2] Technology and human capital growth played a surprisingly small role
in these regions, contributing nothing at all to economic growth in Africa and Latin America,
for example.
The Short Run, the Long Run, and the Very Long Run
Growth accounting focuses on how inputs—and hence output—change over time. We use the
tool both to look at changes in an economy over short time periods—say, from one month to
the next—and also over very long time periods—say, over decades. We are limited only by the
data that we have available to us. It is sometimes useful to distinguish three different time
horizons.
1. The short run refers to a period of time that we would typically measure in months. If
something has only a short-run effect on an economy, the effect will vanish within months
or a few years at most.
2. The long run refers to periods of time that are better measured in years. If something will
happen in the long run, we might have to wait for two, three, or more years before it
happens.
3. The very long run refers to periods of time that are best measured in decades.
These definitions of the short, long, and very long runs are not and cannot be very exact. In
the context of particular chapters, however, we give more precise definitions to these
ideas. [3] Figure 5.11 “The Different Time Horizons in Economics” summarizes the main
influences on the inputs to the production function in the short run, the long run, and the very
long run.
Figure 5.11 The Different Time Horizons in Economics
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Look first at physical capital—the first row in Figure 5.11 “The Different Time Horizons in
Economics”. In the short run, the amount of physical capital in the economy is more or less
fixed. There are a certain number of machines, buildings, and so on, and we cannot make big
changes in this capital stock. One thing that firms can do in the short run is to change capital
utilization—shutting down a production line if they want to produce less output or running
extra shifts if they want more output. Once we move to the long run and very long run, capital
mobility and capital accumulation become important.
Look next at labor. In the short run, the amount of labor in the production function depends
primarily on how much labor firms want to hire (labor demand) and how much people want
to work (labor supply). As we move to the long run, migration of labor becomes significant as
well: workers sometimes move from one country to another in search of better jobs. And, in
the very long run, population growth and other demographic changes (the aging of the
population, the increased entry of women into the labor force, etc.) start to matter.
Human capital can be increased in the long run (and also in the short run to some extent) by
training. The most important changes in human capital come in the very long run, however,
through improved education.
There is not very much that can be done to change a country’s technology in the short run. In
the long run, less technologically advanced countries can import better technologies from
other countries. In practice, this often happens as a result of a multinational firm establishing
operations in a developing country. For example, if Dell Inc. establishes a factory in Mexico,
then it effectively transfers some know-how to the Mexican economy. This is known
as technology transfer, the movement of knowledge and advanced production techniques
across national borders.
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In the long run and very long run, technology advances through innovation and the hard work
of research and development (R&D) that—hopefully—gives us new inventions. In the very
long run, countries may be able to improve their institutions and thus create better social
infrastructure. In the very long run, declines in natural resources also become significant.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Growth accounting is a tool to decompose economic growth into components of input
growth and technological progress.
In economics, we study changes in GDP over very different time horizons. We look at
short-run changes due mainly to changes in hours worked and the utilization of
capital stock. We look at long-run changes due to changes in the amount of available
labor and capital in an economy. And we look at very-long-run changes due to the
accumulation of physical and human capital and changes in social infrastructure and
other aspects of technology.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Rewrite the growth accounting equation for the case where a = 1/4.
2. Using the growth accounting equation, fill in the missing numbers in Table 5.2 “Some
Examples of Growth Accounting Calculations*”.
[1] We use this tool in Chapter 7 “The Great Depression” to study the behavior of the US
economy in the 1920s and 1930s.
[2] The study covered the period 1960–1987. See World Bank, World Development Report
1991: The Challenge of Development, vol. 1, p. 45, June 30, 1991, accessed August 22,
2011,http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165259&theSitePK=4780
60&pi PK=64165421&menuPK=64166093&entityID=000009265_3981005112648.
[3] For example, Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed” explains the adjustment of prices in an
economy. In that chapter, we define the short run as the time horizon in which prices are
“sticky”—not all prices have adjusted fully—whereas the long run refers to a period where all
prices have fully adjusted. Meanwhile, Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty” uses
the very long run to refer to a situation where output and the physical capital stock grow at the
same rate.
5.6 Globalization and Competitiveness Revisited
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How is competitiveness measured?
2. What are some of the policies governments use to influence their competitiveness?
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At the beginning of this chapter, we noted that both President George W. Bush and President
Obama have emphasized policies to improve the competitiveness of the United States. Such
interest in national competitiveness is not restricted to the United States. [1]In their “Lisbon
Agenda” of 2000, the heads of European countries stated an aim of making the European
Union “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010.” [2]
Competitiveness: Another Look
Various organizations produce rankings of the competitiveness of countries. For example,
IMD, a business school in Switzerland, produces a World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY)
every year. [3] The World Economic Forum (WEF) produces an annual Global
Competitiveness Report. [4] In 2010, the WEF judged Switzerland to be the most competitive
economy in the world, followed by the United States and Singapore. According to IMD, the
top three were Hong Kong, the United States, and Singapore. These rankings are covered
extensively in the business press, and there is also a market for them—WCY resources cost
over $1,000. Business and governments purchase these reports each year. National
competitiveness is big business.
In their bid to measure competitiveness, the WEF and the WCY look at a combination of
“hard” economic data and surveys of businesspeople. Each looks at hundreds of measures in
their respective attempts to measure national competitiveness. If these two institutions are to
be believed, national competitiveness is a very complicated animal indeed. Although we do
not want to go through their measures in detail, a few themes emerge.
Both the WEF and the WCY look at measures of human capital, such as the number of
people enrolled in tertiary education.
Technology and technological infrastructure feature prominently in both lists of data. The
WEF and the WCY look at measures such as the penetration of computers, the Internet,
and mobile phones and the granting of patents.
The quality of public institutions and the prevalence of corruption feature prominently in
both lists. Here, the WEF relies on survey data on corruption, bribes, and the extent to
which the legal system is fair and transparent. The WCY includes survey information on
management practices and “attitudes and values.”
Thus the items that we have identified as components of social infrastructure and human
capital are included as key determinants of competitiveness. (Technological infrastructure is
difficult to classify and measure. In part, it is captured by measures of capital stock because
knowledge can be embodied in the capital stock.)
Countries that do better in terms of these rankings will tend to have higher levels of output
because these are all inputs into the aggregate production function. The competitiveness of a
country is not a matter of how much output it produces, however; we already have a perfectly
good measure of that, called real gross domestic product (real GDP). Instead, competitiveness
is the ability to attract foreign capital. If countries do not have enough domestic savings to
fund investment, then they need to obtain capital from other countries. The amount of capital
in the world is limited, so countries compete for this capital by trying to make their economies
attractive places to invest. More human capital, better knowledge, or superior social
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infrastructure all serve to increase the return on investment. If workers are more skilled, then
extra capital will generate more output. If firms have better processes in place, then extra
capital will generate more output. If a country is free of corruption, then extra capital will
generate more output.
This suggests that one good yet simple indicator of national competitiveness is the marginal
product of capital. Country A is more competitive than country B if capital investment in
country A is more productive than in country B. More exactly, a country is more competitive if
it has a higher marginal product of capital.
Globalization: Another Look
Whenever a good or service is produced and sold, economic value is created. The amount of
value is given by the difference between the value to the buyer and the value to the seller. For
example, suppose a toy car is produced in a factory in Kansas at a cost of $5. Imagine that a
potential buyer in California values the car at $20—that is, she is willing to pay up to this
amount for the toy. Then the value created if the buyer and seller trade is $20 − $5 = $15.
In a globalized world, toy cars can be transported around the world. This means two things.
First, goods can go to where buyers value them the most. There might be a buyer in Germany
who values the car at $25. If he buys the car, then the trade creates $20 worth of value (= $25
− $5). Second, goods can be manufactured where production costs are lowest. Perhaps the toy
car can be manufactured in China for $2. If the toy is produced in China and sold in Germany,
then the total value created by the trade increases to $23 (= $25 − $2). Globalization thus
contributes to a more efficient global economy because goods—and many services—can be
shipped around the world to create more value. They can be produced where it is most
efficient to produce them and sold where they are valued the most.
We have also seen that capital (and to a lesser extent labor) moves around the world. Capital
moves to competitive economies—that is, to the places where its marginal product is highest.
This again contributes to economic efficiency because it means that we (that is, the world as a
whole) get more output from a given amount of capital input.
This brief description paints a rosy picture of globalization as a force that makes the world a
more productive place. Yet globalization has vehement critics. Protesters have taken to the
streets around the world to complain about it. And the recent era of globalization has seen
mixed results in terms of economic success. Some economies—particularly in East Asia—have
exploited the opportunities of globalization to their advantage. But other countries—most
notably in sub-Saharan Africa—remain stuck in poverty.
So what is our story missing? What is wrong with the idea that the free movement of goods
and capital can encourage prosperity everywhere? There are some reasons why we should
temper our optimism about the process of globalization, including the following:
There are winners and losers. There is a strong presumption from economic theory
that globalization will increase overall economic efficiency, but there is no guarantee that
everyone will gain. Investors are winners from globalization because they can send their
funds to wherever capital earns the highest return. Workers in countries that attract
capital will, in general, be winners because they will obtain higher real wages. However,
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workers in countries that lose capital lose from globalization: they see their real wages
decrease. In our example, the buyers of toys in California and Germany benefit from the
fact that toys are cheaper and available in greater variety. But the toy manufacturer in
Kansas loses out because it cannot compete with the cheaper product from China. The
factory may close, and its workers may be forced to look for other—perhaps less
attractive—jobs.
The playing field is not level. In an introductory economics book, we do not have room
to review the details of trade agreements throughout the world. But one trenchant
criticism of globalization is that developed countries have maintained high tariffs and
subsidies even as they have encouraged poorer countries to eliminate such measures. As a
result, the benefits of globalization have been almost entirely absent for some of the
poorest countries in the world. Moreover, rich countries have disproportionate control
over some of the key international institutions: the managing director of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) is traditionally a European; the president of the World Bank is
appointed by the United States.
One size may not fit all. International institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank
typically advocate similar policies for all countries. In fact, different policies might be
appropriate for different countries. For example, these organizations argued that countries
should allow free movement of capital across their borders. We have seen that there is a
strong argument for allowing capital to go in search of the highest return. But not all
capital flows take the form of building new factories. Sometimes, the movement of capital
consists of only very fast transfers of money in and out of countries, based on guesses
about movements in interest rates and exchange rates. These flows of money can be a
source of instability in a country. There is increasing recognition that, sometimes at least,
it is better to place some limits on such speculative capital movements.
Most economists are convinced that the benefits of globalization are enough to outweigh these
concerns. Many—perhaps most—are also convinced that, if globalization is to live up to its
promise for the world, it needs to be managed better than it has been in the past.
Policies to Increase Competitiveness and Real Wages
We know that if an economy increases its labor input, other things being equal, the marginal
product of labor (and hence the real wage) decreases. If an economy increases its physical
capital stock, meanwhile, then the marginal product of capital (and hence the economy’s
competitiveness) decreases.
There is a critical tension between competitiveness and real wages. Suppose for a moment
that human capital and technology are unchanging. Then an economy in which real wages are
increasing must also be an economy that is becoming less competitive. Conversely, the only
way in which an economy can become more competitive is by seeing its real wages decrease.
High real wages make a country less attractive for businesses—after all, firms choose where to
locate in an attempt to make as much profit as possible, so, other things being equal, they
prefer to be in low-wage economies. Indeed, the WEF and the WCY both use labor costs as
one of their indicators of competitiveness. Our article about Compal locating in Vietnam
likewise cited low wages as an attraction of the country.
But we must not be misled by this. High real wages signal prosperity in a country. Low real
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wages, even if they make an economy competitive and help to attract capital, are not in
themselves desirable. After all, the point of attracting capital in the first place is to increase
economic well-being. As an example, China has been quite successful at attracting capital, in
large part because of low real wages. As the country has become more prosperous, real wages
have risen. A BusinessWeek article, commenting on the increasing wages in the country,
observed the following: “The wage issue has started to affect how companies operate in China.
U.S. corporations and their suppliers are starting to rethink where to locate facilities, whether
deeper into the interior (where salaries and land values are smaller), or even farther afield, to
lower-cost countries such as Vietnam or Indonesia. Already, higher labor costs are beginning
to price some manufacturers out of more developed Chinese cities such as Shanghai and
Suzhou.” [5] In other words, increasing real wages are making China less competitive. But this
tells us that China is getting richer, and workers in China are able to enjoy improvements in
their standard of living. This is a good thing, not a problem.
What we really want are policies that will increase both competitiveness and real wages at the
same time. The only way to do this is by increasing the stocks of human capital, knowledge,
and social infrastructure (there is little a country can do to increase its stock of natural
resources). There are no easy or quick ways to increase any of these. Still, important policy
options include the following:
Invest in education and training. Overall economic performance depends to a great
degree on the education and skills of the workforce. This is one reason why countries
throughout the world recognize the need to provide basic education to their citizens. It is
worthwhile for countries to build up their stock of human capital just as it is worthwhile
for them to build up their stocks of physical capital.
Invest in research and development (R&D). The overall knowledge in an economy
is advanced by new inventions and innovations. The romantic vision of invention is that
some brilliant person comes up with a completely new idea. There are celebrated examples
of this throughout human history, starting perhaps with the cave dweller who had the idea
of cracking a nut with a stone and including the individual insights of scientists like Louis
Pasteur, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. But the reality of invention in the modern
economy is more mundane. Inventions and innovations today almost always originate
from teams of researchers—sometimes in universities or think tanks or sometimes in the
R&D departments of firms. Governments often judge it worthwhile to subsidize such
research to help increase the stock of knowledge. R&D expenditures in the United States
and other rich countries are substantial; in the United States they amount to about 2
percent of GDP.
Encourage technology transfer. Firms in developed countries tend to have access to
state-of-the-art knowledge and techniques. To increase their stock of knowledge, such
countries must advance the overall knowledge of the world. For poorer countries in the
world, however, there is another possibility. Factories in poor countries typically do not
use the most advanced production techniques or have the most modern machinery. These
countries can improve their stock of knowledge by importing the latest techniques from
other countries. In practice, governments often do this by encouraging multinational firms
from rich countries to build factories in their countries. Technology transfer within a
country is also important. Researchers have found that, even with a country, there can be
big differences in the productivity of different factories within an industry. [6] So countries
may be able to increase real GDP by providing incentives for knowledge sharing across
plants.
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Invest in social infrastructure. Improvements in social infrastructure are hard to
implement. A government, no matter how well intentioned, cannot eliminate corruption
overnight. Nor can it instantly establish a reliable legal system that will uphold contracts
and protect property rights. (Even if a country could do so, it would still take considerable
time for international investors to gain confidence in the system.) Improving social
infrastructure is, for most countries, a struggle for the long haul.
We should ask whether government needs to play a role in any of this. After all, individuals
have an incentive to invest in their own education. Many people find it worthwhile to pay for
undergraduate or graduate degrees because they know they will get better, higher paying jobs
afterward. Similarly, firms have a lot of incentive to carry out R&D because a successful
invention will allow them to earn higher profits.
There is no doubt that these private incentives play a big role in encouraging the advancement
of knowledge. Still, most economists agree that private incentives are not sufficient.
Particularly in poor countries, people may not be able to afford to pay for their own education
or be able to borrow for that purpose, even if it would eventually pay off for them to do so.
Because knowledge is nonrival and frequently nonexcludable, not all the benefits from R&D
flow to the firms that make the investment. For example, suppose a firm comes up with some
new software. Other firms may be able to imitate the idea and capture some of the benefits of
the invention. (Although the United States and other countries have patent and copyright laws
to help ensure that people and firms can enjoy the benefits of their own inventions, such laws
are imperfect, and firms sometimes find that their ideas are copied or stolen.) Private markets
will do a poor job of providing nonrival and nonexcludable goods, so there is a potential role
for the government.
Similar arguments apply to much social infrastructure. The provision of roads is a classic
function of government because they are again (most of the time, at least) nonrival and
nonexcludable. And the establishment of a reliable legal system is one of the most basic
functions of government.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In some leading studies, the items that we have identified as components of social
infrastructure and human capital are included as key determinants of
competitiveness. Overall, the marginal product of capital is a good indicator of the
competitiveness of a country.
Governments take actions to increase their competitiveness and the real wages of
their workers by encouraging the accumulation of human capital, knowledge, and the
transfer of technology.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Why is GDP not a good measure of competitiveness?
2. How could a policy to increase the inflow of capital lead to a decrease in
competitiveness? What does this inflow of capital do to the real wage of workers?
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[1] It is perhaps more pronounced in the United States than in other countries. A Google
search on October 17, 2011 reveals that the string “Keep America Competitive” has almost
twice as many hits as the string “Keep Canada Competitive” and more than three times as
many hits as “Keep Britain Competitive.”
[2] See “Lisbon Agenda,” EurActive, May 21, 2007, accessed July 27,
2011,http://www.euractiv.com/en/future-eu/lisbon-agenda/article-117510.
[3] See “World Competitiveness Center,” IMD, accessed August 22,
2011,http://www.imd.org/research/centers/wcc/index.cfm.
[4] See “Global Competitiveness Report,” World Economic Forum, accessed June 29,
2011,http://www.weforum.org/s?s=global+competitiveness.
[5] “How Rising Wages Are Changing the Game in China,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March
27, 2006, accessed June 29,
2011,http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977049.htm.
[6] See Chang-Tai Hsieh and Peter Klenow, “Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China
and India,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics CXXIV, no. 4, November 2009, accessed
June 28, 2011, http://klenow.com/MMTFP .
5.7 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
We began the chapter with five stories from all around the world. Let us briefly review these
stories, based on what we have learned in this chapter.
Niger
Niger is an extremely poor country. Life expectancy in Niger is 52, the infant mortality rate is
over 10 percent, and less than 30 percent of the population can read and write. It is extremely
poor because it lacks the key inputs to the production function. It is largely a subsistence
agricultural economy: it has relatively little physical capital or human capital, little physical
infrastructure, and poor social infrastructure as well. It is a natural target for World Bank
help. The particular World Bank project that we cited is aimed at one particular input: its goal
is to improve Niger’s human capital.
Vietnam
In a globalized world, savings and investment do not have to be equal in any individual
economy. Savers can send their funds almost anywhere in the world in search of a high return
on capital. Countries that are competitive, in the sense that they have a high marginal product
of capital, will tend to attract such funds. One manifestation of these flows of capital is that
multinational companies establish factories where they can produce most cheaply. In the
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http://www.imd.org/research/centers/wcc/index.cfm
http://www.weforum.org/s?s=global+competitiveness
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977049.htm
http://klenow.com/MMTFP
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story, we see that Vietnam, a low-wage economy, is attracting capital investment from a
Taiwanese company. Capital flows have a similar effect to the migration of labor: when capital
flows into a country, it increases the real wage; when capital flows out of a country, real wages
decrease. Globalization benefits the world as a whole, but many individual workers may lose
out.
United Arab Emirates
The policies of Dubai are straightforward to understand in the framework of this chapter.
Dubai is actively trying to import foreign physical capital and human capital. It is encouraging
multinational firms to establish operations in the country. This makes sense because, as we
now know, increased physical and human capital will both tend to increase the marginal
product of labor in Dubai, leading to higher wages and higher prosperity. Dubai’s claims of
attractiveness rest largely on its social infrastructure.
The United Kingdom
Migrant workers are a global phenomenon, be they Poles traveling to England, Mexicans
moving to the United States, or Filipinos moving to Saudi Arabia. Like the young Poles in this
story, they move from country to country in search of higher wages. Worker migration across
national boundaries tends to equalize wages in different countries. As workers leave Poland,
for example, labor becomes scarcer there, so wages in Poland tend to increase. When they
arrive in the United Kingdom, there is more labor supplied to the United Kingdom labor
market, so wages there tend to decrease. However, labor migration is still quite limited
because (1) countries restrict immigration and (2) most workers still do not want to suffer the
upheaval of moving to a different country and culture.
United States
The competitiveness initiatives of President Obama and President George W. Bush are
designed to increase both human capital and knowledge within the United States. They
include measures to strengthen education (human capital), increase research and
development (R&D; knowledge), and encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. We have
seen that the idea of competitiveness is subtle: nations do not compete in the same way that
countries do. Still, improvements in technology and human capital will tend to increase the
marginal product of capital, making the United States a more attractive place for investment.
In that sense, they do make the country more competitive.
Key Links
World Economic Forum: http://www.weforum.org
World Competitiveness Yearbook: http://www.imd.ch/wcc
World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org
Dubai government: http://www.dubaitourism.ae/node
EXERCISES
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http://www.imd.ch/wcc
http://www.worldbank.org/
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TABLE 5.3 AN EXAMPLE OF A PRODUCTION FUNCTION
Output Capital Labor Human Capital Technology
10 1 1 10 10
20 2 2 10 10
20 4 1 10 10
20 1 4 10 10
30 9 1 10 10
30 1 9 10 10
30 3 3 10 10
40 2 8 10 10
40 8 2 10 10
40 4 4 10 10
40 4 4 20 5
40 4 4 5 20
80 4 4 20 20
1. By comparing two different rows in the preceding table, show that the marginal
product of labor is positive. Make sure you keep all other inputs the same. In other
words, find two rows that show that an increase in labor, keeping all other inputs the
same, leads to an increase in output.
2. By comparing two different rows in the preceding table, show that the marginal
product of human capital is positive. Again, make sure you keep all other inputs the
same.
3. By comparing two different rows in the preceding table, show that the marginal
product of technology is positive.
4. Does the production function exhibit diminishing marginal product of physical capital?
[Hint: if more and more extra capital is needed to generate the same increase in output,
then there is diminishing marginal product.]
5. Does the production function exhibit diminishing marginal product of labor?
6. (Difficult) Can you guess what mathematical function we used for the production
function?
7. Why are electricians not paid the same amount in Topeka, Kansas, and New York City?
Why are electricians not paid the same amount in North Korea and South Korea? Is the
explanation the same in both cases?
8. Think about the production function for the university or college where you are
studying. What are some of the different inputs that go into it? Classify these inputs as
physical capital, human capital, labor, knowledge, natural resources, and social
infrastructure. Try to come up with at least one example of each.
9. Suppose government spending is 30, government income from taxes (including
transfers) is 50, private saving is 30, and lending to foreign countries is 20. What is
national savings? What is investment?
10. Explain how it is possible for investment to be positive yet for the capital stock to fall
from one year to the next.
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11. Is a fireworks display nonrival? Nonexcludable?
12. Suppose that a country’s capital stock growth rate is 8 percent, the labor hours growth
rate is 4 percent, the human capital growth rate is 2 percent, and the technology growth
rate is 3 percent. The parameter a is 0.25. What is the output growth rate?
13. Suppose that a country’s capital stock growth rate is 4 percent, the labor hours growth
rate is 3 percent, the human capital growth rate is 1 percent, and the output growth rate
is 5 percent. The parameter a is 0.5. What is the technology growth rate?
14. Explain why a decrease in a country’s competitiveness can be a sign that the country is
becoming more prosperous.
15. Firms are sometimes willing to pay for training courses for their workers. Other things
being equal, do you think a firm would prefer to pay for one of its employees to do a
general management course or a course that trains the employee in the use of software
designed specifically for the firm? Explain.
Economics Detective
1. Go to the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov). Find
the median hourly wage in the state in which you live. (If you do not live in the
United States, pick a state at random.)
a) How does it compare to the median hourly wage for the country as a whole?
b) Which is higher in your state—the median wage or the mean wage? Can you
explain why?
2. Find an example of a competitiveness initiative in some country other than the
United States. How will the proposed policies help to attract capital?
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Chapter 6
Global Prosperity and Global Poverty
Life Around the World
[…]
I thought about my new friend Mariya, her life and daily routine. She was married
before I had my driver’s license. She pounded millet all day, sweating yet smiling. She
hauled water from the well. She cooked. She birthed child after child. There was no end
to the manual labor her life required. I liked to watch her. It was fascinating. But if hers
was my life, I’d probably jump into that well.
I’ve always thought what life each soul is assigned to is a game of chance. I couldn’t help
but to wonder what would have become of me had the powers that be had shaken those
dice one more time on March 16, 1982, before moving the game piece that sent me to
DePaul Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.
If I had been born into Mariya’s life, would I have been able to hack it? If she had been
born into my life, would she have been happier? […] [1]
In Niger, where Mariya lives, about 1 in 9 children die before their first birthday. Life
expectancy at birth is 53 years, and less than 30 percent of the population can read and write.
About one-fifth of the population is nomadic. An Oxfam study in 2005 found that nomads had
recently lost about 70 percent of their animals, and that “almost one in ten families is
surviving on a diet of mainly wild plants, leaves, and
grass.” [2]Real gross domestic product (real GDP) per person in Niger is the equivalent
of about $700 per year.
Call centers are a phenomenon that has taken over the young crowd of metros in India
by a storm. Its implications are social, cultural and economic. It is a new society of the
young, rich and free, selling the new dream of an independent life to the regular desi.
[…]
[C]heap labor in India owes its origin to the high rate of unemployment here. Hundreds
of thousands of graduates are jobless and desperate for work in India.
[…]
Most call center jobs require a basic understanding of computers and a good grasp over
English. And the urban youth of India are computer literate graduates with a command
over English language. This is the ideal unskilled labor that the call center industry is
looking for.
[…]
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With its operations mainly during the night, the call centers offer an opportunity for the
young to live a perpetual nocturnal life, a saleable idea to the youth. The fascination of
the dark and the forbidden, is tremendous for the Indian youth, recently unleashed from
the chains of tradition and culture. Because of this fascination, the industry has
developed an air of revolution about itself. Not only is it cool to work for call centers, it
is radical and revolutionary.
Just like the bikers subculture of the 60s and the flower children of the 70s, these call
centerites also have their own lingo and a unique style of existence. Most of them are
happy in a well paying monotonous job, reaping the benefits of technology, enjoying a
life away from rush hour traffic and local trains. The moolah is good, the work is easy
and life is comfortable. [3]
Life expectancy in India is 67 years, and the infant mortality rate is about 1 in 20. Real GDP
per person is about $3,500.
More Americans own pets than ever before, and they’re spending more money to keep
them healthy, according to a survey released today by the American Veterinary Medical
Association.
The number of U.S. households with pets climbed 7.6 million, to 59.5% of all homes, up
from 58.3% in 2001. By comparison, about 35% of U.S. households have children, the
Census Bureau says.
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[…]
Pet owners are spending more on medical care. Veterinary expenditures for all pets
were estimated at $24.5 billion in 2006. In inflation-adjusted dollars, Americans spent
$22.4 billion in 2001.
This represents “the high-tech care that pet owners are demanding and willing to pay
for,” DeHaven says. “Diseases that once would have been difficult to treat—diabetes,
heart disease, cancer—today are very treatable. We’re even putting pacemakers in
dogs.” [4]
In the United States, where spending on veterinary care for pets is considerably more than
twice the entire GDP of Niger, the infant mortality rate is about 1 in 170, and life expectancy is
about 78. Real GDP per person is more than 10 times greater than in India and almost 70
times greater than in Niger.
These stories are more than anecdotes. They are, in a real sense, representative of these three
countries, as we can see by looking at economic data. Figure 6.1 “Real GDP per Person in the
United States, India, and Niger” shows real GDP per person in India, the United States, and
Niger over the 1960–2009 period. [5] From part (a) of Figure 6.1 “Real GDP per Person in the
United States, India, and Niger”, we can see that GDP per person in the United States has
grown substantially. On average, real GDP per person grew at 2 percent per year. Perhaps this
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doesn’t sound like a lot. Economic growth cumulates over time, however. An annual growth
rate of 2 percent means that real GDP per person is about 2.6 times higher than half a century
ago. To put it another way, each generation is roughly twice as rich as the previous generation.
Although there are periods of high and low (sometimes even negative) growth in GDP per
person, these fluctuations are overwhelmed by the overall positive growth in our economy.
With this growth come many benefits: higher consumption, more varieties of goods, higher
quality goods, better medical care, more enjoyable leisure time, and so on.
Figure 6.1 Real GDP per Person in the United States, India, and Niger
Real GDP per person in the United States (a) is substantially larger than (b) real GDP in
India and Niger. The growth experiences of the three countries are also very different
Source: Alan Heston, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 7.0,
Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of
Pennsylvania, May 2011.
Part (b) of Figure 6.1 “Real GDP per Person in the United States, India, and Niger” shows real
GDP per person for India and Niger. Notice first that the scale on this graph is very different.
In 1960, real GDP per person in the United States was about $15,000 (measured in year 2005
dollars). In Niger and India, it was about 5 percent of the US figure—about $700 per person.
The second striking feature of this graph is the very different performance of India and Niger.
India, like the United States, has grown: GDP per person is much higher at the end of the
sample than at the beginning. Indeed, India has grown faster than the United States: the
average growth rate over the period was 3.1 percent. Over the last two decades, the difference
is even starker: India has grown at about 4.4 percent per year on average. Nevertheless, the
United States is still a lot richer than India.
By world standards, India is a long way from being the poorest country. In 1960, Niger was
richer than India on a per person basis. But in the following half century, Niger became
poorer, not richer. GDP per person decreased by almost 30 percent. India in 2009 was six
times richer than Niger. Statistics on GDP are just that—statistics—and it is easy to look at
graphs like these and forget that they are telling us about the welfare of human beings. But
imagine for a moment that Niger had managed to grow like India, instead of collapsing as it
did. People would not be surviving by eating grass, infants would be more likely to grow up to
be adults instead of dying of preventable diseases, and children would be learning to read and
write.
This is why the study of economic growth matters. And this is why, in this chapter, we take on
arguably the most important question in the entire book.
Why are some countries rich and other countries poor?
Along the way, we tackle two other closely related questions. We want to know if the
differences in income that we see in the world are likely to persist over time. The experiences
of the United States, India, and Niger suggest that this question may not have a simple
answer: India has been tending to catch up with the United States, but Niger has been falling
further behind. As we seek to answer that question, we will also investigate the ultimate
sources of economic growth:
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Will poorer countries catch up to richer countries?
Why do countries grow?
Road Map
The big mystery we investigate in this chapter is the vast variation in economic performance
from country to country. We want to know why the experiences of the United States, India,
and Niger are so different from one another.
We begin this chapter with an extended story. We think about how growth would work in a
country with just a single inhabitant. Then we turn to a back-of-the-envelope calculation to
understand why countries differ so much in terms of economic performance. To understand
these differences, we focus attention on different inputs to the production function, first
considering physical capital and then looking at human capital and technology. After that, we
develop a complete framework for understanding how and why economies grow in the very
long run. Finally, we look at policy and international institutions.
[1] Alexis Wolff, “Village Life—Niger,” February 27, 2005, accessed June 28,
2011,http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/05-02/village-life-niger.html.
[2] See “The World Factbook,” Central Intelligence Agency, accessed June 28,
2011,https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html; and
“Nomadic Way of Life in Niger Threatened by Food Crisis,” Oxfam America, August 16, 2005,
accessed June 29, 2011, http://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/pressreleases/nomadic-way-of-
life-in-niger-threatened-by-food-crisis.
[3] “The Indo-American Dream—Coming of Age with Call Center Jobs,” Mumbai Travel &
Living Guide, accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.mumbaisuburbs.com/articles/call-centers-
mumbai.html.
[4] Elizabeth Weiss, “We Really Love—and Spend on—Our Pets,” USA Today, December 11,
2007, accessed July 29, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2007-12-10-pet-
survey_N.htm#.
[5] Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten, “Penn World Table Version 6.2,” Center
for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of
Pennsylvania, September 2006, accessed June 29,
2011, http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt_index.php. The data in the Penn World
Tables are constructed so that dollar figures for different countries can be legitimately
compared. Specifically, the data are constructed on a purchasing power parity basis, meaning
that they take into account the different prices of goods and services in different countries and
are based on how much can actually be purchased.
6.1 The Single-Person Economy
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http://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/pressreleases/nomadic-way-of-life-in-niger-threatened-by-food-crisis
http://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/pressreleases/nomadic-way-of-life-in-niger-threatened-by-food-crisis
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http://www.mumbaisuburbs.com/articles/call-centers-mumbai.html
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How does the capital stock increase?
2. What are the factors that lead to output growth?
3. What are the differences between growth in a closed economy and growth in an open
economy?
The macroeconomy is very complicated. Overall economic performance depends on billions of
decisions made daily by millions of people. Economists have developed techniques to keep us
from being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the economy and the masses of data that are
available to us. One of our favorite devices is to imagine what an economy would look like if it
contained only one person. This fiction has two nice features: we do not have to worry about
differences among individuals, and we can easily isolate the most important economic
decisions. Thinking about the economy as if it were a single person is only a starting point, but
it is an extremely useful trick for cutting through all the complexities of, say, a $12 trillion
economy populated by 300 million individuals.
Figure 6.2 The Aggregate Production Function
The aggregate production function combines an economy’s physical capital stock, labor
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hours, human capital, and technology to produce output (real gross domestic product [real
GDP]).
Solovenia
Imagine, then, an economy called Solovenia. Solovenia is populated by one individual—we
will call him Juan. Juan has access to an aggregate production function. The amount of
output (real GDP) that he can produce depends on how large a physicalcapital stock he
owns, how many hours he chooses to work, his human capital, and his technology (Figure 6.2
“The Aggregate Production Function”). Physical capital is the stock of factories and
machinery in the economy, while human capital refers to the skills and education of the
workforce. Technology is a catchall term for everything else (other than capital, labor, or
human capital) that affects output. [1] It includes the following:
Knowledge. The technological know-how of the economy
Social infrastructure. The institutions and social structures that allow a country to
produce its real GDP
Natural resources. The land and mineral resources in the country
Toolkit: Section 16.15 “The Aggregate Production Function”
You can review the aggregate production function, including its inputs, in the toolkit.
Much of our focus in this chapter is on how economies build up their stock of physical
capital. Figure 6.3 “The Aggregate Production Function: Output as a Function of the Physical
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Capital Stock” shows how output in the aggregate production function depends on the capital
stock. Increases in the capital stock lead to more output. If Juan has more tools to work with,
then he can produce more goods. However, we usually think that the production function will
exhibit diminishing marginal product of capital, which means that a given increase in
the capital stock contributes more to output when the capital stock is low than when the
capital stock is high. In Figure 6.3 “The Aggregate Production Function: Output as a Function
of the Physical Capital Stock”, we can see this from the fact that the production function gets
flatter as the amount of physical capital increases.
Figure 6.3 The Aggregate Production Function: Output as a Function of the Physical Capital
Stock
As the amount of physical capital increases, output increases, but at a decreasing rate
because of the diminishing marginal product of capital.
Each day Juan chooses how much time to work and how much time to spend in leisure. Other
things being equal, we expect that Juan likes to have leisure time. This is not to say that Juan
never gets any satisfaction from working. But like most people—even those who enjoy their
jobs—he would prefer to work a little bit less and play a little bit more. He cannot spend all his
time in leisure, however. He works because he likes to consume. The harder he works, the
more real GDP he can produce and consume. Juan’s decision about how many hours to work
each day is determined in large part by how productive he can be—that is, how much real GDP
he can produce for each hour of leisure time that he gives up.
Juan does not have to consume all the output that he produces; he might save some of it for
the future. As well as deciding how much to work, he decides how much to consume and how
much to save each day. You have probably made decisions like Juan’s. At some time in your
life, you may have worked at a job—perhaps in a fast-food restaurant, a grocery store, or a
coffee shop. Perhaps you were paid weekly. Then each week you might have spent all the
money you earned on movies, meals out, or clothes. Or—like Juan—you might have decided to
spend only some of that money and save some for the future. When you save money instead of
spending it, you are choosing to consume goods and services at some future date instead of
right now. You may choose to forgo movies and clothes today to save for the purchase of a car
or a vacation.
The choice we have just described—consuming versus saving—is one of the most fundamental
decisions in macroeconomics. It comes up again and again when we study the macroeconomy.
Just as you and Juan make this choice, so does the overall economy. Of course, the economy
doesn’t literally make its own decision about how much to save. Instead, the saving decisions
of each individual household in the economy determine the overall amount of savings in the
economy. And the economy as a whole doesn’t save the way you do—by putting money in a
bank. An economy saves by devoting some of its production to capital goods rather than
consumer goods. If Juan chooses to produce capital goods, he will have a larger capital stock
in the future, which will allow him to be more productive and enjoy higher consumption in the
future.
Growth in a Closed Economy
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At any given moment, Juan’s ability to produce output is largely determined by his stock of
physical capital, his human capital, and the state of technology in Solovenia. But, as time
passes, the level of output in Solovenia can change through a variety of mechanisms.
First, the capital stock in Solovenia can grow over time, as shown in Figure 6.4. Juan builds up
his capital stock by saving. Since Juan is the only inhabitant, the amount he saves is equal to
the national savings of Solovenia. It is the difference between his output (real GDP of
Solovenia) and the amount he consumes. [2]
Figure 6.4
Increases in the capital stock lead to increases in output. If the capital stock in Solovenia
increases between this year and next year, output also increases. Increases in the capital
stock are one source of growth.
The more that Juan saves today, the more he can build up his capital stock, and the higher his
future standard of living will be. If Juan chooses to consume less today, he will have a higher
living standard in the future. If Juan chooses to consume more today, he must accept that this
means less consumption in the future. Economies, like individuals, can choose between eating
their cake now or saving it for the future.
In making this decision, Juan weighs the cost of giving up a little bit of consumption today
against the benefit of having a little bit more consumption in the future. The higher the
marginal product of capital, the more future benefit he gets from sacrificing consumption
today. Other things being equal, a higher marginal product of capital induces Juan to save
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more. Juan’s choice also depends on how patient or impatient he is. The more patient he is,
the more he is willing to give up consumption today to enjoy more consumption in the future.
Increases in the amount of physical capital are one way in which an economy can grow.
Another is through increases in human capital and technology. These shift the production
function upward, as shown in Figure 6.5. Perhaps Juan sometimes has better ideas about how
to do things. Perhaps he gets better with practice. Perhaps Juan spends some time trying to
come up with better ways of producing things.
Figure 6.5
Increases in human capital or technology lead to increases in output. Increases in
technology, human capital, and the workforce, like increases in the capital stock, are a
source of output growth.
Through the accumulation of physical and human capital, and by improving the components
of technology such as knowledge and social infrastructure, the output in Solovenia will grow
over time. The combined effect of physical capital growth and improvements in technology is
shown in Figure 6.6.
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Figure 6.6
Increases in capital, human capital, and technology all lead to increases in output. In
general, economies grow because of increases in capital, technology, human capital, and the
workforce.
Growth in an Open Economy
If Juan does not trade with the rest of the world, his only way to save for the future is by
building up his capital stock. In this case, national savings equal investment. An economy
that does not trade with other countries is called a closed economy. An economy that trades
with other countries is called an open economy. In the modern world, no economy is
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completely closed, although some economies (such as Belgium) are much more open than
others (such as North Korea). The world as a whole is a closed economy, of course.
If Solovenia is an open economy, Juan has other options. He might decide that he can get a
better return on his savings by investing in foreign assets (such as Italian real estate, shares of
Australian firms, or Korean government bonds). Domestic investment would then be less than
national savings. Juan is lending to the rest of the world.
Alternatively, Juan might think that the benefits of investment in his home economy are
sufficiently high that he borrows from the rest of the world to finance investment above and
beyond the amount of his savings. Domestic investment is then greater than national savings.
Of course, if Juan lends to the rest of the world, then he will have extra resources in the future
when those loans are repaid. If he borrows from the rest of the world, he will need to pay off
that loan at some point in the future.
There may be very good opportunities in an economy that justify a lot of investment. In this
case, it is worthwhile for an economy to borrow from other countries to supplement its own
savings and build up the capital stock faster. Even though the economy will have to pay off
those loans in the future, the benefits from the higher capital stock are worth it.
The circular flow of income shows us how these flows show up in the national accounts. If
we are borrowing on net from other countries, there is another source of funds in additional to
national savings that can be used for domestic investment. If we are lending on net to other
countries, domestic investment is reduced.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
You can review the circular flow of income in the toolkit.
investment = national savings + borrowing from other countries
or
investment = national savings − lending to other countries.
Savings and investment in a country are linked, but they are not the same thing. The savings
rate tells us how much an economy is setting aside for the future. But when studying the
accumulation of capital in an economy, we look at the investment rate rather than the
savings rate. Total investment as a fraction of GDP is called the investment rate:
investment rate =
investment
GDP
.
Figure 6.7 Investment Rates in the United States, India, and Niger
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There are marked differences in investment rates in the United States, India, and Niger.
Source: Alan Heston, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 7.0,
Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of
Pennsylvania, May 2011.
Figure 6.7 “Investment Rates in the United States, India, and Niger” shows investment rates
in the United States, India, and Niger from 1960 to 2009. A number of features of this picture
are striking: [3]
For most of the period, India had a higher investment rate than the other two countries. As
we saw earlier, India was also the fastest growing of the three countries. These facts are
connected: capital accumulation plays an important role in the growth process.
The investment rate in the United States has been relatively flat over time, though it has
been noticeably lower in recent years.
Investment rates in Niger have been more volatile than in the other two countries. They
were low in the mid 1980s but have increased substantially in recent years.
Low investment rates may be due to low savings rates. They may also reflect relatively low
returns to increases in the capital stock in a country. The low investment rate that prevailed
for many years in Niger not only reflected a low saving rate but also indicates that something
is limiting investment from external sources. For the United States, in contrast, a significant
part of the high investment rate is due not to domestic savings but to inflows from other
countries.
We know that output per person is a useful indicator of living standards. Increases in output
per person generally translate into increases in material standards of living. But to the extent
that an economy trades with other countries, the two are not equivalent. If an economy
borrows to finance its investment, output per person will exaggerate living standards in the
country because it does not take into account outstanding obligations to other countries. If an
economy places some of its savings elsewhere, then measures of output per person will
understate living standards. [4]
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Solovenia and Solovakia
Now add another country, Solovakia (with a single inhabitant named Una), and compare it to
Solovenia. We can compare Solovenia and Solovakia by investigating which is producing more
output per person and why. Imagine, for example, that Solovenia is a relatively poor country,
and Solovakia is richer. Using our knowledge of the aggregate production function, we can
understand how this difference might arise. It might be because Una has more human capital
or knowledge than Juan, or because Una has a larger stock of physical capital.
Another basis for comparison is the rate at which the two economies are growing. If Solovakia
is richer, and if it is also growing faster than Solovenia, then the gap between the two
countries will become wider over time. We call such a process divergence. Conversely, if
Solovenia is growing faster than Solovakia, then the gap between Juan’s and Una’s living
standards will become smaller over time. Such a situation, where poorer countries catch up to
richer ones, is called convergence.
Why might we see either convergence or divergence? Part of the answer has to do with
the marginal product of capital in the two countries. Suppose that Solovakia is richer
because it has a larger stock of physical capital than Solovenia. In that case, we expect the
marginal product of capital to be larger in Solovenia. Solovenia is a more competitive
economy than Solovakia. Juan will want to invest at home, while Una will take some of the
output that she produces in Solovakia and invest it in Solovenia. Therefore we expect capital
to migrate from Solovakia to Solovenia. As a consequence, it is likely that Solovenia will grow
faster than Solovakia, leading to convergence.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The capital stock increases through investment.
Because physical capital is an input in the aggregate production function, growth in
capital stock is one source of output growth. The other sources are the accumulation
of human capital and increases in technology.
In a closed economy, investment equals national savings. In an open economy,
investment equals national savings plus inflows of funds from abroad. So in an open
economy, growth in the capital stock and hence output growth can be financed both
by domestic savings and borrowing from other countries.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Draw a version of Figure 6.3 “The Aggregate Production Function: Output as a Function
of the Physical Capital Stock” with labor hours instead of physical capital on the
horizontal axis. Explain how the figure illustrates the positive marginal product of labor
and diminishing marginal product of labor. How would you illustrate a change in the
capital stock using this figure?
2. Explain how an economy can have an investment rate of 10 percent but a savings rate of
only 3 percent.
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[1] Physical capital, human capital, and technology are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5
“Globalization and Competitiveness”.
[2] In a real economy, national savings also include the savings of government: we must add
in the government surplus or subtract the government deficit, as appropriate.
[3] International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, April 2011, accessed
July 29, 2011, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/01/weodata/index.aspx.
[4] The national accounts deal with this issue by distinguishing between GDP, which
measures the production that takes place within a country’s borders, and gross national
product (GNP), which corrects for income received from or paid to other countries.
6.2 Four Reasons Why GDP Varies across Countries
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the main possible explanations for real GDP differences across countries?
2. How important are differences in technology for explaining differences in real GDP
across countries?
We started this chapter with the following question: “Why are some countries rich and other
countries poor?” The aggregate production function and the story of Juan help us to
understand what determines the amount of output that an economy can produce, taking us
the first step toward explaining why some countries are richer than others.
The production function tells us that if we know four things—the size of the workforce, the
amount of physical capital, the amount of human capital, and the level of technology—then we
know how much output we are producing. When comparing two countries, if we find that one
country has more physical capital, more labor, a better educated and trained workforce (that
is, more human capital), and superior technology, then we know that country will have more
output.
Differences in these inputs are often easy to observe. Large countries obviously have bigger
workforces than small countries. Rich countries have more and better capital goods. In the
farmlands of France, you see tractors and expensive farm machinery, while you see plows
pulled by oxen in Vietnam; in Hong Kong, you see skyscrapers and fancy office buildings,
while the tallest building in Burkina Faso is about 12 stories high; in the suburbs of the United
States, you see large houses, while you see shacks made of cardboard and corrugated iron in
the Philippines. Similarly, rich countries often have well-equipped schools, sophisticated
training facilities, and fine universities, whereas poorer countries provide only basic
education. We want to be able to say more, however. We would like to know how much these
different inputs contribute to overall economic performance.
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To get some sense of this, we look at some rough numbers for the United States, India, and
Niger. We carried out this exercise using data from 2003, but the fundamental message does
not depend on the year that we have chosen; we would get very similar conclusions with data
from any recent year. To start, let us look at the different levels of output in these
countries. Table 6.1 “Real GDP in the United States, India, and Niger”gives real gross
domestic product (real GDP) in these countries. Note that we are now looking at the overall
level of GDP, rather than GDP per person as we did at the beginning of this chapter. Real GDP
in the United States was about $10.2 trillion. In India, real GDP was about one-third of US
GDP: $3.1 trillion. In Niger, real GDP was under $10 billion. In other words, the United States
produces about 1,000 times as much output as Niger.
Table 6.1 Real GDP in the United States, India, and Niger
Country Real GDP in 2003 (Billions of
Year 2000 US Dollars)
United
States
10,205
India 3,138
Niger 9
Source: Alan Heston, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 7.0,
Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of
Pennsylvania, May 2011.
In the following subsections, we look at how the different inputs contribute to bring about
these large differences in output. We go through a series of thought experiments in which we
imagine putting the amount of each input available in the United States into the production
functions for the Indian and Niger economies.
Differences in the Workforce across Countries
The United States, India, and Niger differ in many ways. One is simply the number of people
in each country. The workforce in the United States is about 150 million people. The
workforce in India is more than three times greater—about 478 million in 2010—while the
workforce in Niger is only about 5 million people. Thus India has much more labor to put into
its production function than does Niger.
In Table 6.2 “Real GDP in 2003 in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three Countries
Had the Same Workforce” we look at what would happen to output in India and Niger if—
counterfactually—each had a workforce the size of that in the United States while their other
inputs were unchanged. Output in the United States is, of course, unchanged in this
experiment. India’s output would decrease to about $1.4 trillion because they would have a
smaller workforce. Niger’s output would increase about tenfold to $88 trillion. Differences in
the workforce obviously matter but do not explain all or even most of the variation across the
three countries. Niger’s output would still be less than 1 percent of output in the United States.
Table 6.2 Real GDP in 2003 in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three Countries Had
the Same Workforce
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Country Real GDP in 2003 (Billions of
Year 2000 US Dollars)
United
States
10,205
India 1,475
Niger 88
Differences in Physical Capital across Countries
Not surprisingly, the United States also has a much larger capital stock than does Niger. The
capital stock in the United States is worth about $30 trillion. India’s capital stock is about $3
trillion, and Niger’s capital stock is much, much smaller—about $9 billion. So what would
happen if we also gave India and Niger the same amount of physical capital as the United
States? Table 6.3 “Real GDP in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three Countries Had
the Same Workforce and Physical Capital Stock” shows the answer.
India’s GDP, in this thought experiment, goes back to something close to its actual value of
around $3 trillion. In other words, the extra capital compensates for the smaller workforce.
Real GDP in the United States is still more than three times larger than that in India. The
extra capital makes a big difference in Niger, increasing its output about ten-fold. Even if
Niger had the same size workforce and the same amount of capital as the United States,
however, it would still have only a tenth of the amount of output. The other two inputs—
human capital and technology—evidently matter as well.
Table 6.3 Real GDP in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three Countries Had the Same
Workforce and Physical Capital Stock
Country Real GDP in 2003 (Billions of
Year 2000 US Dollars)
United
States
10,205
India 3,054
Niger 1,304
Differences in Human Capital across Countries
Differences in education and skills certainly help to explain some of the differences among
countries. Researchers have found evidence that measures of educational performance are
correlated with GDP per person. The causality almost certainly runs in both directions:
education levels are low in Niger because the country is so poor, and the country is poor
because education is low.
We can include measures of education and training in an attempt to measure the skills of the
workforce. In fact, economists Robert Hall and Chad Jones have constructed a measure that
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allows us to compare the amount of human capital in different countries. [1]In Table 6.4 “Real
GDP in 2003 in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three Countries Had the Same
Workforce, Physical Capital Stock, and Human Capital Stock”, we bring the human capital
level in India and Niger up to the level in the United States and, as before, suppose that all
three countries have the same amount of labor and physical capital. Real GDP in India would
climb to about $5.2 trillion, or a little over half the level in United States. Niger’s real GDP
would equal about $2.8 trillion, meaning the increased human capital would more than
double Niger’s GDP. However, real GDP in the United States would still be more than three
times greater than that of Niger.
Table 6.4 Real GDP in 2003 in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three Countries Had
the Same Workforce, Physical Capital Stock, and Human Capital Stock
Country Real GDP in 2003 (Billions of
Year 2000 US Dollars)
United
States
10,205
India 5,170
Niger 2,758
Differences in Technology across Countries
To summarize, even after we eliminate differences in labor, physical capital, and human
capital, much is still left to be explained. According to our production function, the remaining
variation is accounted for by differences in technology—our catchall term for everything apart
from labor, physical capital, and human capital.
Just as firms accumulate physical capital, they also accumulate knowledge in various ways.
Large firms in developed countries develop new knowledge through the activities of their
research and development (R&D) divisions. [2] In poorer countries, firms may access existing
knowledge by importing technology from more developed countries.
Differences in knowledge help to explain differences in output per worker. The rich countries
of the world tend to have access to state-of-the-art production techniques. We say that they
are on the technology frontier; they use the most advanced production technologies
available. Factories in poor countries often do not use these production techniques and lack
modern machinery. They are inside the technology frontier.
As economists have researched the differences in economic performance in rich and poor
countries, they have found that success depends on more than physical capital, human capital,
and knowledge. Appropriate institutions—the social infrastructure—also need to be in place.
These are institutions that allow people to hold property and write and enforce contracts that
ensure they can enjoy the fruits of their investment. Key ingredients are a basic rule of law and
a relative lack of corruption. An ability to contract and trade in relatively free markets is also
important.
Particularly in more advanced countries, we need the right institutions to encourage
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technological progress. This is complicated because there is a trade-off between policies to
encourage the creation of knowledge and policies to encourage the dissemination of
knowledge. Knowledge is typically a nonexcludable good, so individuals and firms are not
guaranteed the rights to new knowledge that they create. This reduces the incentive to
produce knowledge. To counter this problem, governments establish certain property rights
over new knowledge, in the form of patent and copyright laws. Knowledge is also typically
a nonrival good, so everyone can, in principle, benefit from a given piece of knowledge.
Once new knowledge exists, the best thing to do is to give it away for free. Patent and
copyright laws are good for encouraging the development of knowledge but bad for
encouraging the dissemination of knowledge. Current debates over intellectual property rights
(file sharing, open source, downloading of music, etc.) reflect this trade-off.
Differences in natural resources can also play a role in explaining economic performance.
Some countries are lucky enough to possess large amounts of valuable resources. Obvious
examples are oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, the United States,
and the United Kingdom. Yet there are many countries with considerable natural resources
that have not enjoyed great prosperity. Niger’s uranium deposits, for example, have not
helped that country very much. At the same time, some places with very little in the way of
natural resources have been very successful economically: examples include Luxembourg and
Hong Kong. Natural resources help, but they are not necessary for economic success, nor do
they guarantee it.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Differences in real GDP across countries can come from differences in population,
physical capital, human capital, and technology.
After controlling for differences in labor, physical capital, and human capital, a
significant difference in real GDP across countries remains.
Checking Your Understanding
1. In Table 6.2 “Real GDP in 2003 in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three
Countries Had the Same Workforce”, Table 6.3 “Real GDP in the United States, India,
and Niger if All Three Countries Had the Same Workforce and Physical Capital Stock”,
and Table 6.4 “Real GDP in 2003 in the United States, India, and Niger if All Three
Countries Had the Same Workforce, Physical Capital Stock, and Human Capital Stock”,
the level of real GDP for the United States is the same as it is in Table 6.1 “Real GDP in
the United States, India, and Niger”. Why is this the case?
2. What kinds of information would help you measure differences in human capital?
3. How can human capital and knowledge flow from one country to another?
[1] To estimate relative human capital levels in different countries, we use the figures in
Robert Hall and Chad Jones, “Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output per
Worker Than Others?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 1 (1999): 83–116.
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[2] Gains in productivity of this form sometimes end up embodied in capital stock—think of a
computer operating system, such as Windows or Linux. Such knowledge increases the value of
capital stock and is already captured by looking at the ratio of capital stock to GDP.
6.3 The Accumulation of Physical Capital
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What factors determine the growth rate of the capital stock?
2. Will poorer countries catch up to richer countries because of faster growth of capital
stock?
3. What is the evidence on convergence?
4. Why might countries not converge?
Our first task in this chapter was to explain the vast differences in living standards that we
observe in the world. We now know that this variation is due to differences in physical capital,
human capital, and technology. The rough calculations in Section 6.2 “Four Reasons Why
GDP Varies across Countries” tell us that variations in physical capital, human capital, and
technology all play a role in explaining differences in economic performance.
Now we consider these inputs separately. In this section, we look at the accumulation of
physical capital. In Section 6.4 “Balanced Growth”, we look at the role of human capital and
technology. Our main aim is to consider one of our two remaining questions:
Will poorer countries catch up to richer countries?
The Growth Rate of the Capital Stock
Capital goods are goods such as factories, machines, and trucks. They are used for the
production of other goods and are not completely used up in the production process.
Economies build up their capital stocks by devoting some of their gross domestic product
(GDP) to new capital goods—that is, investment. As we saw in our discussion of Solovenia
in Section 6.2 “Four Reasons Why GDP Varies across Countries”, if a country does not interact
much with other countries (that is, it is a closed economy) the amount of investment reflects
savings within a country. In open economies, the amount of investment reflects the perceived
benefits to investment in that country compared to other countries.
Capital goods wear out over time and have to be scrapped and replaced. A simple way to think
about this depreciation is to imagine that a fraction of the capital stock wears out every year. A
reasonable average depreciation rate for the US economy is 4 or 5 percent. To understand
what this means, think about an economy where the capital stock consists of a large number
of identical machines. A depreciation rate of 5 percent means that for every 100 machines in
the economy, 5 machines must be replaced every year. [1]
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The depreciation of capital goods reduces the capital stock. The total amount of capital lost to
depreciation each year is calculated by multiplying the depreciation rate and the capital stock
together. If the capital stock is $30 trillion, for example, and the depreciation rate is 5 percent,
then $1.5 trillion (= $30 trillion × 0.05) worth of capital is lost each year.
The capital stock increases as long as there is enough new investment to replace the worn out
capital and still contribute some extra.
The overall change in the capital stock is equal to new investment minus depreciation:
change in capital stock = new investment − depreciation rate × capital stock.
For example, suppose that the current capital stock (measured in trillions of dollars) is 40,
and the depreciation rate is 10 percent per year. Then the capital stock after depreciation is 40
− (.1 × 40) = 40 − 4 = 36. Suppose that new investment is $4.8 trillion. Then the new capital
stock is 36 + 4.8 = 40.8. In this case, capital stock has increased by $0.8 trillion, or 2 percent.
The equation for the change in the capital stock is one of the fundamental ingredients of
economic growth. It tells us that economies build up their capital stock—and therefore their
real GDP—by devoting enough output to new investment to both replace worn out capital and
then add some more. If we divide both sides of the previous equation by the capital stock, we
can obtain the growth rate of the capital stock. (Remember that the growth rate of a variable
is the change in the variable divided by its initial level.)
capital stock growth rate =
investment
capital stock
– depreciation rate.
The growth rate of the capital stock depends on three things:
1. The amount of investment. The more investment the economy carries out, the more
quickly the capital stock grows.
2. The current capital stock. The larger the capital stock, other things being equal, the
lower its growth rate.
3. The depreciation rate. If existing capital wears out faster, the capital stock grows more
slowly.
It is intuitive that a higher investment rate increases the growth rate of the capital stock, and a
higher depreciation rate decreases the growth rate of the capital stock. It is less obvious why
the growth rate of the capital stock is lower when the capital stock is higher. The growth rate
measures the change in the capital stock as a percentage of the existing capital stock. A given
change in the capital stock results in a smaller growth rate if the existing capital stock is
larger. For example, suppose that the current capital stock is 100, and the change in the
capital stock is 10. Then the growth rate is 10 percent. But if the current capital stock is 1,000,
then the same change of 10 in the capital stock represents only a 1 percent growth rate.
Toolkit: Section 16.11 “Growth Rates”
The toolkit contains more information on how growth rates are calculated.
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Convergence through Capital Accumulation
Why are we so interested in the accumulation of capital? One reason is that poverty of the
kind we observe in Niger and elsewhere is a massive problem for the world. About 40 percent
of the world’s population—close to 2.5 billion people—live in conditions of poverty. (The
World Bank defines poverty as living on less than US$2 per day.) We are not going to solve
the problem of mass poverty overnight, so we would like to know whether this gap between
the rich and the poor is a permanent feature of the world. It might be that economies will
diverge, meaning that the disparities in living standards will get worse and worse, or it might
be that they will converge, with poorer countries catching up to richer countries.
When comparing two countries, if we find that the poorer economy is growing faster than the
richer one, then the two are converging. If we find that the richer country is growing faster
than the poorer one, they are diverging. Moreover, if a country has a small capital stock, we
know that—other things being equal—it will tend to be a poorer country. If a country has a
large capital stock, then—again, other things being equal—it is likely to be a richer country.
The question of convergence then becomes: other things being equal, do we expect a country
with a small capital stock to grow faster than an economy with a large capital stock?
The answer is yes, and the reason is the marginal product of capital. From the production
function, the marginal product of capital is large when the capital stock is small. Think again
about Juan in Solovenia. A large marginal product of capital means that he can obtain a lot of
extra output if he acquires some extra capital. This gives him an incentive to save rather than
consume. A large marginal product of capital also means that Juan can attract investment
from other countries.
A country where the marginal product of capital is high is a competitive economy—one where
both domestic savers and foreign savers want to build up the capital stock. The capital stock
will grow quickly in such an economy. This is precisely what we saw in the equation for the
growth rate of the capital stock: higher investment and a lower capital stock both lead to a
larger capital stock growth rate. Both of these imply that a country with a large marginal
product of capital will tend to grow fast.
We illustrate this idea in Figure 6.8 “Convergence through the Accumulation of Capital”.
Country A has a small capital stock. The aggregate production function tells us that this
translates into a large marginal product of capital—the production function is steep. In turn, a
large marginal product of capital means that country A will grow quickly. Country B has an
identical production function but a larger capital stock, so the marginal product of capital is
lower in country B than in country A. There is less incentive to invest, implying that country B,
while richer than country A, grows more slowly.
Figure 6.8 “Convergence through the Accumulation of Capital” also shows that it is possible
for a country to have such a large capital stock that it shrinks rather than grows. Country C
has so much capital that its marginal product is very low. There is little incentive to build up
the capital stock, so the capital stock depreciates faster than it is replaced by new investment.
In such an economy, the capital stock and output would decrease over time.
Figure 6.8 Convergence through the Accumulation of Capital
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The growth rate of the capital stock depends on the marginal product of capital. Country A
has little capital, so the marginal product of capital is large, and the capital stock will grow
rapidly. Country B has more capital, so the capital stock grows more slowly. Country C has
so much capital that the capital stock decreases.
Figure 6.8 “Convergence through the Accumulation of Capital” suggests an even stronger
conclusion: all three economies will ultimately end up at the same capital stock and the same
level of output—complete convergence. This conclusion is half right. If the three economies
were identical except for their capital stocks and if there were no growth in human capital and
technology, they would indeed converge to exactly the same level of capital stock and output.
In Section 6.4 “Balanced Growth”, we look at this argument more carefully. First, though, we
examine the evidence on convergence.
Convergence or Divergence? Two Contrasting Pictures
Convergence is a very pretty theory but is it borne out by the evidence? Figure 6.9 “Some
Evidence of Convergence” shows the growth experience of several countries in the second half
of the 20th century. These countries are all members of the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD) and are, relatively speaking, rich. [2]Figure 6.9 “Some
Evidence of Convergence” shows real GDP per person in these countriesrelative to the United
States (the United States itself is the horizontal line near the top of the figure.) Figure 6.9
“Some Evidence of Convergence” does show some evidence of convergence. Countries with
higher levels of real GDP person in 1950 tended to grow more slowly than countries with
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lower levels of real GDP per person. Poorer countries in this group tended to catch up with
richer countries.
Figure 6.9 Some Evidence of Convergence
The growth experience of 16 relatively developed countries, measured as real GDP per
person relative to the level in the United States, shows considerable evidence of convergence.
So far so good. But Figure 6.10 “Some Evidence of Divergence” shows the growth experience
over the same period for a more diverse group of countries. This group is largely composed of
poorer countries. The picture here is very different: we do not see convergence. There is no
evidence that the poorer countries are growing faster than the richer countries. In some cases,
there even appears to be divergence: poor countries growing more slowly than rich countries
so that output levels in rich and poor countries move further apart.
Figure 6.10 Some Evidence of Divergence
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In contrast to Figure 6.9 “Some Evidence of Convergence”, the countries in this sample do not
appear to be converging. Many countries that were poor in 1950 were just as poor,
relatively speaking, in 2000.
Table 6.5 “Evidence from Select Countries” shows more data for some of these countries. It
lists the level of initial GDP per person and the average growth rate in GDP per person
between the early 1950s and the end of the century. For example, Argentina had real GDP per
person of $6,430 in 1950 (in year 1996 dollars) and grew at an average rate of 1.25 percent
over the 50-year period. Egypt and South Korea had very close levels of GDP per person in the
early 1950s, but growth in South Korea was much higher than that in Egypt: by the year 2000,
GDP per person was $15,876 in South Korea but only $4,184 in Egypt. These two countries
very clearly diverged rather than converged. Looking at China, the level of GDP per person in
the early 1950s was less than 10 percent that of Argentina. By 2000, GDP per person in China
was about 33 percent of that in Argentina.
Table 6.5 Evidence from Select Countries
Country
(Starting
Year)
Real GDP per Capita
(Year 1996 US Dollars)
Percentage Average
Growth Rate to 2000
Argentina
(1950)
6,430 1.25
Egypt (1950) 1,371 2.33
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China (1952) 584 4.0
South Korea
(1953)
1,328 5.5
Source: Penn World Tables
Overall, this evidence suggests that our theory can explain the behavior over time of some but
not all countries. If we look at relatively rich countries, then we do see evidence of
convergence. Across broader groups of countries, we do not see convergence, and we see some
evidence of divergence.
Explaining Divergence
Why is it that, contrary to what Figure 6.8 “Convergence through the Accumulation of
Capital” seems to suggest, not all countries converge? The logic of that picture rests on the
diminishing marginal product of capital. If rich countries have lower marginal product of
capital than poor countries, then we expect poor countries to catch up. If, for some reason,
richer countries sometimes also have a higher marginal product of capital than poorer
countries, then the argument for convergence disappears.
Figure 6.11 “Divergence Arising from Increasing Marginal Product of Capital” shows an
example where the aggregate production function looks a bit different. This production
function has a range where increases in capital stock lead to a higher rather than a lower
marginal product of capital. That is, for some amounts of capital, we see increasing marginal
product of capital rather than diminishing marginal product of capital. In the figure, country
A and country B converge, just as in our previous diagram. But country C is rich enough to lie
on the other side of the range where there is an increasing marginal product of capital.
Country C therefore has a higher marginal product of capital than country B, even though
country C is richer. Countries B and C will diverge, rather than converge.
Figure 6.11 Divergence Arising from Increasing Marginal Product of Capital
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In this diagram, three countries have an aggregate production function that does not
always exhibit diminishing marginal product of capital. As a result, the economies need not
converge.
Figure 6.12 “Divergence Arising from Differences in Technology” shows another reason why a
richer country might have a higher marginal product of capital than a smaller country.
In Figure 6.8 “Convergence through the Accumulation of Capital” we supposed that the three
countries had the same production function and differed only in terms of their capital stock.
In Figure 6.12 “Divergence Arising from Differences in Technology”, country B is richer than
country A for two reasons: it has more capital and has a superior technology (or more labor or
human capital). The higher capital stock, other things being equal, means a lower marginal
product of capital in country B. But the superior technology, other things being equal, means a
higher marginal product of capital in country B. In the picture we have drawn, the technology
effect dominates. Country B has the higher marginal product of capital, so it is the more
attractive location for capital—it is more competitive. Because of this, the capital stock
increases in country B. Indeed, if the only factor driving investment is the marginal product of
capital, then we would expect capital to flow among countries until the marginal product of
capital is equal everywhere. [3]
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One reason why a richer economy might have better technology is because it has better social
infrastructure. In particular, developed economies often have the legal and cultural
institutions that preserve property rights. The return on investment is higher, other things
being equal, when property rights are protected. In economies with less well-developed
institutions, investors need a higher rate of return to compensate them for the additional risk
of placing their capital in those countries.
Measuring these aspects of social infrastructure is a challenge. The World Bank has attempted
to do so in its 2005 World Development Report. [4] The study looks at various aspects of
doing business in 48 countries. The top constraints on investment reported by firms were
policy uncertainty, macroeconomic instability, and taxes. Many of the risks of doing business
are directly associated with government action in the present and in the future. This is nicely
stated in the World Bank report: “Because investment decisions are forward looking, firms’
judgments about the future are critical. Many risks for firms, including uncertain responses by
customers and competitors, are a normal part of investment, and firms should bear them. But
governments have an important role to play in maintaining a stable and secure environment,
including by protecting property rights. Policy uncertainty, macroeconomic instability, and
arbitrary regulation can also cloud opportunities and chill incentives to invest. Indeed, policy-
related risks are the main concern of firms in developing countries.” [5]
Figure 6.12 Divergence Arising from Differences in Technology
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In this diagram, country B has a better technology or more human capital than country A.
Even though country B has a larger capital stock, it also has a larger marginal product of
capital.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Capital stock increases from investment and decreases due to the depreciation of
capital stock.
All else being the same, poorer countries have a lower capital stock and therefore a
higher marginal product of capital compared to rich countries. Thus capital
accumulation should be faster in poor countries, which will lead to convergence with
richer countries.
The evidence suggests convergence between some but not all economies.
Divergence of output across countries might come from the presence of an increasing
marginal product of capital or from one country having a superior technology to
another.
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Checking Your Understanding
1. Suppose we have 100 units of capital stock at the beginning of 2012 and the following
table gives the investment for the next 5 years. Suppose the depreciation rate is 5
percent. Fill in the blanks in the table for the years 2012–2017.
Year Capital Stock
(Start of Year)
Investment Depreciation
2012 100 80
2013 20
2014 50
2015 120
2016 10
2. If one country has a higher level of real GDP than another, does that mean it must have a
higher growth rate as well?
3. If citizens of a relatively poor country are educated in a richer country, does this help or
hinder convergence?
[1] The depreciation rate can be understood in terms of the average lifetime of a typical
machine. For example, a depreciation rate of 5 percent is the same as saying that, on average,
machines last for 20 years. To see this, imagine that capital stock is kept constant at 100
machines, and each machine lasts for 20 years. Imagine also that 5 machines are 1 year old, 5
machines are 2 years old, and so forth, with the oldest 5 machines being 20 years old. Each
year, these 5 oldest machines would wear out (5 percent depreciation) and have to be replaced
by 5 new machines. After a year has passed, the situation will be exactly the same as the
previous year: there will be 5 machines that are 1 year old, 5 machines that are 2 years, and so
forth. Mathematically, we are saying that the lifetime of a machine = 1/depreciation rate: 20 =
1/0.05.
[2] The countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland,
Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
The median real GDP per capita in 1950 for these countries was about $6,000, in year 1996
dollars. Data for Figure 6.9 “Some Evidence of Convergence” and Figure 6.10 “Some Evidence
of Divergence” come from Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten, “Penn World
Table Version 6.2,” Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at
the University of Pennsylvania, September 2006, accessed June 29,
2011,http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt_index.php.
[3] We discuss capital migration across countries in more detail in Chapter 5 “Globalization
and Competitiveness”.
[4] World Bank, World Development Report 2005: A Better Investment Climate for
Everyone(New York: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2004), 8, accessed August 22,
2011,http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2005/Resources/complete_report .
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[5] World Bank, World Development Report 2005: A Better Investment Climate for
Everyone(New York: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2004), 5, accessed August 22,
2011,http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2005/Resources/complete_report .
6.4 Balanced Growth
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is balanced growth?
2. Why does balanced growth matter?
3. When will economies converge to a balanced-growth path?
We have seen that the accumulation of capital—other things being equal—leads economies to
converge over time. However, we saw that the evidence for such convergence in the data is
highly mixed. To understand more about when economies will and will not converge, we need
a more complete theory of the sources of economic growth. In this section, we develop such a
theory and then use it to look again at the question of convergence. We initially take as given—
that is, as exogenous—the growth rates of human capital, the workforce, and the technology.
Growth Accounting
We begin with the tool of growth accounting. The growth accounting equation for our
aggregate production function is as follows: [1]
output growth rate = [a × (capital growth rate)]
+ [(1 − a) × (workforce growth rate + human capital growth rate)]
+ technology growth rate.
Toolkit: Section 16.17 “Growth Accounting”
You can review growth accounting in the toolkit.
In this equation, a is just a number. For the US economy, a is approximately equal to 1/3.
Remember that output is just another term for real gross domestic product (real GDP).
It turns out that, in the very long run, we expect the capital stock and the level of output to
grow at exactly the same rate. We see why later in this section. Such a situation is called
balanced growth. When this is true, the growth accounting equation then becomes [2]
balanced-growth output growth rate
= workforce growth rate + human capital growth rate +
1
1−a
× technology growth rate .
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For example, suppose that a = 1/3, the human capital growth rate = 0.01, the technology
growth rate = 0.02, and the workforce growth rate = 0.03. Then
balanced-growth output growth rate = 0.01 +
3
2
× 0.02 + 0.03 = 0.07.
The Growth Rate of Output per Worker in a Balanced-Growth Economy
When we are comparing living standards across countries, it is better to adjust for differences
in the size of the workforce to obtain output per worker. This is a measure of the
overall productivity of an economy—that is, the effectiveness of an economy for producing
output. (Of course, output per worker and output per person are very closely related. For the
US economy, the workforce is roughly half the total population, so output per person is
therefore approximately half as much as output per worker.) The growth rate of output per
worker equals the growth rate of output minus the growth rate of the workforce:
balanced-growth output-per-worker growth rate = human capital growth rate +
1
1−a
× technology growth .
This equation tells us that, in the end, the secret to economic growth is the development of
knowledge and skills. Invention, innovation, education, training, and improvements in social
infrastructure are the drivers of economic growth in the very long run.
Perhaps surprisingly, the growth rate of the capital stock is not a fundamental determinant of
the growth rate. When we have balanced growth, the capital stock grows, which contributes to
the overall growth of output. But if we ask what determines the overall growth rate in an
economy, it is the growth of technology and human capital. The capital stock then adjusts to
keep the economy on its balanced-growth path. By the definition of balanced growth, the
growth rate of the capital stock is equal to the output growth rate.
Figure 6.13 Output and Capital Stock in a Balanced-Growth Economy
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This picture shows an example of an economy on a balanced-growth path. Both variables
grow at 3 percent per year and the capital stock is always equal to exactly twice the level of
GDP.
Figure 6.13 “Output and Capital Stock in a Balanced-Growth Economy” illustrates balanced
growth. Look first at output. Notice that even though the growth rate of output is constant,
the graph is not a straight line. Instead, it curves upward: the change in the level of output
increases over time. This is because a growth rate is a percentage change. In our example,
output in 2000 is $10 trillion, and the growth rate is 3 percent. From 2000 to 2001, output
increases by $300 billion (= $10 trillion × 0.03). By 2050, output is equal to $44 trillion.
Between that year and the next, output increases by $1.3 trillion (= $44 trillion × 0.03). Even
though the growth rate is the same, the change in the level of output is more than four times
as large.
When output and the capital stock grow at the same rate, the ratio of the capital stock to GDP
does not change. In Figure 6.13 “Output and Capital Stock in a Balanced-Growth Economy”,
the value of the capital stock is always twice the value of output. The capital stock and real
GDP both grow at the same rate (3 percent per year), so the ratio of the capital stock to GDP
does not change over time.
Figure 6.14
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Balanced growth means that the ratio of the capital stock to output does not change. On a
balanced-growth path, output and the capital stock grow at the same rate, so the ratio of the
capital stock to output is always the same: the growth path of the economy is a straight line
from the origin.
Figure 6.14 shows what a constant ratio of the capital stock to GDP looks like in our
production function diagrams. Along any straight line from the origin, the ratio of the capital
stock to output does not change. As a simple example, suppose that (as in Figure 6.13 “Output
and Capital Stock in a Balanced-Growth Economy”) the capital stock is always twice the level
of output. This means that output is always half of the capital stock:
output = 0.5 × capital stock.
This is just the equation of a straight line that passes through the origin. In Figure 6.14,
increases in human capital or technology shift the production function upward. On the
balanced-growth path, capital stock grows at exactly the right rate so that the economy grows
along a straight line from the origin.
The Transition to Balanced Growth
If an economy is not yet on its balanced-growth path, it will tend to go toward that path. If a
country has a small capital stock relative to GDP, then its capital stock will grow faster than
real GDP. Countries that are still developing may well be in this position. Countries that are
further along in the development process are likely to be (approximately) on their balanced-
growth paths. For such countries, the ratio of capital stock to output is unchanging.
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Economies that have not yet accumulated enough capital to be on their balanced-growth
paths will have a growth rate that equals the balanced-growth rate plus an additional factor
due to the growth rate of capital relative to GDP. [3]
output per worker growth rate
= balanced-growth output-per-worker growth rate +
a
1−a
× (capital growth rate−output growth rate) .
The first term is the growth rate along the balanced-growth path. The second term is
the additional component to growth that comes about whenever the capital stock is growing
faster than output.
Table 6.6 “Approaching the Balanced-Growth Path” gives an example of an economy that is
approaching a balanced-growth path. Like the economy in Figure 6.13 “Output and Capital
Stock in a Balanced-Growth Economy”, the balanced-growth output growth rate is 3 percent.
The workforce grows at 1 percent, so output per worker grows at 2 percent along the balanced-
growth path. However, this economy starts off (in the year 2000) with a smaller capital stock
than is needed for balanced growth. Looking at the first row of the table, you can see that the
capital stock grows at 14.4 percent, while output grows at 6.8 percent. Because capital grows
faster than output, there is an additional component to growth, as we have just explained.
This contributes an extra 3.8 percentage points to the growth rate, so output per worker grows
at 5.8 percent.
As time goes on, the capital stock grows relative to output, and the economy gets closer to the
balanced-growth path. As this happens, the additional component of growth becomes smaller.
For example, in 2010, the capital stock grows at 6.8 percent, and output grows at 4.3 percent.
The growth rate of output per worker is 3.3 percent—2 percentage points being the balanced-
growth contribution and 1.3 percent due to the faster growth rate of capital stock compared to
output. By 2050, the economy is close to balanced growth: output per worker grows at 2.3
percent, with capital stock growing only a little bit faster than output.
Table 6.6 Approaching the Balanced-Growth Path
Year Balanced-
Growth Output
Growth Rate (%)
Balanced-
Growth
Output per
Worker
Growth
Rate (%)
Capital
Growth
Rate (%)
Output
Growth
Rate (%)
Output per
Worker
Growth
Rate (%)
2000 3.0 2.0 14.4 6.8 5.8
2005 3.0 2.0 9.3 5.1 4.1
2010 3.0 2.0 6.8 4.3 3.3
2015 3.0 2.0 5.5 3.8 2.8
2020 3.0 2.0 4.7 3.6 2.6
2025 3.0 2.0 4.1 3.4 2.4
… … … … … …
2050 3.0 2.0 3.8 2.3
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Countries that are well below their growth path will see their capital stock grow rapidly
relative to GDP. They will experience relatively rapid GDP growth. Countries that are close to
their balanced-growth path will see their capital stock grow more slowly relative to GDP and
have a GDP growth rate that is only slightly bigger than the balanced-growth rate. Although
the economy will eventually reach its balanced-growth value, this adjustment may take
decades. For this reason, we say that the economy will achieve balanced growth only in the
very long run. [4]
Convergence Revisited
We can now use our theory of balanced growth to make our earlier argument for convergence
more precise. Then we consider whether we might also see convergence from changes in
human capital and technology.
Convergence in Physical Capital
Imagine that we are comparing two countries that are identical in almost every respect. They
both have the same levels of technology and human capital and the same balanced-growth
ratio of capital stock to GDP. However, they have different amounts of physical capital.
Suppose that one of the countries has a large capital stock (call it the rich country) and the
other country has a much smaller capital stock (call it the poor country).
These two economies will initially have different levels of output and living standards. Our
model predicts, however, that these differences will be temporary. Both economies will
approach the balanced-growth path. The poor country will grow more rapidly because its ratio
of capital stock to GDP will be increasing more quickly as it moves toward the balanced-
growth path. Over time, we expect to see the poor country catch up to the rich one. We
illustrate this in Figure 6.15 “Convergence of a Rich Country and a Poor Country”.
Figure 6.15 Convergence of a Rich Country and a Poor Country
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Consider two economies, identical in all respects except that one has a smaller capital stock
than the other. The poorer country accumulates capital faster than the richer country and
grows faster.
This is exactly the same mechanism for convergence that we saw before. The country with a
smaller capital stock will have a higher marginal product of capital and will grow faster
because the country is a more attractive place for investment. Because the poor country
accumulates capital more rapidly than the richer country, it will grow faster. The two
countries will converge to the same balanced-growth path and to the same level of output per
person.
Convergence in Human Capital
So far we have not considered why human capital might change over time. If there are reasons
to think that this variable might grow more quickly in poor countries than in rich countries,
we have another force that might drive convergence.
In some ways, human capital resembles physical capital. As with the physical capital stock,
some accumulation is the result of decisions by governments, and some comes from decisions
by private agents. From the government side, it is likely that economies with low levels of
human capital might also be economies in which there is a high return to basic education. If
literacy rates are low and most children do not receive much education, even straightforward
investments in schooling might yield big gains in terms of the ultimate capabilities of the
workforce. Governments in poor countries might see big potential gains from investment in
education. Private individuals and firms may also perceive that the returns on education are
larger in poorer economies. If very few people in the economy have college degrees, an
individual might find that a college education yields a very large payoff. By contrast, if the
population as a whole is highly educated, it might take a much larger investment to stand out
from others.
This discussion is somewhat speculative. Human capital is difficult to measure, and the
marginal product of human capital is even harder to quantify. Nevertheless, there are some
good reasons to believe that the incentives to invest in human capital are greater in poorer
economies. If so, we have another reason to expect convergence.
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Convergence in Technology
What about technology? Will it grow faster in poorer economies? The answer depends on
which aspect of technology we are talking about.
Differences in knowledge between rich and poor countries are likely to diminish over time.
Rich economies are typically close to the technology frontier, meaning that they are using
state-of-the-art production techniques. For countries on the technology frontier, growth in
knowledge can only come the hard way, through investment in research and development
(R&D). Countries inside the technology frontier are typically poorer developing countries.
These economies can grow their stock of knowledge simply by importing knowledge from
countries at the frontier. Technological advance is much cheaper and easier if you can use
others’ inventions and innovations rather than coming up with your own. We therefore expect
such countries to have faster growth rates of knowledge. As they become more developed, the
growth of knowledge in these economies will slow down to the rate experienced by other
countries near the technology frontier. But in the meantime, they will grow faster than rich
countries. Technology transfer to developing economies is surely a force leading to
convergence of economies.
There is less to say about social infrastructure and natural resources. The amount of natural
resources available in an economy is largely due to accidents of history and geography: there
is no obvious reason to expect the growth rate of natural resources to be linked to the level of
development. Social infrastructure, meanwhile, is a complicated mix of institutions, customs,
and other factors. Again, there is no obvious reason to expect social infrastructure to grow
more quickly in poorer economies.
Divergence Revisited
Now that we have incorporated human capital and technology into our framework, we can
identify some further possible explanations of divergence. Our theory says that economies will
converge if they differ only in terms of their initial capital stock. But it is possible that
different economies will also have different balanced-growth paths. Figure 6.16 “Balanced
Growth in Two Countries with Different Ratios of Capital to Output” shows what this looks
like. The ratio of capital stock to output in the very long run depends on a number of different
factors, including the growth rate of technology and the growth rate of the workforce. If these
differ across countries, then their balanced-growth paths will differ as well, and we will not
observe convergence. [5]
Figure 6.16 Balanced Growth in Two Countries with Different Ratios of Capital to Output
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Economies may have different balanced-growth paths. In this example, the ratio of capital
stock to output is higher in country A than in country B.
This explanation—and our previous stories of divergence—tells us why different economies
will not necessarily end up at exactly the same level of output per worker. But the problem of
divergence is in some ways worse than that. Some countries are not only failing to converge
but also moving further and further apart. In other words, in some cases, richer economies are
growing faster than poorer economies. Indeed, as we saw with Niger, some of the poorest
economies in the world have been shrinking rather than growing.
Remember that the growth rate of output per worker on a balanced-growth path is as follows:
balanced-growth output-per-worker growth rate
= human capital growth rate +
1
1−a
× technology growth rate .
We can explain divergence in our framework if human capital or technology is growing more
slowly in poor countries than in rich ones. Are there reasons to expect this to be the case?
Earlier, we said that countries with low levels of human capital might also be countries where
the return to human capital investment was large, which is a force for convergence. We also
pointed out, however, that the marginal product of physical capital might be larger in an
economy with a superior technology, even if that economy had more capital. The same is true
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of human capital. Countries can build up their human capital through schooling and training.
They can also build up their human capital by attracting skilled workers from other countries.
If richer countries are able to attract skilled workers, then we will see divergence rather than
convergence. [6]
Turning to technology, divergence in social infrastructure is certainly a possibility. Social
infrastructure includes the rule of law, the general business climate, social attitudes toward
corruption, the protection of property rights, and many other intangible factors. These
influences on economic growth are difficult to define and almost impossible to measure
accurately. Yet economists are convinced that successful economies must have a good set of
such social institutions. It is likely that it is easier to build and improve such institutions in
countries that are relatively prosperous, which would again lead richer countries to grow more
rapidly than poorer countries.
Economists have built some of these ideas into the theoretical framework of economic growth.
Unfortunately, the models are too complicated for an introductory economics textbook, so we
will not go into them in any detail here. We can, however, provide a simple example that
conveys the flavor of these more complex ideas. The story goes as follows. We know that
workers acquire human capital through education and on-the-job training. Suppose that,
when there is more physical capital in the economy (relative to the number of workers), it is
easier to acquire human capital. You can study in modern facilities with up-to-date
computers. You work with state-of-the-art machinery and become more skilled. In this story,
human capital is endogenous: it depends on the amount of physical capital.
To be concrete, imagine that technology is constant, and the amount of human capital is
proportional to the amount of physical capital per worker. When we incorporate this
assumption into the production function, we end up with a very straightforward relationship:
output = B × physical capital,
where B is just a number. [7]
In this economy, the ratio of capital stock to GDP is constant at all times (capital/output =
1/B). This economy is always on a balanced-growth path. Because of this, the growth rate of
output equals the growth rate of capital stock:
output growth rate = physical capital growth rate.
The more important point, though, is that this technology does not exhibit diminishing
marginal product of capital. The marginal product of capital is constant: it equals B. If this
number were different in different economies, then we would expect to see capital stock
flowing from economies where B is small toward economies where B is large. We would see
divergence rather than convergence.
The model that we have described in this subsection is simplistic. Its point is simply to show
that, if we make human capital endogenous, it is much easier to explain divergence.
Economists have built more complicated and realistic models with endogenous human capital
and technology that give similar results.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
Balanced growth occurs when capital stock grows at the same rate as output. Along a
balanced-growth path, the ratio of output to capital stock does not change.
Balanced growth is important to understand because over long periods of time, we
expect economies to reach their balanced-growth path.
There are reasons to expect at least some convergence in physical capital, human
capital, and knowledge. However, there is no strong argument for why we would see
convergence in social infrastructure.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Suppose that an economy has a balanced-growth path where the physical capital stock is
three times the level of GDP. If the current capital stock is four times the level of GDP,
do you expect capital stock to grow faster or slower than GDP?
2. Suppose we have two economies that are currently identical, except in the first
economy a is 0.3 and in the second economy a is 0.5. Will the balanced-growth path be
the same in both countries? Which economy will converge more quickly to the balanced-
growth path?
[1] Growth accounting is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5 “Globalization and
Competitiveness”.
[2] You don’t need to worry about the mathematical details, but if you are interested, we
obtain this equation by setting the capital growth rate equal to the
output growth rate:output growth rate
BG
= [a × (output growth rate
BG
)] + [(1 − a) ×
(workforce growth rate + human capital growth rate)] + technology growth rate, which
implies (1 − a) × output growth rate
BG
= [(1 − a) × (workforce growth rate + human capital
growth rate)] + technology growth rate.
Dividing this equation by (1 − a) gives us the equation in the text.
[3] If you are interested in the mathematical derivation of this equation, you can find it in the
toolkit.
[4] To be mathematically precise, the economy gets closer and closer to its balanced-growth
path but never quite gets there. Over a period of decades, it gets close enough that it makes no
practical difference.
[5] The toolkit presents a complete model of balanced growth, including a formula for the
balanced-growth ratio of capital stock to output.
[6] In Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”, we discuss how economies actively seek
to attract human capital.
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[7] The derivation of this equation is not very difficult; it is explained in the toolkit.
6.5 The Role of International Institutions in Promoting Growth
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the main international organizations that help to promote growth?
2. What do these institutions do to achieve their stated goals?
Governments acting alone can do a lot to promote economic growth. We have discussed the
importance of protecting property rights and establishing a climate of political stability. These
efforts by individual governments are complemented by international actions to promote
growth and development in poorer countries. In this section, we describe three powerful and
controversial international economic organizations: the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). We briefly explain what
these institutions do and how they go about reaching their goals. [1]
The World Bank
The World Bank is an international intermediary funded by 184 member countries. Its goal is
to provide loans and grants to developing countries with the aim of eliminating poverty by
promoting economic growth. Economists working at the World Bank rely on variants of the
growth model used in this chapter to understand the growth experiences of different countries
and determine the effects of policies in those countries.
The World Bank borrows money on international capital markets and also receives funds
directly from member countries. The World Bank is similar to a bank that a household or a
firm would approach for a loan to build a factory or a house, except that its borrowers are
national governments. It often funds projects that would otherwise not be undertaken. In
many cases, these are projects that promote infrastructure, education, health, and so forth.
Projects like these may have social benefits yet not be profitable enough for private firms to
undertake. Building a road in a rural part of a developing country is not the type of investment
project one normally associates with a profit-seeking firm, for example, even though the road
may have spurred rural development.
In 2010 the World Bank made about $45 billion in loan commitments and $29 billion in loan
disbursements. [2] At one level, this is evidently substantial—a project worth $100 million or
more can certainly have a large impact on a poor country. At another level, it is not a huge
sum of money in the global economy. For comparative purposes, BP set aside over $40 billion
to pay for the cleanup of its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
World Bank projects range broadly. They include funding for infrastructure construction,
promoting health care (such as HIV/AIDS programs), promoting education, and so forth.
Many of these projects involve the provision of public goods, so they create benefits for society
as a whole that exceed the direct return on investment. That is, many of the projects that are
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funded by national governments in richer countries are funded through the World Bank in
developing countries. At the beginning of this chapter, we saw an example of a World Bank
project in Niger, which was aimed at increasing human capital in that country. As another
example, here is a description of a recent World Bank loan to Guyana to provide water access
to the poor.
Guyana: Water Sector Consolidation Project
GRANT AMOUNT: $12.3 million
PROJECT DESCRIPTION: This project’s main objective is to increase access to safe water
among the poor. The project seeks to support the achievement of sustainable universal access
to safe and affordable water for the population of Guyana, especially the poor. The project will
also help to consolidate the water sector modernization and reform process undertaken by the
government with support of the International Development Association (IDA) and other
donors in recent years. [3]
The project described here would not likely be a profitable private sector project, but it is
important for the development of Guyana. Notice, too, that this loan, like many other World
Bank loans, is for the development of infrastructure (roads, bridges, schools, communication
systems, etc.). In more developed countries, such projects are usually performed by
governments, but in developing countries, these investments are frequently undertaken
through the World Bank.
Investment in infrastructure is typically complementary to the accumulation of other physical
capital, such as machines and plants. Even though developing countries have relatively low
capital stocks, investment in plants and equipment may not be very profitable if basic
infrastructure is lacking. There is no point in building a factory if there are no roads to take
your goods to market. Investment in infrastructure can increase the marginal product of
capital and make other investment more attractive.
The International Monetary Fund
The IMF was established to (among other things) provide short-term support for countries
facing financial difficulties. This is explicitly stated in the IMF’s Articles of Agreement: “To
give confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily
available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct
maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of
national or international prosperity.” [4]
A country’s balance of payments has two main components. The first is the trade balance. A
balance of payment maladjustment may mean that a country is running persistent trade
deficits—that is, its imports are greater than its exports. This means the country is borrowing
from other countries and is building up its external debt. The second component of the
balance of payments is the interest that a country must pay on its existing external debt. This
means that imbalances in the past lead to worse imbalances in the present. Imagine, for
example, that Juan in Solovenia borrowed extensively in the past. It is then difficult for him to
get out of debt because he has to pay so much interest. Moreover, the amount of external debt
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in a country cannot grow forever. When countries get into trouble by accumulating large
amounts of debt, there is a temptation to default on outstanding debt. A key role of the IMF is
to help countries through these difficult episodes.
IMF help has strings attached. A controversial aspect of the IMF’s mode of operation is in the
phrase…under adequate safeguards. As part of a deal to provide resources to countries in
need of funds, the IMF often makes explicit demands about government fiscal and monetary
policies. This is termed IMF “conditionality” and is described by the IMF as follows: “When a
country borrows from the IMF, its government agrees to adjust its economic policies to
overcome the problems that led it to seek financial aid from the international community.
These loan conditions also serve to ensure that the country will be able to repay the Fund so
that the resources can be made available to other members in need. In recent years, the IMF
has streamlined conditionality in order to promote national ownership of strong and effective
policies.” [5]
A quick tour of the IMF website (http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm) provides a lot of
information about past and ongoing loans. One example is the ongoing relationship between
the IMF and Argentina. [6] This agreement with Argentina came after Argentina was unable
to meet demands for payment on some of its external debt and after real gross domestic
product (real GDP) had fallen by nearly 11 percent in 2002. Agreement with the IMF was not
immediate, partly due to the conditionality of a prospective loan. Though agreement was
ultimately reached, there were lengthy negotiations regarding the conduct of fiscal and
monetary policy in Argentina as a condition for IMF assistance.
The World Trade Organization
The WTO “makes the rules” for international trade. It is a relatively new organization—having
been founded in 1995—and has 150 member countries. It arose from earlier trade agreements
between countries, most notable the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The WTO
website describes the role of the organization as follows:
[…]
Essentially, the WTO is a place where member governments go, to try to sort out the
trade problems they face with each other. The first step is to talk. The WTO was born out
of negotiations, and everything the WTO does is the result of negotiations. The bulk of
the WTO’s current work comes from the 1986–94 negotiations called the Uruguay
Round and earlier negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT). The WTO is currently the host to new negotiations, under the “Doha
Development Agenda” launched in 2001.
Where countries have faced trade barriers and wanted them lowered, the negotiations
have helped to liberalize trade. But the WTO is not just about liberalizing trade, and in
some circumstances its rules support maintaining trade barriers—for example to
protect consumers or prevent the spread of disease.
[…] [7]
The negotiations at the WTO set the ground rules for international trade. Using the
mechanisms of the WTO, countries agree on trade policies, such as the levels of tariffs. This is
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also a forum for designing policies on the protection of intellectual property rights. The WTO
also provides a forum for dispute resolution.
Many critics of globalization have focused their attention on the WTO. For example, the
nongovernmental organization Global Exchange (http://www.globalexchange.org) lists 12
“top reasons to oppose the WTO,” including the claims that the WTO is increasing hunger,
increasing inequality, trampling human rights, destroying the environment, and killing people
through its policies. Critics such as this group argue that the WTO is fundamentally
undemocratic, writing the rules so as to favor powerful corporations and rich countries.
Defenders of the WTO argue that it gives poorer countries a much greater voice in
international economic decision making. They point out, for example, WTO decisions are
based on consensus, meaning that all 150 member countries must agree to them.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO are three leading international organizations
that help countries in the development process.
The World Bank funds projects in recipient countries, the IMF provides balance of
payments support, and the WTO works to reduce trade barriers.
Checking Your Understanding
1. In what way does the IMF work to promote convergence across countries?
2. The WTO helps to govern intellectual property rights. What is the impact of those rights
on development?
[1] The websites of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO are, respectively, as
follows:http://www.worldbank.org, http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm,
and http://www.wto.org.
[2] “Annual Report 2010: Financial Information,” World Bank, accessed August 22,
2011,http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTANNREP/
EXTANNREP2010/0,,contentMDK:22626599~menuPK:7115719~pagePK:64168445~piPK:6
4168309 ~theSitePK:7074179,00.html.
[3] “Water Sector Consolidation Project,” World Bank, July 12, 2005, accessed June 30,
2011,http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&
theSitePK=40941&menuPK=228424&Projectid=P088030&cid=3001_72.
[4] “Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund,” International Monetary
Fund, February 22, 2010, accessed June 30,
2011, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/aa/aa01.htm.
[5] “IMF Conditionality,” International Monetary Fund, March 18, 2011, accessed August 22,
2011, http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/conditio.htm.
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http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm
http://www.wto.org/
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http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=40941&menuPK=228424&Projectid=P088030&cid=3001_72
http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=40941&menuPK=228424&Projectid=P088030&cid=3001_72
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/aa/aa01.htm
http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/conditio.htm
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[6] The IMF formulates country reports on an annual basis, and these are available on the
IMF website. These reports summarize the dealings between individual countries and the
IMF. Argentina had reached an agreement with the IMF in September 2003 providing
Argentina with access to SDR 8,981 million. SDR means “special drawing right.” It is a unit of
account used by the IMF whose value is an average of four key currencies. Its actual value on
any given date can be found at http://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/data/rms_sdrv.aspx. In
May 2011, 1 SDR was worth US$1.59.
[7] “What Is the World Trade Organization?” World Trade Organization, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/fact1_e.htm.
6.6 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
We live in a world today that would be unrecognizable and unimaginable to those born two
centuries ago. Things we take for granted—jet travel, antibiotics, electricity, the Internet,
dentistry—are all products of the extraordinary growth of the last 200 years. Yet despite all
our technological advances, billions of people in the world still live in poverty. Although some
countries continue to grow rapidly, others stagnate or even go backward. If we could unlock
the secrets of economic growth, we would have the means to help people to permanently
better lives.
Even as economists emphasize economic growth as a way to combat poverty, noneconomists
are often critical of economic growth, pointing out that it comes with costs as well as benefits.
For example, as countries become richer, they use more energy and more of the world’s
natural resources. Oil reserves are being depleted, and rainforests are disappearing. Growth
may lead to increased pollution, such as greenhouse gas emissions that in turn contribute to
climate change. These are serious and legitimate concerns. In brief, economists have four
main responses.
1. The framework we presented in this chapter does, in fact, capture the effect of declining
natural resources. They lead to a slower rate of growth in technology. Indeed, it is possible
that declining natural resources could more than offset growth in knowledge and social
infrastructure so that the technology growth rate becomes negative. As yet, there is no
evidence that this is a significant concern, but—at least until we have a better
understanding of the drivers of knowledge and social infrastructure growth—it certainly
might become relevant in the future.
2. There are indeed uncompensated side effects of economic growth, such as increased
pollution. Economists agree that such effects can be very important. However, they can
and should be corrected directly. Curtailing growth is an extremely indirect and inefficient
response to its adverse side effects. As Nobel Prize–winner Robert Solow put it, “What no-
growth would accomplish, it would do by cutting off your face to spite your nose.” [1]
3. The evidence reveals that some environmental problems are solved rather than
exacerbated by growth. Air pollution is a much more serious problem in the developing
countries of the world than in the rich countries of the world. In part this is because a
clean environment is a luxury good; people only worry about the state of the environment
once their basic needs of food and shelter are addressed.
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4. The most serious problems are those where we cannot rely on market mechanisms. If oil
becomes scarce, then increases in the price of oil will provide incentives for people to
economize on their use of fuel and look for alternative sources of energy. These incentives
will at least ease the adjustment of the world economy. But there are no functioning
market mechanisms to deal with climate change, for example.
Decades of research by economists have told us that there is no magic bullet, no simple and
painless way to encourage economic growth. At the same time, we have learned a great deal
about how and why countries grow. We have learned that growth depends on the
accumulation of both physical and human capital. We have learned that growth ultimately
hinges on the growth of knowledge, highlighting the importance of education, training, and
research and development (R&D). And we have learned that good institutions are critical for
countries that want to promote economic growth.
We have made progress, but the study of economic growth remains one of the most
fascinating and challenging problems in all economics. There is no doubt that economists will
continue their search for the elusive secrets of prosperity. As the Nobel Prize–winning
economist Robert Lucas observed, “Once one starts to think about [economic growth], it is
hard to think about anything else.”
Key Links
Penn World Tables: http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu
International Monetary Fund (IMF): http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm
World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org
World Bank Development
Report:http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EX
TWDRS/0,,contentMDK:20227703~pagePK:478093~piPK:477627~theSitePK:477624,00
.html
World Bank Development
Indicators:http://www.google.com/publicdata/overview?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&st
rail=false&nselm=h&hl=en&dl=en
World Trade Organization: http://www.wto.org
CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook
Angus Maddison’s home page: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison
Excel file of long-run
data:http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_03-2007.xls
EXERCISES
1. Think about your last visit to a shopping center or a large food store in the United
States or other developed economy. Which of these goods and services do you think
are available in a typical market in Niger? Which were available in the United States
50 years ago? 100 years ago?
2. (Advanced) In the late 1990s, the US government was running a surplus of about 1
percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Current projections show that the
government is going to run deficits in excess of 5 percent of GDP in the future. Let
us imagine that there are no changes in private saving or in foreign
borrowing/lending. [2] In this case, the increased deficit translates directly into a
decrease in the investment rate. To investigate the implications of such a decrease,
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suppose that, in the year 2000
investment rate = 0.24,
depreciation rate = 0.085, and
output growth rate = 0.035.
a) On a balanced-growth path, the ratio of capital stock to output is given by
the following formula:
capital
output
=
investment rate
depreciation rate + output growth rate
.
Suppose that the economy was on a balanced-growth path in 2000. Calculate
the balanced-growth ratio of the capital stock to GDP.
b) Suppose the production function for this economy is output per worker = 15,000
× capital/output. What is output per worker in 2000?
c) Now suppose that the increase in the government deficit means that the
investment rate decreases to 0.18. What is the new balanced-growth ratio of the
capital stock to GDP?
d) Suppose that by 2040, improvements in technology and human capital mean
that the production function is given by output per worker = 30,000 ×
capital/output. Suppose also that the economy has reached its new balanced-
growth path. What is output per worker in 2040?
e) What would output per worker equal in 2040 if there had been no change in the
investment rate?
3. Try to estimate approximately how much you spend every day. Be sure to include an
amount for rent, utilities, and food. Do you think it would be possible for you to live
on $2 per day?
4. Suppose there are two economies. The first has a current level of real GDP of 100, and
the second has a current level of real GDP of 200. The poorer country is forecasted to
grow at 10 percent in the coming year, while the richer country is forecasted to grow
at 15 percent. If these forecasts are true, what will their levels of real GDP be next
year? Is this a case of divergence or convergence?
5. When capital’s share of output (a) is larger, does an economy move to its balanced-
growth path more quickly or more slowly? Explain.
6. Suppose that capital’s share of output is 0.5, the human capital growth rate is 2
percent, the technology growth rate is 1 percent, and the workforce is not growing.
What is the balanced-growth growth rate of output?
7. Look at Table 6.6 “Approaching the Balanced-Growth Path”. Explain why the output
growth rate decreases over time.
8. (Advanced) Think about Juan in Solovenia. Consider two cases. In the first case, he
experiences an increase in his productivity that he knows will last for only one month.
In the second, he experiences a permanent increase in his productivity. How do you
think his decisions about how hard to work will be different in the two cases?
9. On a balanced-growth path, the ratio of capital stock to output is given by the
following formula:
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capital
output
=
investment rate
depreciation rate + output growth rate
.
Use the formula for the balanced-growth rate of output to determine how the
ratio of capital stock to output depends on the growth rate of the workforce. Does
an increase in the growth rate of the workforce lead to an increase or a decrease
in the ratio of capital stock to output?
Economics Detective
1. Find savings rates for the United States, India, and Niger and compare these to the
investment rates for these countries. What can you say about capital inflows from
other countries?
2. Go to the Penn World Tables (http://datacentre2.chass.utoronto.ca/pwt61). Click on
“Alphabetical List of Countries.” Select the United States and two other countries of
your choice. Look at the data for real GDP per capita and real GDP per worker. Briefly
describe in words what has happened to these two variables over the period for which
data are available.
Spreadsheet Exercises
1. Using a spreadsheet, reproduce Figure 6.13 “Output and Capital Stock in a Balanced-
Growth Economy”. Specifically, suppose that GDP starts with the value 10 in the year
2000, and capital stock in the same year has the value 20. Now set the growth rate of
each series equal to 3 percent (0.03). What is the capital stock in 2050? What is GDP?
Has the ratio of capital stock to GDP stayed constant?
2. Using the same spreadsheet and keeping the growth rate of GDP equal to 3 percent,
examine what happens if the growth rate of capital is (a) 1 percent; (b) 5 percent.
3. Suppose that an economy has the following production function:
output per worker = √the ratio of capital to GDP × human capital.
Suppose that the workforce is growing at 1 percent per year, and human capital is
growing at 2 percent per year. (We are assuming technology is constant in this
example.) Suppose that we find that the ratio of capital stock to GDP is 4 on all dates
and, initially, human capital is 15,000. What are the values for the growth rate of
output per worker, the growth rate of output, and the growth rate of capital?
4. By experimenting with a spreadsheet, find out how long it will take for output per
worker to double in this example.
[1] Robert M. Solow, “Is the End of the World at Hand?” Challenge 16, no. 1 (March/April
1973): 39–50. Also available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/40719094.
[2] The condition that private savings do not change is important. For example, if the
government cuts taxes, it is possible that people will predict that taxes will be higher in the
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future and will increase their savings in anticipation. We will say more about this in Chapter
14 “Balancing the Budget”.
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Chapter 7
The Great Depression
Lessons from History
Newspaper headlines around the world in 2008 asked whether the world’s economies were
heading for another “Great Depression.” Long-past economic history suddenly captured the
attention of economists, journalists, and others. But what was this event and why—even
though it occurred the best part of a century ago—does it still hold such a prominent place in
our economic memories?
In the early 1930s, instead of benefiting from economic growth and improved standards of
living, people witnessed a huge decline in the level of economic activity. There was great
economic hardship: large numbers of families struggled to obtain even basic food and shelter.
Some sense of the desperation during these times can be found in oral histories. Here, for
example, is one person’s story of what it was like trying to find a job:
I’d get up at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckles
Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men. You know dang well
there’s only three or four jobs. The guy would come out with two little Pinkerton cops: ‘I
need two guys for the bull gang. Two guys to go into the hole.’ A thousand men would
fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there. Only four of us would get through.
I was too young a punk. [1]
The personal suffering is less apparent in the figure below, but this picture does reveal the
extraordinary nature of those times. It shows real gross domestic product (real GDP) in the
United States from 1890 to 1939. Three things stand out. First, the level of economic activity
grew substantially during this half century. This is normal: economies typically grow over the
long haul, becoming more productive and producing more output. Second, although the level
of US economic activity grew substantially over this half century, there were many ups and
downs in the economy during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Third—and most
important for our purposes—the period from 1929 to 1937 stands out from the rest. This was
not a minor blip in economic activity; the US economy suffered a collapse that persisted for
many years. At the same time, unemployment climbed to a staggering 25 percent in 1933—one
out of four people was unemployed—compared to a rate of only 3.2 percent in 1929.
Figure 7.1 US Real GDP, 1890–1939
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Real GDP increased considerably between 1890 and 1939, but the Great Depression of the
early 1930s is a striking exception.
Source: Data from “What Was the U.S. GDP Then?,” Measuring Worth, accessed August 22,
2011, http://www.measuringworth.org/datasets/usgdp/result.php.
The United States was not the only country to experience such hard economic times in this
period. Many other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, and
Italy also saw their economic progress reversed for a period of years. The Great Depression, as
this economic cataclysm came to be called, was a shock to the economists of the day. Prior to
that time, most economists thought that, though economies might grow fast in some years
and decline slightly in others, prolonged unemployment and underutilization of resources was
impossible. The Great Depression proved this view to be erroneous and eventually led to a
fundamental change in the way in which economists thought about the aggregate economy.
The idea that the economy was naturally stable was replaced with a view that severe economic
downturns could recur at any time.
Along with this change in thinking about the economy came a change in attitudes toward
macroeconomic policy: economists began to believe that the government could play an active
role to help stabilize the economy, perhaps by increasing government spending in bad times.
Prior to the Great Depression, nobody even thought that the government should try to keep
the economy stable. Both Democrats and Republicans in the 1932 election
advocated less government spending because government revenues had fallen. Yet, by the end
of the 1930s, the United States and other countries had adopted the view that active policy
measures were useful or even essential for the proper functioning of economies.
Three-fourths of a century later, these events are part of economic history. Few people still
alive experienced those terrible years directly, yet the time remains part of our collective
memory. Above all, we need to know what went wrong if we hope to ensure that such
punishing times do not come again. Indeed, the world economy recently suffered the most
severe recession since the 1930s, and it is unclear at the time of this writing how long or how
bad the current crisis will be. The insights of the economists who explained the Great
Depression are still at the heart of today’s discussions of economic policy. Understanding
what happened to the economy in the 1930s is more than an exercise in economic history; it is
essential for understanding modern macroeconomics. We want to know—
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What caused the Great Depression?
Road Map
We begin by looking at some facts about the Great Depression and the boom that preceded it.
Our goal is to see if we can develop a good explanation of these facts. The most fundamental
defining feature of the Great Depression was the large and sustained decrease in real GDP. In
the figure below, which shows the circular flow of income, reminds us that real GDP measures
both production and spending.
Figure 7.2 The Circular Flow of Income
GDP measures the production of an economy and total income in an economy. We can use
the terms production, income, spending, and GDP interchangeably.
It follows that during the Great Depression, both output and spending decreased. Perhaps it is
the case that production in the economy declined for some reason, and spending decreased as
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a consequence. Or perhaps spending declined for some reason, and production decreased as a
consequence. We examine two approaches to the Great Depression, based on these ideas. One
sees the root cause of the Great Depression as a decline in the productive capabilities of the
economy, meaning that firms—for some reason—were unable to produce as much as they had
before. This then led to decreased spending. The other approach sees the root cause of the
Great Depression as a decline in spending, meaning that households and firms—for some
reason—decided that they wanted to purchase fewer goods and services. This then led to
decreased production.
We look at each explanation in turn. We investigate which inputs contributed the most to the
decrease in output and also look at what happened to the different components of spending.
This more careful look at the data helps us to evaluate the two competing theories of the Great
Depression. We conclude by examining the implications for economic policy and considering
what policies were actually conducted at the time of the Great Depression.
[1] See Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1970), 30.
7.1 What Happened during the Great Depression?
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the main facts about the Great Depression?
2. What is puzzling about the Great Depression?
3. What are the two leading strands of thought about the cause of the Great Depression?
We begin with some facts. Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*” shows
real gross domestic product (real GDP), the unemployment rate, theprice level,
and the inflation rate from 1920 to 1939 in the United States. Real GDP measures the
overall production of the economy, the unemployment rate measures the fraction of the labor
force unable to find a job, the price level measures the overall cost of GDP, and the inflation
rate is the growth rate of the price level.
Table 7.1 Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*
Year Real
GDP
Unemployment Price
Level
Inflation Rate
1920 606.6 5.2 11.6
1921 585.7 11.7 10.4 -10.3
1922 625.9 6.7 9.8 -5.8
1923 713.0 2.4 9.9 1.0
1924 732.8 5.0 9.9 0.0
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1925 748.6 3.2 10.2 3.0
1926 793.9 1.8 10.3 1.0
1927 798.4 3.3 10.4 1.0
1928 812.6 4.2 9.9 -4.8
1929 865.2 3.2 9.9 0.0
1930 790.7 8.9 9.7 -2.0
1931 739.9 16.3 8.8 -9.3
1932 643.7 24.1 8.0 -9.1
1933 635.5 25.2 7.5 -6.3
1934 704.2 22.0 7.8 4.0
1935 766.9 20.3 8.0 2.6
1936 866.6 17.0 8.1 1.3
1937 911.1 14.3 8.4 3.7
1938 879.7 19.1 8.2 -2.4
1939 950.7 17.2 8.1 -1.2
*GDP is in billions of year 2000 dollars (Bureau of Economic
Analysis [BEA]). The unemployment rate is from the US
Census Bureau, The Statistical History of the United States:
From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books,
1976; see also http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/statab.html).
The base year for the price index is 2000 (that is, the index
equals 100 in that year) and comes from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS; http://www.bls.gov), 2004.
Looking at these data, we see first that the 1920s were a period of sustained growth,
sometimes known as the “roaring twenties.” Real GDP increased each year between 1921 and
1929, with an average growth rate of 4.9 percent per year). Meanwhile the unemployment rate
decreased from 6.7 percent in 1922 to 1.8 percent in 1926. Real GDP reached a peak of $865
billion in 1929. This number is expressed in year 2000 dollars, so we can compare that
number easily with current economic data. In particular, if we divide by the population at that
time, we find that GDP per person was the equivalent of about $7,000, in year 2000 terms.
Real GDP per person has increased about fivefold since that time.
Toolkit: Section 16.11 “Growth Rates”
You can review growth rates in the toolkit.
The Great Depression began in late 1929 as a recession not unlike those experienced
previously—a decrease in GDP from one year to the next was common—but it rapidly
blossomed into a four-year reduction in economic activity. By 1933, real GDP had fallen by
over 25 percent and was only $636 billion. At the same time, unemployment increased from
around 3 percent to 25 percent. In 1929, jobs were easy to come by. By 1933, they were almost
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impossible to find. More than a quarter of the people wishing to work were unable to find a
job. Countless others, no doubt, had given up even looking for a job and were out of the labor
force.
The experience of the 1920s and 1930s tells us that when real GDP increases, unemployment
tends to decline and vice versa. We say that unemployment is countercyclical, meaning that
it typically moves in the direction opposite to the movement of real GDP. An economic
variable is procyclical if it typically moves in the same direction as real GDP, increasing
when GDP increases and decreasing when GDP decreases. The countercyclical behavior of
unemployment is not something that is peculiar to the Great Depression; it is a relatively
robust fact about most economies. It is also quite intuitive: if fewer people are employed, less
labor goes into the production function, so we expect output to be lower.
An event occurred in September 1929 that, at least with hindsight, marks a turning point. The
stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, had been increasing until
that time but then decreased by 48 percent in less than 2.5 months. The value of the stock
market is a measure of the value, in the minds of investors, of all the firms in the economy.
Investors suddenly decided that the US economy was worth only half what they had believed
three months earlier. It is unlikely that two such dramatic economic events occurred at almost
the same time and yet are unconnected. We should not make the claim that the stock market
crash caused the Great Depression. But the stock market decrease was correlated with
declining output in the early days of the Great Depression. Correlation is distinct from
causation. It is possible, for example, that the stock market crash and the Great Depression
were both caused by some other event.
Toolkit: Section 16.13 “Correlation and Causality”
Correlation is a statistical measure of how closely two variables are related. If the two
variables tend to increase together, we say that they are “positively correlated”; if one
increases when the other decreases, then they are “negatively correlated.” If the relationship
between the two variables is an exact straight line, we say that they are “perfectly correlated.”
The fact that two variables are correlated does not necessarily mean that changes in one
variable cause changes in the other. The toolkit contains more information.
Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*” also contains information on the price
level and the inflation rate. The most striking fact from this table is that the price level
declined over this period—on average, goods were considerably cheaper in dollar terms in
1940 than they were in 1920. We see this both from the decrease in the price level and from
the fact that the inflation rate was negative in several years (remember that the inflation rate
is the growth rate of the price level). If we look at the more recent history of the United States
and at most other countries, we rarely observe negative inflation. Decreasing prices are an
unusual phenomenon.
Other countries had similar experiences during this time period. Figure 7.3 “The Great
Depression in Other Countries” shows that France, Germany, and Britain all experienced very
poor economic performance in the early 1930s. Output was lower in each country in 1933
compared to four years earlier, and each country also saw a decline in the price level. Many
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other countries around the world had similar experiences. The Great Depression was a
worldwide event.
Figure 7.3 The Great Depression in Other Countries
France, Germany, and Britain also experienced declines in output (a) and prices (b) during
the Great Depression. The output data are data for industrial production (manufacturing in
the case of the United States), and the price data are wholesale prices.
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Source: International Monetary Fund, “World Economic Outlook: Crisis and Recovery,”
April 2009, Box 3.1.1,http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/c3/Box3_1_1 .
Why this was the case remains one of the puzzles of the period. There were events at the time
that had international dimensions, such as concerns about the future of the “gold standard”
(which determined the exchange rates between countries) and various policies that
disrupted international trade. Still, economists are unconvinced that such factors can explain
why the Great Depression occurred in so many countries. Three-fourths of a century later, we
still do not have a complete understanding of the Great Depression and are still unsure exactly
why it happened. From one perspective this is frustrating, but from another it is exciting: the
Great Depression maintains an air of mystery.
Toolkit: Section 16.10 “Foreign Exchange Market”
You can review the meaning and definition of the exchange rate in the toolkit.
The Puzzle of the Great Depression
Try to imagine yourself in the United States or Europe in the early 1930s. You are witnessing
immense human misery amid a near meltdown of the economy. Friends and family are losing
their jobs and have bleak prospects for new employment. Stores that you had shopped in all
your life suddenly go out of business. The bank holding your money has disappeared, taking
your savings with it. The government provides no insurance for unemployment, and there is
no system of social security to provide support for your elderly relatives.
Economists and government officials at that time were bewildered. The experience in the
United States and other countries was difficult to understand. According to the economic
theories of the day, it simply was not possible. Policymakers had no idea how to bring about
economic recovery. Yet, as you might imagine, there was considerable pressure for the
government to do something about the problem. The questions that vexed the policymakers of
the day—questions such as “What is happening?” and “What can the government do to
help?”—are at the heart of this chapter.
Economists make sense of events like the Great Depression by first accumulating facts and
then using frameworks to interpret those facts. We have a considerable advantage relative to
economists and politicians at the time. We have the benefit of hindsight: the data we looked at
in the previous subsection were not known to the economists of that era. And economic theory
has evolved over the last seven decades, giving us better frameworks for analyzing these data.
Earlier, we said there are two possible reasons why output decreased.
1.There was a decrease in production due to a decrease in the available inputs into the
aggregate production function. Since there was no massive decrease in the amount
of physical capital or the size of the workforce, and people presumably did not suddenly
lose all their human capital, this means that the culprit must have been a decrease
in technology.
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2.There was a decrease in aggregate spending. Households chose to reduce their
consumption, firms chose to reduce their investment, and governments chose to reduce
their spending. As a consequence, firms scaled back their production.
We look at each of these candidate explanations in turn.
Toolkit: Section 16.15 “The Aggregate Production Function”
You can review the aggregate production function and the inputs that go into it in the toolkit.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
During the Great Depression in the United States from 1929 to 1933, real GDP
decreased by over 25 percent, the unemployment rate reached 25 percent, and prices
decreased by over 9 percent in both 1931 and 1932 and by nearly 25 percent over the
entire period.
The Great Depression remains a puzzle today. Both the source of this large economic
downturn and why it lasted for so long remain active areas of research and debate
within economics.
One explanation of the Great Depression rests on a reduction in the ability of the
economy to produce goods and services. The second leading explanation focuses on a
reduction in the overall demand for goods and services in the economy.
Checking Your Understanding
1. The notes in Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*” state that the base
year for the price level is 2000, so the price index has a value of 100 in that year.
Approximately how much would you expect to have paid in the year 2000 for something
that cost $2 in the late 1920s?
2. Using Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*”, how can you see that the
unemployment rate is countercyclical?
7.2 The Great Depression: A Decrease in Potential Output?
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is potential output?
2. How could a decrease in potential output create the Great Depression?
3. How does the theory that the Great Depression was caused by a decrease in potential
output match the facts?
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Our first approach to interpreting the Great Depression focuses on potential output, which
is the amount of real gross domestic product (real GDP) an economy produces when the labor
market is in equilibrium and capital goods are not lying idle. We start here because this
approach corresponds reasonably closely to the economic wisdom of the time.
A Decrease in Technology: The Multiple-Markets Perspective
Comparative statics is a technique that allows us to understand the effects of a decrease in
technology in a particular market, such as the market for new homes. In a comparative statics
exercise, we look at what happens to endogenous variables (in this case, production and
prices of new homes) when we change an exogenous variable (in this case, technology). A
decline in technology shifts the market supply curve leftward: at any given price, the decrease
in technology means that the firm can produce less output with its available inputs. The result
is shown in part (a) of Figure 7.4 “An Inward Shift in the Market Supply of Houses” for the
housing market: output of new homes decreases and the price of new homes increases.
Toolkit: Section 16.8 “Comparative Statics”
You can review the technique of comparative statics and the definition of endogenous and
exogenous variables in the toolkit.
Figure 7.4 An Inward Shift in the Market Supply of Houses
(a) A decrease in technology leads to an inward shift of the market supply curve for houses.
(b) The labor and other resources that are not being used to produce houses can now be used
to produce other goods, such as cars.
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If this decline in technology in the housing market were the only change in the economy, what
would happen? Construction firms would fire workers because these firms were building
fewer new homes. Over time, however, the fired construction workers would find new jobs in
other sectors of the economy. The same logic applies to other inputs: capital and other inputs
that were being used in the construction industry would be redeployed to other markets. For
example, there would be additional labor and other inputs available for automobile
production. Part (b) of Figure 7.4 “An Inward Shift in the Market Supply of Houses” shows the
resulting outward shift in the supply curve for cars. It is difficult to explain the big decrease in
output and the high rate of unemployment in the Great Depression through a change in
technology in a single market.
Suppose, however, that this change in technology does not happen in just one market but
occurs across the entire economy. Then a version of part (a) in Figure 7.4 “An Inward Shift in
the Market Supply of Houses” would hold for each market in the economy. We would see
declines in economic activity across a wide range of markets. Moreover, with declines in so
many industries, we would expect to see lower real wages and less employment. The idea that
workers could easily move from one industry to another is not as persuasive if the entire
economy is hit by an adverse technology shock.
Using Growth Accounting to Understand the Great Depression
We use growth accounting to show how changes in output are driven by changes in the
underlying inputs—capital, labor, and technology. Equivalently, we use the technique to give
us a measure of the growth rate of technology, given data on the growth rates of output,
capital, and labor:
technology growth rate = output growth rate − [a × capital stock growth rate]− [(1 − a) ×
labor growth rate].
We have omitted human capital from this growth accounting equation. We do so because,
unfortunately, we do not have very good human capital measures for the period of the Great
Depression. Human capital typically changes very slowly, so this is not too much of a problem:
over a period of a decade, we do not expect big changes in human capital. Any changes in
human capital that do occur are included in the catchall “technology” term.
Toolkit: Section 16.17 “Growth Accounting”
You can review the technique of growth accounting in the toolkit.
The key ingredient needed for the growth accounting equation is the number a. It turns out
that a good measure of a is the fraction of real GDP that is paid to owners of capital. Roughly
speaking, it is the amount of GDP that goes to the profits of firms. Equivalently, (1 − a) is the
fraction of GDP that is paid to labor. The circular flow of income reminds us that all income
ultimately finds its way back to households in the economy, which is why these two numbers
sum to one.
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Can Technology Changes Explain the Roaring Twenties?
The economist John Kendrick applied such growth accounting to data from the Great
Depression. [1] Table 7.2 “Growth Rates of Real GDP, Labor, Capital, and Technology, 1920–
39*” summarizes his findings. Each row in Table 7.2 “Growth Rates of Real GDP, Labor,
Capital, and Technology, 1920–39*” decomposes output growth into three components. In
1923, for example, output grew at a very high rate of 14.2 percent. This growth in output came
from labor growth of 9.9 percent and capital stock growth of 2.0 percent. The remainder,
which we interpret as growth in technology, grew at 9.5 percent. By all accounts, 1923 was a
good year. The other entries in the table can be read in the same way.
Table 7.2 Growth Rates of Real GDP, Labor, Capital, and Technology, 1920–39*
Year Real
GDP
Unemployment Price
Level
Inflation Rate
1920 0.4 1.4 2.1 -1.2
1921 -3.6 -11.5 1.5 4.0
1922 6.4 8.7 0.7 0.1
1923 14.2 9.9 2.0 9.5
1924 2.0 -3.2 2.6 4.9
1925 3.6 4.0 2.4 0.1
1926 6.2 4.2 3.2 3.4
1927 1.1 -0.2 2.9 0.5
1928 1.0 0.6 2.4 -0.3
1929 6.5 2.2 2.4 5.7
1930 -9.2 -8.1 2.0 -4.8
1931 -7.5 -10.5 0.1 0.4
1932 -14.5 -13.5 -2.2 -5.2
1933 -2.5 -1.0 -3.4 -1.2
1934 9.9 0.4 -2.8 13.7
1935 9.0 5.8 -1.4 6.6
1936 12.8 10.3 0.0 6.8
1937 6.9 5.8 1.4 2.9
1938 -5.5 -9.3 0.9 1.2
1939 9.1 6.2 -0.3 4.6
*All entries are annual growth rates calculated using data from
John W. Kendrick,Productivity Trends in the United
States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), Table
A-XXII, 335. Following the discussion in Kendrick, the capital
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share (a) was 0.30 until 1928 and 0.25 thereafter.
Real GDP and technology were both growing in most years in the 1920s. In the early 1930s
both variables decreased, and both grew again as the economy recovered from the Great
Depression. In other words, technology growth and output growth are positively correlated
over this period. This suggests the possibility that changes in technology caused the changes
in output—always remembering that, as we observed earlier, correlation need not imply a
causal relationship. An improvement in technology causes firms to want to produce more.
They demand more workers, so employment and real wages increase. The increased output,
through the circular flow, means that there is increased income. Households increase both
consumption and savings. Higher savings means higher investment, so, over time, the
economy accumulates more capital. Exactly the opposite holds if there is a decrease in
technology: in this case, employment, consumption, and investment all decrease.
Does this theory fit the facts? For the roaring twenties, we see growth in output, labor, and
capital. In addition, there was a positive technology growth rate in almost all the years of the
decade. These movements are indeed consistent with the behavior of an economy driven by
improvements in technology. Jumping back for a moment to individual markets,
improvements in technology shift supply curves rightward. Increased output is therefore
accompanied by decreased prices. The aggregate price level is nothing more than a weighted
average of individual prices, so price decreases in individual markets translate into a decrease
in the overall price level. From Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*”, the
price level actually moved very little between 1922 and 1929, so this fits less well.
Overall, the view that technological progress fueled the growth from 1922 to 1929 seems
broadly consistent with the facts. Given the simplicity of the framework that we are using,
“broadly consistent” is probably the best it is reasonable to hope for.
Can Technology Changes Explain the Great Depression?
Now let us apply the same logic to the period of the Great Depression. Negative growth in
output from 1930 to 1933 was matched by negative growth in labor and technology (except for
1931). The capital stock decreased from 1932 to 1935, reflecting meager investment during
this period. When the economy turned around in 1934, technology growth turned up as well.
Imagine that the economy experienced negative technology growth from 1929 to 1933. The
reduced productivity of firms leads to a decrease in demand for labor, so real wages and
employment decrease. Lower productivity also means that firms did not think it was
worthwhile to invest in building new factories and buying new machinery. Both labor and
capital inputs into the production function declined. Once technology growth resumed in
1934, the story was reversed: labor and capital inputs increased, and the economy began to
grow again. In this view, there was a substantial decline in the production capabilities of the
economy, leading to negative growth in output, consumption, and investment. The Great
Depression, in this account, was driven by technological regress.
Many economists are skeptical of such an explanation of the Great Depression. They have
three criticisms. First, large-scale technological regress is difficult to believe on its face. Did
people know an efficient way to manufacture something in 1929 but then forget it in 1930?
Even remembering that technology includes social infrastructure, it is hard to imagine any
event that would cause a decrease of 3 percent or more in technology—and if such an event
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did occur, surely we would be able to point to it and identify it.
Second, this explanation claims that labor input decreased because households saw lower real
wages and voluntarily chose to consume leisure rather than work. By most measures, though,
real wages increased. Moreover, it is difficult to equate a 25 percent unemployment rate, not
to mention all the stories of how people could not find work, with a labor market in which
households are simply moving along a labor supply curve.
Third, a prominent feature of the Great Depression is the decrease in the price level that
occurred from 1929 to 1933. Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*” tells us
that prices decreased by over 9 percent in both 1931 and 1932. However, a reduction in the
level of potential GDP would cause an inward shift of market supply curves and thus
an increase, rather than a decrease, in prices.
For most economists, the view of the Great Depression as a shift in technology is not
convincing. Something else must have been going on. In particular, the very high
unemployment rate strongly suggests that labor markets were malfunctioning. Thus, rather
than viewing the large decreases in output in economies around the world as part of the
normal functioning of supply and demand in an economy, we should perhaps consider it as
evidence that sometimes things can go badly wrong with the economy’s self-correction
mechanisms. If we want to explain the Great Depression, we are then obliged—as were the
economists at the time—to find a new way of thinking about the economy. It was an economist
named John Maynard Keynes who provided such a new approach; in so doing, he gave his
name to an entire branch of macroeconomic theory.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Potential output is the amount of real GDP an economy could produce if the labor
market is in equilibrium and capital goods are fully utilized.
A large enough decrease in potential output, say through technological regress, could
cause the large decrease in real GDP that occurred during the Great Depression.
A reduction in potential output would lead to a decrease in real wages and an increase
in the price level. Those implications are inconsistent with the facts of the Great
Depression years. Further, it is hard to understand how potential output could
decrease by the extent needed to match the decrease in real GDP during the Great
Depression. Finally, a 25 percent unemployment rate is not consistent with labor
market equilibrium.
Checking Your Understanding
1.Draw the comparative statics picture for the labor market for the situation in which the
Great Depression is a consequence of technological regress—that is, negative technology
growth. Which curve shifts? Does it shift leftward or rightward?
2.Suppose the supply curve in a market shifts rightward. What must happen to the demand
curve if the price in the market does not change?
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[1] See John W. Kendrick, Productivity Trends in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1961), particularly Table A-XXII, p. 335, and the discussion of these
calculations.
7.3 The Components of GDP during the Great Depression
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the main components of aggregate spending?
2. What is the national income identity?
3. What happened to consumption and investment spending during the Great
Depression?
4. What is consumption smoothing?
In his analysis of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes contrasted his new approach
with the prevailing “classical” theory: [1] “I shall argue that the postulates of the classical
theory are applicable to a special case only and not to the general case.…Moreover, the
characteristics of the special case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of
the economic society in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading
and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience.” Keynes claimed that there
was a fundamental failure in the economic system that prevented markets from fully
coordinating activities in the economy. He argued that, as a consequence, the actual output of
the economy was not determined by the productive capacity of the economy, and that it was
“misleading and disastrous” to think otherwise. In more modern terms, he said that actual
output need not always equal potential output but was instead determined by the overall level
of spending or demand in the economy.
Keynes provided a competing story of the Great Depression that did not rely on technological
regress and in which unemployment truly reflected an inability of households to find work.
Keynes gave life to aggregate spending—the total spending by households, firms, and
governments—as a determinant of aggregate gross domestic product (GDP). With this new
perspective, Keynes also uncovered a way in which government intervention might help the
functioning of the economy.
To understand how Keynes approached the puzzle of the Great Depression, we must first look
more closely at the components of GDP. Figure 7.5 “The Firm Sector in the Circular
Flow” shows the circular flow, emphasizing the flows in and out of the firm sector of the
economy. Accounting rules tell us that in every sector of the circular flow, the flow of dollars
in must equal the flow of dollars out. We know that the total flow of dollars from the firm
sector measures the total value of production in the economy. The total flow of dollars into the
firm sector equals total expenditures on GDP. The figure therefore illustrates a fundamental
relationship in the national accounts.
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Figure 7.5 The Firm Sector in the Circular Flow
The flow of dollars into the firm sector equals consumption plus net exports plus investment
plus government purchases. The flow of dollars from the firm sector equals total GDP in the
economy.
The National Income Identity
The national income identity states that
production = consumption + investment + government purchases + net exports.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
The toolkit describes the circular flow of income in more detail.
Consumption refers to total consumption spending by households on final goods and
services. Consumption is divided into three categories.
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1. Services. These are items such as haircuts, restaurant meals, hotel nights, legal services,
and movies. There is often no tangible product; the consumer purchases the time and
skills of individuals (such as barbers, chefs, and lawyers). Production and consumption of
services usually occur together.
2. Nondurable goods. Examples include groceries, clothing, and DVDs—tangible products
that (usually) have a fairly limited lifespan (typically less than three years).
3. Durable goods. These are items such as automobiles, “white goods” (washing machines,
refrigerators, and other appliances), and computers. They are tangible products that
usually have a lifespan of several years.
The distinctions among these categories are not always as clear-cut as the definitions suggest.
A good pair of blue jeans might outlast a shoddy dishwasher, even though the jeans are
classified as a nondurable good and the dishwasher as a durable good.
Investment is the purchase of new goods that increase the capital stock, allowing us to
produce more output in the future. Investment is divided into three categories.
1. Business fixed investment. Purchases of physical capital (plants, machines) for the
production of goods and services
2. New residential construction. The building of new homes
3. Inventory investment. Change in inventories of final goods
The economist’s definition of investment is precise and differs from the way we often use the
word in everyday speech. Specifically, economists do not use the term to mean the purchase of
financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. Most of the time when we talk about investment in
this book, we are referring to business fixed investment—the production of new physical
capital goods. Inventory investment is a special category of investment that we explain
in Section 7.3.2 “Inventory Investment”.
As a rough rule of thumb, consumption spending is carried out by households, and
investment spending is carried out by firms. But there is one important exception: new
residential construction is included in investment. A new house purchased by a household is
treated as investment, not consumption.
Government purchases include all purchases of goods and services by the government. We
include in our definition of “government” local as well as national government activity. In the
United States, this means that we collapse together federal, state, and local governments for
the purpose of our analysis.
This component of spending refers only to purchases of goods and services, not to transfers.
So, if the federal government buys aircraft from Boeing or the local police department buys a
fleet of Volvos, these are included in government purchases. However, a transfer you receive
from the government—say, because you are unemployed and are being paid unemployment
insurance—is not counted in GDP. (Of course, if you then use this income to purchase goods
and services, that consumption is part of GDP.)
Net exports simply equal exports minus imports. They are included because we must correct
for the expenditure flows associated with the rest of the world. Some spending in the economy
goes to imported goods, which is not associated with domestic production. We must subtract
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these imports from total expenditures. Against that, some demand for domestically produced
goods comes from other countries. We add these exports to total expenditure.
Inventory Investment
Inventory investment is a relatively minor component of GDP, but we need to understand it in
some detail because it plays a key role in the Keynesian approach. When a firm produces
output, it does one of two things with it: it either sells it or adds it to inventory. Thus an
accounting relationship within a firm is that
production = sales + changes in inventory.
If a firm produces more than it sells, its stocks of inventories increase. If a firm sells more
than it produces, its stocks of inventories decrease. The inventories that a firm holds are
counted as part of its capital stock, so any change in firms’ inventories is counted as a
component of investment.
Suppose General Motors (GM) produces 10 million cars, anticipating that it will sell them all.
Then imagine that demand is lower than expected, so it only sells 9.9 million. The result is
that 100,000 cars pile up on GM’s lots, and the GM accountants record this as an addition to
inventory. We want GDP to measure both production and spending, but we have 100,000 cars
that have been produced but not purchased. The national income accounts get around this
problem by effectively pretending that GM bought the cars from itself.
If the cars are then sold in the following year, they will not contribute to GDP in that year—
quite properly, since they were not produced that year. The national accounts in the next year
will show that 100,000 cars were sold to households, but they will also show that inventories
decreased by 100,000 cars. Thus the accounts record expenditures on these cars as part of
durable goods consumption, but the accounts also contain an offsetting reduction in inventory
investment.
In some cases, firms change their stocks of inventory as a part of their business strategy. More
often, changes in inventories occur because a firm did not correctly forecast its
sales. Unplanned inventory investment is an increase in inventories that comes about
because a firm sells less than it anticipated. Because GM expected to sell all 10 million cars but
sold only 9.9 million, GM had 100,000 cars of unplanned inventory investment.
Moreover, GM is likely to react swiftly to this imbalance between its production plans and its
sales. When it sees its sales decrease and its inventory increase, it will respond by cutting its
production back until it is in line with sales again. Thus, when an individual firm sees
inventories increase and sales decrease, it typically scales down production to match the
decrease in demand.
Now let us think about how this works at the level of an economy as a whole. Suppose we
divide total spending in the economy into unplanned inventory investment and everything
else, which we call planned spending.
Toolkit: Section 16.19 “The Aggregate Expenditure Model”
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Planned spending is all expenditure in the economy except for unplanned inventory
investment:
GDP = planned spending + unplanned inventory investment.
This equation must always hold true because of the rules of national income accounting.
Begin with the situation where there is no unplanned inventory investment—so GDP equals
planned spending—and then suppose that planned spending decreases. Firms find that their
production is in excess of their sales, so their inventory builds up. As we just argued, they
respond by decreasing production so that GDP is again equal to planned spending, and
unplanned inventory investment is once again zero. Thus, even though unplanned inventory
investment can be nonzero for very short periods of time, we do not expect such a situation to
persist. We expect instead that actual output will, in fact, almost always equal planned
spending.
What Happened to the Components of GDP during the Great Depression?
Now let us look at how these components of GDP behaved during the 1930s. Table 7.3
“Growth Rates of Key Macroeconomic Variables, 1930–39*” presents these data in the form of
growth rates. Remember that a positive growth rate means the variable in question increased
from one year to the next, while a negative growth rate means it decreased.
Table 7.3 Growth Rates of Key Macroeconomic Variables, 1930–39*
Growth
Rates
1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939
Real GDP -8.6 -6.4 -13.0 -1.3 10.8 8.9 13.0 5.1 -3.4 8.1
Consumption -5.3 -3.1 -8.9 -2.2 7.1 6.1 10.1 3.7 -1.6 5.6
Investment -33.3 -37.2 -69.8 47.5 80.5 85.1 28.2 24.9 -33.9 28.6
Government
Purchases
10.2 4.2 -3.3 -3.5 12.8 2.7 16.7 -4.2 7.7 8.8
*This table shows growth rates in real GDP, consumption, investment, and
government purchases. All data are from the National Income and Product
Accounts web page, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce
(http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/index.asp).
We see again that real GDP decreased for four years in succession (the growth rates are
negative from 1930 to 1933). The decrease in real GDP was accompanied by a decline in
consumption and investment: consumption likewise decreased for four successive years, and
investment decreased for three successive years. The decline in consumption was not as steep
as the decline in real GDP, while the decline in investment was much larger. Were we to drill
deeper and look at the components of consumption, we would discover that expenditures on
durable goods decreased by 17.6 percent in 1930 and 25.1 percent in 1932, while expenditures
on services decreased by only 2.5 percent in 1930 and 6.3 percent in 1932.
Whatever was happening during this period evidently had a much larger influence on firms’
purchases of investment goods, and on households’ spending on cars and other durable
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goods, than it did on purchases of nondurable goods (such as food) and services (such as
haircuts). A similar pattern can be observed in modern economies: consumption is smoother
than output, and spending on services is smoother than spending on durables. The reason for
this is a phenomenon that economists call consumption smoothing.
Toolkit: Section 16.23 “The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption”
Consumption smoothing is the idea that households like to keep their flow of consumption
relatively steady over time. When income is unusually high, the household saves (or pays off
existing loans); when income is unusually low, the household borrows (or draws down
existing savings). Consumption smoothing is a key ingredient of the life-cycle model of
consumption, which is discussed in more detail in the toolkit.
If your company has a good year and you get a big bonus, you will increase consumption
spending not only this year but also in future years. To do so, you must save a portion of your
bonus to pay for this higher consumption in the future. By the same logic, if your income
decreases, your consumption will not decrease as much. People who became unemployed
during the Great Depression did not reduce their consumption of services and nondurable
goods to zero. Instead, as far as was possible, they drew on their existing savings, borrowed,
and postponed purchases of durable goods.
Consumption of durable goods, in other words, resembles investment rather than
consumption of nondurable goods and services. This makes sense because durable goods
resemble investment goods that are purchased by households. Like investment goods, they
yield benefits over some prolonged period of time. As an example, consider automobile
purchases during the Great Depression. Although 5.4 million cars were produced in 1929,
only 3.4 million were produced in 1930—a reduction of more than 37 percent in a single year.
Instead of buying new cars, households simply held onto their existing cars longer. As a
consequence of the boom of the 1920s, there were a lot of relatively new cars on the road in
1929: the number of cars less than 3 years old was about 9.5 million. Two years later, this
number had fallen to 7.9 million. [2]
This reduction in activity in the automobile industry was matched by a reduction of inputs
into the production process. By early 1933, there were only 4 workers for every 10 who had
been employed 4 years previously. Equipment purchases for the transportation sector were so
low that capital stock for this sector decreased between 1931 and 1935. In the turmoil of the
Great Depression, many small car producers went out of business, leaving a few relatively
large companies—such as Ford Motor Company and GM—still in business.
Similar patterns arose as the economy recovered. Investment, in particular, was astonishingly
volatile. It decreased by about one-third in 1930 and again in 1931, and by over two-thirds in
1932, but rebounded at an astoundingly high rate after 1933. Consumption, meanwhile, grew
at a slower rate than GDP as the economy recovered.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The components of aggregate spending are consumption, investment, government
purchases of goods and services, and net exports.
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The national income identity states that real GDP is equal to the sum of the
components of aggregate spending.
During the Great Depression, both consumption spending and investment spending
experienced negative growth.
Households use savings to retain relatively smooth consumption despite fluctuations
in their income.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Explain the difference between investment spending in the national income and product
accounts and a decision to buy shares of a company.
2. If someone is unemployed and receives unemployment benefits from a state
government, are those funds counted in aggregate expenditure?
[1] John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money (Orlando: First Harvest/Harcourt, 1964[1936]), 3.
[2] These figures are from Michael Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and
Economic Change in America, 1929–39 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
7.4 The Great Depression: A Decrease in Aggregate Spending?
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How did the perspective of Keynes differ from the “classical theory” of the
macroeconomy?
2. How does a decrease in aggregate spending lead to a reduction in real gross domestic
product (real GDP)?
3. Can a decrease in consumption explain the Great Depression?
4. Can a decrease in investment explain the Great Depression?
Now that we understand the components of aggregate spending, we can consider whether a
decrease in one or more of these components can explain the Great Depression.
A Decrease in Aggregate Spending: The Multiple-Markets Perspective
Consider, as before, the market for new houses and suppose there is a reduction in spending
on houses. Market demand shifts inward, causing a decrease in the price of houses, as shown
in Figure 7.6 “An Inward Shift in Market Demand for Houses”. The lower price means that
construction firms choose to build fewer houses; there is a movement along the supply curve.
Figure 7.6 An Inward Shift in Market Demand for Houses
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A decrease in demand for houses leads to a decrease in the price of houses and a lower
quantity of houses being produced and sold.
As before, the effects are not confined to the housing market. Construction firms demand less
labor, so the wages of these workers decrease. Employment in the construction industry
declines, but these workers now seek jobs in other sectors of the economy. The increased
supply of labor in these sectors reduces wages and thus makes it more attractive for firms to
increase their hiring. Supply curves in other sectors shift rightward. Moreover, the income
that was being spent on housing will instead be spent somewhere else in the economy, so we
expect to see rightward shifts in demand curves in other sectors as well. In summary, if we are
looking at the whole economy, a decrease in spending in one market is not that different from
a decrease in technology in one market: we expect a reduction in one sector to lead to
expansions in other sectors. The economy still appears to be self-stabilizing.
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In this story, as is usual when we use supply and demand, we presumed that prices and wages
adjust quickly to bring supply and demand into line. This is critical for the effective
functioning of markets: for markets to do a good job of matching up demand and supply,
wages and prices must respond rapidly to differences between supply and
demand.Flexible prices adjust immediately to shifts in supply and demand curves so that
price is always at the point where supply equals demand. If, for example, the quantity of labor
supplied exceeds the quantity of labor demanded, flexible wages decrease quickly to bring the
labor market back into equilibrium.
Suppose we instead entertain the possibility that wages and prices do not immediately
adjust. Sticky prices do not react immediately to shifts in supply and demand curves, and
the adjustment to equilibrium can take some time. We defer for the moment the discussion
of why prices might be sticky and concentrate instead on the implications of this new idea
about how markets work. The easiest way to see the effects of price stickiness is to suppose
that prices do not change at all. Figure 7.7 “A Shift in Demand for Houses When Prices Are
Sticky” shows the impact of a decrease in demand for houses when the price of houses is
completely sticky. If you compare Figure 7.7 “A Shift in Demand for Houses When Prices Are
Sticky” to Figure 7.6 “An Inward Shift in Market Demand for Houses”, you see that a given
shift in demand leads to a larger change in the quantity produced.
Figure 7.7 A Shift in Demand for Houses When Prices Are Sticky
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If the price in the market is “sticky,” it may not adjust immediately to the change in demand,
resulting in a large decrease in the quantity of houses that are produced and sold.
What about the effects on other markets? As before, a decrease in demand for housing will
cause construction workers to lose their jobs. If wages are sticky, these workers may become
unemployed for a significant period of time. Their income decreases, and they consume fewer
goods and services. So, for example, the demand for beef in the economy might decrease
because unemployed construction workers buy cheaper meat. This means that the demand for
beef shifts inward. The reduction in activity in the construction sector leads to a reduction in
activity in the beef sector. And the process does not stop there—the reduced income of cattle
farmers and slaughterhouse workers will, in turn, spill over to other sectors.
What has happened to the self-stabilizing economy described earlier? First, sticky wages and
prices impede the incentives for workers to flow from one sector to another. If wages are
sticky, then the reduction in labor demand in the construction sector does not translate into
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lower wages. Thus there is no incentive for other sectors to expand. Instead, these other
sectors, such as food, see a decrease in demand for their product, which leads them to contract
as well. Second, the decrease in income means that it is possible to see decreases in demand
across the entire economy. It no longer need be the case that reductions in spending in one
area lead to increased spending in other sectors.
The Circular Flow of Income during the Great Depression
So far, we have told this story in terms of individual markets. The circular flow helps us see
how these markets come together in the aggregate economy. When we looked at the markets
for housing and beef, we saw that a decrease in demand for housing led to a decrease in
demand for labor and, hence, to lower labor income. We also saw that as income earned in the
housing market decreased, spending decreased in the beef market. Such linkages are at the
heart of the circular flow of income. Household spending on goods and services is made
possible by a flow of income from firms. Firms’ hiring of labor is made possible by a flow of
revenue from households. Keynes argued that this was a delicate process that might be prone
to malfunction in a variety of ways.
Households are willing to buy goods and services if they have a reasonable expectation that
they can earn income by selling labor. During the Great Depression, however, household
expectations were surely quite pessimistic. Individuals without jobs believed that their
chances of finding new employment were low. Those lucky enough to be employed knew that
they might soon be out of work. Thus households believed it was possible, even likely, that
they would receive low levels of income in the future. In response, they cut back their
spending.
Meanwhile, the willingness of firms to hire labor depends on their expectation that they can
sell the goods they manufacture. When firms anticipate a low level of demand for their
products, they do not want to produce much, so they do not need many workers. Current
employees are laid off, and there are few new hires.
Through the circular flow, the pessimism of households and the pessimism of firms interact.
Firms do not hire workers, so household income is low, and households are right not to spend
much. Households do not spend, so demand for goods and services is low, and firms are right
not to hire many workers. The pessimistic beliefs of firms and workers become self-fulfilling
prophecies.
The Aggregate Expenditure Model
In the remainder of this section, we build a framework around the ideas that we have just put
forward. The framework focuses on the determinants of aggregate spending because, in this
approach, the output of the economy is determined not by the level of potential output but by
the level of total spending. This model is based around the idea of sticky prices—or, more
precisely, it tells us what the output of the economy will be, at a given value of the overall
price level. Once we understand this, we can add in the effects of changing prices.
Earlier, we introduced the national income identity:
production = consumption + investment + government purchases + net exports.
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This equation must be true by the way the national income accounts are constructed. That is,
it is an accounting identity. We also explained that
GDP = planned spending + unplanned inventory investment.
It is possible for firms to accumulate or decumulate inventories unintentionally, but such a
situation will not persist for long. Firms quickly respond to such imbalances by adjusting their
production. The aggregate expenditure model takes the national income identity and adds to
it the condition that unplanned inventory investment equals zero—equivalently, gross
domestic product (GDP) equals planned spending:
planned spending = consumption + investment + government purchases + net exports.
Another way of saying this is that as long as we interpret investment to include only planned
investment, the national income equation is no longer an identity but instead a condition for
equilibrium.
The Relationship between Planned Spending and Output
We could now examine all four components of planned spending separately. [1] For the
moment, however, we group them all together.
We focus on the fact that total planned spending depends positively on the level of income and
output in an economy, for two main reasons:
1. If households have higher income, they are likely to increase their spending on many
goods and services. The relationship between income and consumption is one of the
cornerstones of macroeconomics.
2. Firms are likely to decide that higher levels of output—particularly if expected to persist—
mean that they should build up their capital stock and thus increase their investment.
Figure 7.8 The Planned Spending Line
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Planned spending is composed of autonomous spending (the amount of spending when real
GDP equals zero) and induced spending (spending resulting from real GDP).
In summary, we conclude that when income increases, planned expenditure also increases.
We illustrate this in Figure 7.8 “The Planned Spending Line”, where we suppose for simplicity
that the relationship between planned spending and GDP is a straight line:
planned spending = autonomous spending + marginal propensity to spend × GDP.
Autonomous spending is the intercept of the planned spending line. It is the amount of
spending that there would be in an economy if income were zero. It is positive, for two
reasons: (1) A household with no income still wants to consume something, so it will either
draw on its existing savings or borrow against future income. (2) The government purchases
goods and services even if income is zero.
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The marginal propensity to spend is the slope of the planned spending line. It tells us
how much planned spending increases if there is a $1 increase in income. The marginal
propensity to spend is positive: Increases in income lead to increased spending by households
and firms. The marginal propensity to spend is less than one, largely because of consumption
smoothing by households. If household income increases by $1, households typically consume
only a fraction of the increase, saving the remainder to finance future consumption. This
equation, together with the condition that GDP equals planned spending, gives us
the aggregate expenditure model.
Toolkit: Section 16.19 “The Aggregate Expenditure Model”
The aggregate expenditure model takes as its starting point the fact that GDP measures both
total spending and total production. The model focuses on the relationships between output
and spending, which we write as follows:
planned spending = GDP
and
planned spending = autonomous spending + marginal propensity to spend × GDP.
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The model finds the value of output for a given value of the price level. It is then combined
with a model of price adjustment to give a complete picture of the economy.
Figure 7.9 Equilibrium in the Aggregate Expenditure Model
The aggregate expenditure framework tells us that the economy is in equilibrium when
planned spending equals real GDP.
We can solve the two equations to find the values of GDP and planned spending that are
consistent with both equations:
equilibrium GDP =
autonomous spending
1 – marginal propensity to spend
.
We can also take a graphical approach, as shown in Figure 7.9 “Equilibrium in the Aggregate
Expenditure Model”. On the horizontal axis is the level of real GDP, while on the vertical axis
is the overall level of (planned) spending in the economy. We graph the two relationships of
the aggregate expenditure model. The first line is a 45° line—that is, it is a line with a slope
equal to one and passing through the origin. The second is the planned spending line. The
point that solves the two equations is the point where the two lines intersect. This diagram is
the essence of the aggregate expenditure model of the macroeconomy.
The aggregate expenditure model makes no reference to potential output or the supply side of
the economy. The model assumes that the total amount of output produced will always equal
the quantity demanded at the given price. You might think that this neglect of the supply side
is a weakness of the model, and you would be right. In Section 7.4.6 “Price Adjustment”, when
we introduce the adjustment of prices, the significance of potential output becomes clear.
Can a Decrease in Consumption Spending Explain the Great Depression?
We now apply this framework to the Great Depression. The aggregate expenditure approach
suggests that output decreased in the Great Depression because aggregate spending
decreased. Part (a) of Figure 7.10 “A Decrease in Aggregate Expenditures”shows how this
process begins: a decrease in autonomous spending shifts the spending line down. The
interpretation of such a shift is that, at every level of income, spending is lower. Such a
decrease in spending is due to a decrease in (the autonomous component of) consumption,
investment, government spending, or net exports (or some combination of these). Part (b)
of Figure 7.10 “A Decrease in Aggregate Expenditures” shows what happens when the planned
spending line shifts downward. The equilibrium level of real GDP decreases. So far, therefore,
the aggregate expenditure model seems to work: a decrease in autonomous spending leads to
a decrease in real GDP at the given price level. But we need to know why planned spending
decreased.
Figure 7.10 A Decrease in Aggregate Expenditures
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The Keynesian explanation of the Great Depression is that a decrease in autonomous
spending caused the planned spending line to shift downward (a) leading to a decrease in
the equilibrium level of real GDP (b).
Let us first consider the possibility that a reduction in consumption triggered the Great
Depression. Recall that, between September and November 1929, the stock market in the
United States crashed. This collapse meant that many households were suddenly less wealthy
than they had been previously. A natural response to a decrease in wealth is to decrease
consumption; this is known as a wealth effect.
Wealth is distinct from income. Income is a flow: a household’s income is the amount that it
receives over a period of time, such as a year. Wealth is a stock: it is the cumulated amount of
the household’s savings. Is it plausible that wealth effects could explain a collapse of the
magnitude of the Great Depression? To answer this, we need to determine how much real
GDP decreases for a given change in autonomous spending.
The Multiplier
Toolkit: Section 16.19 “The Aggregate Expenditure Model”
The solution for output in the aggregate expenditure model can be written in terms of changes
as follows:
change in GDP = multiplier × change in autonomous spending,
where the multiplier is given by
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multiplier =
1
1 – marginal propensity to spend
.
Suppose that the marginal propensity to spend is 0.8. Then
multiplier =
1
1 – marginal propensity to spend
=
1
1 – 0.8
=
1
0.2
= 5.
A given change in autonomous spending will lead to a fivefold change in real GDP.
Economists refer to this as a multiplier process. Because (1 − marginal propensity to spend) is
less than one, the multiplier is a number greater than one. This means that any change in
autonomous spending is multiplied up to result in a larger change in GDP. Even relatively
small decreases in spending can end up being damaging to an economy.
The economics behind the multiplier comes from the circular flow of income. Begin with a
decrease in autonomous spending. The reduction in spending means less demand for firms’
goods and services. Firms respond by cutting output. (As a reminder, the signal to firms that
they should cut their output comes from the fact that they see a buildup of their inventory.)
When firms cut their output, they require less labor and pay out less in wages, so household
income decreases. This causes households to again cut back on consumption, so spending
decreases further. Thus we go round and round the circular flow diagram: decreased spending
leads to decreased output, which leads to decreased income, which leads to decreased
spending, which leads to decreased output, and so on and so on. The process continues until
the reductions in income, output, and consumption in each round are tiny enough to be
ignored.
We use the multiplier to carry out comparative static exercises in the aggregate expenditure
model. In this case, the endogenous variable is real GDP, and the exogenous variable is
autonomous spending. Given a change in autonomous spending, we simply multiply by the
multiplier to get the change in real GDP when the price level is fixed. Let us do some back-of-
the-envelope comparative static calculations, based on the assumption that the marginal
propensity to spend is 0.8, so the multiplier is 5.
Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*” tells us that real GDP decreased by
approximately $75 billion between 1929 and 1930. With a multiplier of 5, we would need a
drop in autonomous spending of $75 billion divided by 5, or $15 billion, to get this large a
decrease in GDP. The population of the United States in 1930 was approximately 123 million,
so a $15 billion decrease in spending corresponds to about $122 per person. Remember that
the figures in Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*” are in terms of year
2000 dollars. It certainly seems plausible that households, who had been made significantly
poorer by the collapse in the stock market, would have responded by cutting back spending by
the equivalent today of a few hundred dollars per year.
Our goal, you will remember, is to explain the events of the Great Depression. How are we
doing so far? The good news is that we do have a story that explains how output could
decrease as precipitously as it did in the Great Depression years: there was a major stock
market crash, which made people feel less wealthy, so they decided to consume less and save
more.
If we look more closely, though, this story still falls short. When we examined the data for the
Great Depression, we saw that—while output and consumption both decreased—consumption
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decreased much less than did output. For example, from 1929 to 1933, real GDP decreased by
26.5 percent, while consumption decreased by 18.2 percent. By contrast, investment (that is,
purchases of capital by firms, new home construction, and changes in business inventories)
decreased much more than output. In 1932, purchases of new capital were $11 billion (year
2000 dollars), compared to a level of $91 billion in 1929. This is a reduction in real investment
of about 82 percent. We must look more closely at investment to see if our theory can also
explain the different behavior of consumption and investment.
Can a Decrease in Investment Spending Explain the Great Depression?
When GDP decreases, there can be an induced decrease in investment: declines in income
lead firms to anticipate lower production in the future, meaning they see less of a need to
build up their capital stock. But the changes in investment during the Great Depression were
very large. Because it is implausible that such large variation was the result of changes in
output alone, economists look for additional explanations of why investment decreased so
much during the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, the link between savings and investment was disrupted by bank
failures. Between 1929 and 1933, a number of US banks went out of business, often taking the
savings of households with them. People began to trust banks less, and many households
stopped putting their savings into the financial sector. The financial sector is an intermediary
between households and firms, matching up the supply of savings from households with the
demand for savings by firms. Figure 7.11 “The Financial Sector in the Circular Flow of
Income” shows the flows in and out of the financial sector. (Our focus here is on the role of
this sector in matching savers and investors. As Figure 7.11 “The Financial Sector in the
Circular Flow of Income” shows, however, funds also flow into (or from) the financial sector
from the rest of the world and the government sector.)
Figure 7.11 The Financial Sector in the Circular Flow of Income
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Financial institutions such as banks act as intermediaries in the circular flow of income.
During the Great Depression, many banks failed, disrupting the matching of savings and
investment.
To understand bank failures in the Great Depression, we need to take a moment to review
what banks do. A bank is an institution that accepts money (“bank deposits”) from
individuals. It then takes some of that money and puts it into longer-term projects—the
construction of an apartment building, for example. The bank in this case issues a long-term
loan to the company that plans to construct the new building.
At any time, a bank has a portfolio of assets. Some are liquid; they are easily and quickly
exchanged for cash. Some are illiquid; they cannot easily be converted into cash. Banks keep
some assets in a highly liquid form, such as cash or very short-term loans, and also hold assets
that are relatively illiquid, such as a two-year loan to a construction company.
At any time, depositors at a bank can choose to withdraw their money. Under normal
circumstances, people are happy to leave most of their money in the bank, so only a small
fraction of depositors want to withdraw money on any given day. The bank keeps some cash in
its vaults to accommodate this demand. But suppose that times are not normal. Suppose that,
as was the case during the Great Depression, depositors start to see that other banks are going
out of business. Then they may worry that their own bank is also at risk of failing, in which
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case they will lose their savings. The natural response is to rush to the bank to withdraw
money before the bank fails.
If a large number of depositors all try to withdraw money at once, the bank will run out of
cash and other liquid assets. It will not be able to meet the needs of its depositors. The
consequence is a bank run. And if the bank is unable to meet its depositors’ demands, it may
be forced out of business altogether. This is known as a bank failure.
A striking feature of a bank failure caused by a bank run is that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy:
If everybody believes that the bank is safe, then no one will withdraw money, and the
bank will indeed be safe.
If everybody believes that the bank is going to fail, then everyone will try to withdraw
money, and the bank will indeed fail.
Notice that every individual’s decision about what to do is based on what that individual
expects everyone else will do.
Figure 7.12 “Payoffs in a Bank-Run Game” presents the decisions underlying a bank run in a
stylized way. Imagine that you deposit $100 in the bank. The table in the figure shows how
much you obtain, depending on your own actions and those of other depositors. You and the
other depositors must decide whether to leave your money in the bank (“don’t run”) or try to
take your money out of the bank (“run”). If everyone else leaves money in the bank, then you
can withdraw your money and get $100 or leave it in the bank and get the $100 plus $10
interest. If others do not run, then it is also best for you not to run. But if everyone else runs
on the bank, then you get nothing if you leave your money in the bank, and you can (in this
example) recover $20 if you run to the bank along with everyone else. Thus, if you expect
others to run on the bank, you should do the same.
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Figure 7.12 Payoffs in a Bank-Run Game
This table shows the payoffs in a bank-run game. That is, it shows you what you get back
depending on your choice and everybody else’s choice about whether to run on the bank. If
everyone else leaves money in the bank, then you should do the same, but if everyone else
runs on the bank, you are better running as well.
Economists call this situation a coordination game. In a coordination game, there are
multiple equilibria. In this example, there is one equilibrium where there is no run on the
bank, and there is another equilibrium where everyone runs to the bank to withdraw funds.
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Toolkit: Section 16.9 “Nash Equilibrium”
You can find more details on coordination games in the toolkit.
During the Great Depression, a story such as this played out not only at one bank but at
many. Figure 7.13 shows what happened in terms of the aggregate expenditure framework.
Prior to the Great Depression, the economy was in a “high confidence” equilibrium, in which
the banking system was healthy and confidence was high. Then—for some reason—people
became nervous about leaving money in banks, and it became much harder for firms to obtain
loans. The cost of borrowing—the real interest rate—increased, and investment decreased
substantially. The planned spending line shifted downward, and the economy moved to the
bad “low confidence” equilibrium. The downward shift in planned spending leads to a
decrease in real GDP, given the existing level of prices.
Figure 7.13 should look familiar; it is the same as part (b) of Figure 7.10 “A Decrease in
Aggregate Expenditures”. This is because a decrease in autonomous consumption and a
decrease in autonomous investment both look the same in the aggregate expenditure model,
even though the underlying story is different. Of course, it is also possible that both
autonomous consumption and autonomous investment decreased.
Figure 7.13
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Failures in the financial sector lead to a drop in investment spending. During the Great
Depression, a decrease in confidence in the banking system meant that many banks failed,
and it became more difficult and expensive for firms to borrow. The planned spending line
shifted downward, and real GDP decreased.
To summarize, the banking crisis made households reluctant to put money in the banks, and
banks were reluctant to make loans. Two banking measures help us see what was happening.
The currency-deposit ratio is the total amount of currency (that is, either banknotes or
coins) divided by the total amount of deposits in banks. The loan-deposit ratio is the total
amount of loans made by banks divided by the total amount of deposits in banks.
If the currency-deposit ratio is low, households are not holding very much cash but are
instead keeping wealth in the form of bank deposits and other assets. The currency-deposit
ratio increased from 0.09 in October 1929 to 0.23 in March 1933. [2] This means that
households in the economy started holding onto cash rather than depositing it in banks. You
can think of the loan-deposit ratio as a measure of the productivity of banks: banks take
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deposits and convert them into loans for investment. During the Great Depression, the loan-
deposit ratio decreased from 0.86 to 0.73. [3]
Price Adjustment
The story we have told explains why the economy departs from potential output but says
nothing about how (if at all) the economy gets back to potential output. The answer is that
prices have a tendency to adjust back toward their equilibrium levels, even if they do not
always get there immediately. This is most easily understood by remembering that prices in
the economy are, in the end, usually set by firms. When a firm sees a decrease in demand for
its product, it does not necessarily decrease its prices immediately. Its decision about what
price to choose depends on the prices of its inputs and the prices being set by its competitors.
In addition, it depends on not only what those prices are right now but also what the firm
expects to happen in the future. Deciding exactly what to do about prices can be a difficult
decision for the managers of a firm.
Without analyzing this decision in detail, we can certainly observe that firms often keep prices
fixed when demand decreases—at least to begin with. The result looks like that inFigure 7.6
“An Inward Shift in Market Demand for Houses”. In the face of a prolonged decrease in
demand, however, firms will lower prices. Some firms do this relatively quickly; others keep
prices unchanged for longer periods. We conclude that prices are sticky; they do not decrease
instantly, but they decrease eventually. [4] For the economy as a whole, this adjustment of
prices is represented by a price-adjustment equation.
Toolkit: Section 16.20 “Price Adjustment”
The difference between potential output and actual output is called the output gap:
output gap = potential real GDP − actual real GDP.
If an economy is in recession, the output gap is positive. If an economy is in a boom, then the
output gap is negative. The inflation rate when an economy is at potential output (that is,
when the output gap is zero) is called autonomous inflation. The overall inflation rate
depends on both autonomous inflation and the output gap, as shown in the price-adjustment
equation:
inflation rate = autonomous inflation − inflation sensitivity × output gap.
This equation tells us that there are two reasons for increasing prices.
1. Prices increase because autonomous inflation is positive. Even when the economy is at
potential output, firms may anticipate that their suppliers or their competitors are likely to
increase prices in the future. A natural response is to increase prices, so autonomous
inflation is positive.
2. Prices increase because the output gap is negative. The output gap matters because, as
GDP increases relative to potential, labor and other inputs become scarcer. Firms see
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increasing costs and choose to set higher prices as a consequence. The “inflation
sensitivity” tells us how responsive the inflation rate is to the output gap.
When real GDP is above potential output, there is upward pressure on prices in the economy.
The inflation rate exceeds autonomous inflation. By contrast, when real GDP is below
potential, there is downward pressure on prices. The inflation rate is below the autonomous
inflation rate. The price-adjustment equation is shown in Figure 7.14 “Price Adjustment”.
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Figure 7.14 Price Adjustment
When an economy is in a recession, actual inflation is lower than autonomous inflation. In a
boom, inflation is higher than its autonomous level.
We can apply this pricing equation to the Great Depression. Imagine first that autonomous
inflation is zero. In this case, prices decrease when output is below potential. From 1929 to
1933, output was surely below potential and, as the equation suggests, this was a period of
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decreasing prices. After 1933, as the economy rebounded, the increase in the level of economic
activity was matched with positive inflation—that is, increasing prices. This turnaround in
inflation occurred even though the economy was still operating at a level below potential
output. To match this movement in prices, we need to assume that—for some reason that we
have not explained—autonomous inflation became positive in this period.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Keynes argued that, at least in the short run, markets were not able to fully coordinate
economic activity. His theory gave a prominent role to aggregate spending as a
determinant of real GDP.
Given prices, a reduction in spending will lead to a reduction in the income of workers
and owners of capital, which will lead to further reductions in spending. This link
between income and spending is highlighted by the circular flow of income and
underlies the aggregate expenditure model.
The stock market crash in 1929 reduced the wealth of many households, and this
could have led them to cut consumption. This reduction in aggregate spending,
through the multiplier process, could have led to a large reduction in real GDP.
The reductions in investment in the early 1930s, perhaps coming from instability in
the financial system, could lead to a reduction in aggregate spending and, through the
multiplier process, a large reduction in real GDP.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Some researchers have suggested that a reduction in US net exports is another possible
cause of the Great Depression. Use the aggregate expenditure model to consider the
effects of a reduction in net exports. What happens to real GDP?
2. Suppose autonomous inflation is constant, but real GDP moves around. Would you
expect inflation to be procyclical or countercyclical?
[1] Different chapters of this book delve deeper into these types of spending.
[2] See Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–
1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), Table B3.
[3] See Ben Bernanke, “Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the
Great Depression,” American Economic Review 73 (1983): 257–76, Table 1.
[4] Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed” provides more detail about the price-adjustment
decisions of firms.
7.5 Policy Interventions and the Great Depression
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is stabilization policy?
2. What is monetary policy, and how was it used during the Great Depression?
3. What is fiscal policy, and how was it used during the Great Depression?
Understanding why the Great Depression occurred is certainly progress. But policymakers
also wanted to know if there was anything that could be done in the face of this economic
catastrophe. One of Keynes’ most lasting contributions to economics is that he showed how
different kinds of economic policy could be used to assist economies that were stuck in
recessions.
When markets are doing a good job of allocating resources, standard economic reasoning
suggests that it is better for the government to stay out of the way. But when markets fail to
allocate resources well, the government might be able to improve the overall functioning of
the economy. The idea that markets left alone would coordinate aggregate economic activity is
difficult to defend in the face of 25 percent unemployment of the labor force and a decline in
economic activity of nearly 30 percent over a 4-year period. Thus the rationale for government
intervention in the aggregate economy is that markets are failing to allocate resources
properly, perhaps because prices and wages are sticky.
Policy Remedies
In the wake of the Great Depression, economists started advocating the use of government
policy to improve the functioning of the macroeconomy. There are two kinds of government
policy. Monetary policy refers to changes in interest rates and other tools that are under the
control of the monetary authority of a country (the central bank).Fiscal policy refers to
changes in taxation and the level of government purchases; such policies are typically under
the control of a country’s lawmakers. Stabilization policy is the general term for the use of
monetary and fiscal policies to prevent large fluctuations in real gross domestic product (real
GDP).
In the United States, the Federal Reserve Bank controls monetary policy, and fiscal policy is
controlled by the president, the Congress, and state governments. In the countries of the
European Union, monetary policy is controlled by the European Central Bank, and fiscal
policies are controlled by the individual governments of the member countries.
Keynes suggested that the cause of the Great Depression was an unusually low level of
aggregate spending. This diagnosis suggests an immediate remedy: use government policies
to increase aggregate spending. Because
change in GDP = multiplier × change in autonomous spending,
any government policy that increases autonomous spending will, through this equation, also
increase GDP. There are many different policies at the disposal of the government, but they
are similar at heart. The idea is to stimulate one of the components of aggregate spending—
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consumption, investment, government purchases, or net exports.
One fiscal policy measure is an increase in government purchases. Suppose the government
increases its expenditure—perhaps by hiring more teachers, buying more tanks, or building
more roads. This increases autonomous spending and works its way through the economy,
just as in our earlier discussion of a decrease in autonomous consumption—except now we are
talking about an increase rather than a decrease. If the government spends an extra dollar,
this immediately expands income by that dollar. Extra income leads to extra spending, which
leads to further increases in output and income. The process continues around and around the
circular flow.
Imagine that, as before, the marginal propensity to spend is 0.8, so that the multiplier is 5. If
the government increases expenditure on goods and services by $1 billion, overall GDP in the
economy will increase by $5 billion. Thus to offset the decrease in real GDP of about $90
billion between 1929 and 1933, assuming a marginal propensity to spend of 0.8, the federal
government should have increased government spending by $18 billion. The multiplier is a
double-edged sword. It has the bad effect that it can turn small decreases in spending into big
decreases in output. But it also means that relatively small changes in government spending
can have a big effect on output.
Tax cuts are another way to stimulate the economy. If households have to pay fewer taxes to
the government, they are likely to spend more on consumption goods. This form of policy
intervention has been used over and over again by governments in the United States and
elsewhere. Tax cuts, like government spending, must be paid for. If the government spends
more and taxes less, then the government deficit increases. The government must borrow to
finance such fiscal policy measures. [1]
The central bank can use monetary policy to affect aggregate spending. Monetary policy
operates through changes in interest rates, which are—in the short run at least—under the
influence of the central bank. Lower interest rates make it cheaper for firms to borrow, which
encourages them to increase investment spending. Lower interest rates likewise mean lower
mortgage rates, so households are more likely to buy new homes. Lower interest rates may
encourage households to borrow and spend more on other goods. And lower interest rates can
even encourage net exports. [2]
Monetary and Fiscal Policies during the Great Depression
We have argued that monetary and fiscal policies could have been used to help the economy
out of the Great Depression. But what did policymakers actually do at the time? The answer
comes in two parts: at the start of the Great Depression, they did not do much; after 1932,
they did rather more.
Both presidential candidates campaigned in favor of conservative fiscal policy in 1932. Here
are some excerpts from the party platforms. [3]
From the Democratic Party platform:
We advocate an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by
abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus,
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and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per
cent in the cost of the Federal Government. And we call upon the Democratic Party in
the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.
We favor maintenance of the national credit by a federal budget annually balanced on
the basis of accurate executive estimates within revenues, raised by a system of taxation
levied on the principle of ability to pay. [4]
From the Republican Party platform:
The President’s program contemplates an attack on a broad front, with far-reaching
objectives, but entailing no danger to the budget. […]
Constructive plans for financial stabilization cannot be completely organized until our
national, State and municipal governments not only balance their budgets but curtail
their current expenses as well to a level which can be steadily and economically
maintained for some years to come. [5]
Both parties were arguing for cuts in government expenditures, not the increases that (with
the benefit of hindsight and better theory) we have suggested were needed. Monetary policy
was likewise not used to stimulate the economy at this time. It seems unlikely that the fiscal
and monetary authorities knew what to do but did nothing. Instead, the tools of economic
thought needed to guide policy were simply not sufficiently well developed at the time. In
keeping with the prevailing view that the economy was self-correcting, the incumbent
Republican president, Herbert Hoover, had insisted that “prosperity is just around the
corner.”
The election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 was a turning point. After his election, President
Roosevelt and his advisors created a series of measures—called the New Deal—that were
intended to stabilize the economy. In terms of fiscal policy, the US government moved away
from budget balance and adopted a much more aggressive spending policy. Government
spending increased from 3.2 percent of real GDP in 1932 to 9.3 percent of GDP by 1936. These
spending increases were financed by budget deficits.
Roosevelt also took action to stabilize the banking system, most notably by creating a system
of deposit insurance. This policy remains with us today: if you have deposits in a US bank, the
federal government insures them. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(http://www.fdic.gov), not a single depositor has lost a cent since the introduction of deposit
insurance. [6] Finally, the 1930s was also the time of the introduction of Social Security and
other measures to protect workers. The Social Security Administration (http://www.ssa.gov)
originated in 1935. [7]
The New Deal brought about changes not only in policy but also in attitudes toward
policymaking. Gardiner Means, who was an economic adviser to the Roosevelt administration
in 1933, said of policymaking at the time:
It was this which produced the yeastiness of experimentation that made the New Deal
what it was. A hundred years from now, when historians look back on this, they will say
a big corner was turned. People agreed old things didn’t work. What ran through the
whole New Deal was finding a way to make things work.
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Before that, Hoover would loan money to farmers to keep their mules alive, but wouldn’t
loan money to keep their children alive. This was perfectly right within the framework
of classical thinking. If an individual couldn’t get enough to eat, it was because he wasn’t
on the ball. It was his responsibility. The New Deal said: “Anybody who is unemployed
isn’t necessarily unemployed because he is shiftless.” [8]
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Stabilization policy entails the use the monetary and fiscal policy to keep the level of
output at potential output.
Monetary policy is the use of interest rates and other tools, under the control of a
country’s central bank, to stabilize the economy. During the Great Depression,
monetary policy was not actively used to stabilize the economy. A major component of
stabilization after 1932 was restoring confidence in the banking system.
Fiscal policy is the use of taxes and government spending to stabilize the economy.
During the first part of the 1930s, contractionary fiscal policy may have deepened the
Great Depression. After 1932, fiscal policy became more expansionary and may have
helped to end the Great Depression.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Suppose the government wants to increase real GDP by $1,000. Explain why a smaller
multiplier implies that the government must increase its spending by more to increase
real GDP by this amount.
2. Did the government miss a chance to carry out stabilization policy before 1932?
[1] Chapter 12 “Income Taxes” and Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget” have more to say about
fiscal policy.
[2] The link from interest rates to net exports is complicated because it involves changes in
exchange rates. You do not need to worry here about how it works. We explain it, together
with other details of monetary policy, in Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”.
[3] See John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, accessed June
30, 2011, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
[4] “Democratic Party Platform of 1932,” The American Presidency Project, accessed June 30,
2011, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29595#ax zz1N9yDnpSR.
[5] “Republican Party Platform of 1932,” The American Presidency Project, accessed June 30,
2011, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29638#axz z1N9yDnpSR.
[6] The FDIC site (http://www.fdic.gov) provides a discussion the history of this fund and
current activities. The discussion of “Who is the FDIC?”
(http://www.fdic.gov/about/learn/symbol/index.html) is a good place to start.
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[7] General information on social security is available at http://www.ssa.gov. The history of
the legislation, including various House and Senate Bills, is also available
athttp://www.ssa.gov/history/history.html. The original act included old-age benefits and the
provision of unemployment insurance. The disability part of the program was created in 1956.
[8] See Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1970), 247.
7.6 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
We started this chapter by describing the experience of the economy of the United States and
other countries in the 1930s. The catastrophic economic performance of that period was
difficult to reconcile with the view of classical economists that markets always worked to
coordinate aggregate economic activity. Although technological progress provides a plausible
explanation of the roaring twenties, technological regress is much less convincing as a story of
the Great Depression. Technological regress also cannot explain the behavior of the price level
and real wages during the Great Depression.
The Keynesian view explains the Great Depression as being driven by a decrease in aggregate
spending, caused primarily by two factors: household consumption decreased because the
stock market crash reduced household wealth, and investment decreased because of
disruption of the financial intermediation process and pessimism over the future of the
economy. These reductions in spending, through the multiplier, led to large reductions in real
output. This story is consistent with the observed reductions in consumption, investment, and
real GDP. With sticky prices, these reductions in spending translate into lower real GDP. The
simple Keynesian story also has two problems: it can explain increasing prices only by
assuming an exogenous increase in autonomous inflation and it provides no explanation of
why observed technology decreased in the Great Depression period.
Along with the Keynesian explanation of the Great Depression comes a solution: use
government policies to manage aggregate spending. If the aggregate expenditure model were
literally true, policymaking would become an exact science: the policymaker would start with
a target level of output and then determine the level of, say, government purchases needed to
reach that target. As you might imagine, life as an economic policymaker is more complicated.
The economists and politicians designing fiscal and monetary policy do not have a perfect
picture of the current state of the economy. Moreover, control over policy tools is often
inexact, and policy decisions take time.
The Great Depression remains something of a puzzle to macroeconomists. This became very
apparent again recently during the so-called Great Recession—the major economic downturn
that began in 2008. There are some resemblances between the two episodes, and the
experience of the Great Depression certainly influenced some of the monetary policy decisions
that were made in recent years. In this chapter, we did not yet consider monetary policy in
detail. Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”, which discusses the conduct of monetary policy,
also addresses monetary policy during the Great Depression.
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The aggregate expenditure framework is not a very sophisticated theory of the economy.
Much work in macroeconomics in the decades since the Great Depression has involved
refining the various pieces of the aggregate expenditure model. Economists have developed
more rigorous theories of consumption, investment, and price adjustment, for example, in
which they emphasize how households and firms base their decisions on expectations about
the future. But Keynes’ fundamental insight—that the level of output may sometimes be
determined not by the productive capacity of the economy but by the overall level of
spending—remains at the heart of macroeconomic research and policymaking today.
Key Links
The history of deposit insurance: http://www.fdic.gov/about/history
Social Security, including details on its history: http://www.ssa.gov and
http://www.ssa.gov/history/history.html
Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov
US Census Bureau, Statistical
Abstracts:http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/statab.html
Photo exhibits about the Great Depression:
Photo essay:http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/depression/photoessay.htm
Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
President Hoover’s library: http://hoover.archives.gov
EXERCISES
1. Consider the bank-run game presented in Section 7.4.5 “Can a Decrease in
Investment Spending Explain the Great Depression?”. Discuss in words how you
think the introduction of deposit insurance would change the incentives of an
individual to run on a bank.
2. If the marginal propensity to spend is 0.6 and autonomous spending decreases by
$500, what is the change in output predicted by the aggregate expenditures model?
3. During the early 1930s, the government was intent on balancing its budget. If this
required a reduction in government spending, what do you predict would happen to
real GDP?
4. Do you think that labor force participation (that is, the percentage of the population
that is actively in the labor force, either working or looking for a job) is procyclical or
countercyclical? Why?
5. What is the effect of consumption smoothing on the value of the multiplier?
6. Explain why an increase in the value of the stock market might lead to higher real
GDP. [Hint: think about what happens to consumption.]
7. Suppose you plan to meet a friend at a restaurant at 7 p.m. You are worried that she
might be late and not show up until 8 p.m. You would prefer to eat at 7 p.m. rather
than 8 p.m., but you also would prefer not to have to stand around waiting for your
friend for an hour. She has the same tastes as you do. Explain carefully how you and
your friend are in a coordination game. Is it an equilibrium for you both to show up at
7 p.m.? Is it an equilibrium for you both to show up at 8 p.m.?
8. Suppose that the inflation rate is very sensitive to the output gap in the economy.
What does this imply about how quickly the economy will get back to equilibrium
following a shock?
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Spreadsheet Exercises
1. Using the data presented in Table 7.1 “Major Macroeconomic Variables, 1920–39*”,
create a spreadsheet to look graphically at the relationship between real GDP,
unemployment, and the price level from 1929 to 1933.
2. Redo Table 7.2 “Growth Rates of Real GDP, Labor, Capital, and Technology, 1920–
39*” assuming that a = 0.3 throughout the period of study. How do the results
change?
Economics Detective
1. Consider the town in which you were born. Try to find out what happened there
during the Great Depression. Did local businesses close? Were jobs available?
2. Can you find a recent example of a bank run in some country? What happened?
3. Following the financial crisis of 2008, the United States adopted a large fiscal
stimulus. Try to find some details of this stimulus. How big was it? What form did it
take? How big did policymakers think the multiplier was?
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Chapter 8
Jobs in the Macroeconomy
Taking to the Streets
In March 2006, students demonstrated on the streets of France.
Violent French Protests: 300 Held
Police detained some 300 people around France after nationwide student marches against a
new labor law turned violent, as street cleaners cleared away torched cars Friday and the
government braced for more protests.
A quarter of a million people took to the streets in some 200 demonstrations around the
country Thursday, in a test of strength between youth and the conservative government of 73-
year-old President Jacques Chirac.
Most of the violence—and the arrests—were around the Sorbonne University in Paris, where
police fired rubber pellets and tear gas at youths who pelted them with stones and set cars on
fire.
[…]
Many trade unionists and students oppose the new youth employment law because it allows
new workers under the age of 26 to be dismissed within a two-year trial period. [1]
If, like most readers of this book, you are a student in the United States, it is unlikely that you
have taken part in violent demonstrations about labor policy. It is not that such
demonstrations are unheard of. In Madison, Wisconsin, in 2011, there were extended protests
concerning proposed changes in public sector contracts. Still, in the United States, it is
accepted that the government has a limited influence on contracts between workers and firms.
It is part of economic life in the United States that employment is not protected by the
government. In Europe, however, many countries have extensive laws on their books that are
designed to protect workers. For example, in much of Europe, unemployment insurance is
more generous than in the United States. Unemployed people obtain larger benefits and are
eligible for these benefits for longer periods of time.
In many European countries, it is also much more difficult to fire workers than it is in the
United States. The proposed new job contract that led to the demonstrations in France was
intended to reduce the nearly 25 percent unemployment rate of the French youth. Perhaps
paradoxically, the contract was designed to make it easier to make young people unemployed.
The logic was that firms would be willing to hire more workers if the costs of firing them were
lower.
The different systems in the United States and Europe each have their defenders. Supporters
of European labor laws point to the greater job security enjoyed by workers in Europe.
Supporters of the US system argue that the United States enjoys greater flexibility in the labor
market, leading to a more efficient economy with less unemployment. Some feel that the
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United States should adopt European-style labor protection measures; others feel that Europe
would benefit from becoming more like the United States.
In this chapter, we look at the different experiences of Europe and the United States in order
to evaluate these different approaches to the labor market. In the end, we want to be able to
answer—or at least form intelligent opinions about—the following question:
What are the results of the different labor market policies in the United States and
Europe?
This is not just an academic question for discussion in a textbook. In both the United States
and Europe, labor market policy is frequently debated. The US Congress has considered
various labor policies, such as restrictions on plant closing to protect jobs, requirements that
firms offer workers health insurance, requirements that firms include paid sick days in
employment contracts, and so on. At the same time, there is considerable discussion in
Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe about the possible benefits of increased labor
market flexibility.
Road Map
Employment and unemployment are ideas that most of us are familiar with. You may well
have already been employed, at least in a part-time capacity, at some point in your life. It is
also possible that you have been unemployed, meaning that you were without a job, but were
actively seeking work. Our personal experiences, and those of our parents and friends, help us
understand the basics of employment and unemployment.
Even if you have not yet been employed, you will begin searching for a job once you graduate
with a college degree. As you surely know, finding a good job is not always easy. You want to
find a job that you enjoy, fits your skills, and pays well. It is also not easy for prospective
employers: they want to find someone who is suitably skilled, will work well within the firm,
and is not too expensive. The challenge is to match workers and jobs: the worker needs to be
suited to the job, and the job needs to be suited to the worker.
The process of matching does not happen just once. As time passes, your skills, ambitions,
and choice of occupation may change. As time passes, your employer’s needs change. You may
wish to move to another city. Your employer may want to move your job to another city. Most
people do not spend their entire lives in one job.
A schematic representation of this process is shown in Figure 8.1 “Employment Transitions
over Your Lifetime”. Here you leave college and look for a job. Finding that job is likely to be
time-consuming. You will have to contact lots of prospective employers, read newspaper ads,
use search engines on the Internet, and, of course, show up for interviews. In the end, you will
find your first job and begin your career.
Figure 8.1Employment Transitions over Your Lifetime
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You might stick with this job for a while, but in all likelihood the match between you and your
employer will come to an end sooner or later. You may leave the job through your own choice
because you are no longer happy with it. Alternatively, you may be forced to leave because
your employer no longer has need of you. You then search for another job. When you succeed
in finding a new position where your needs and desires align with those of another employer,
a new match is formed.
Fifty years or so ago, people often joined companies and stayed with them for life, but this is
very unusual today. You are likely to move between jobs several times during your lifetime
before your eventual retirement. Sometimes you may be able to move from one job to another
without interruption. At other times you will be unemployed between jobs. Throughout your
life, you are likely to face periods of anxiety and stress because of the employment
uncertainties that you confront:
How likely is it that you will be able to retain your current job?
If you lose your job, will you be able to find another job that you like?
How long will it take to find another job?
What should you do if you do not like your job?
How will you support yourself while you are unemployed?
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This discussion makes it clear that we cannot analyze labor market policies without
understanding the movements in and out of employment and unemployment. But before we
can do so, we need to make sure we understand exactly what unemployment is, and what
causes it. Thus we begin by carefully defining unemployment. [2] We look at the data for
Europe and the United States and make sense of this data using economic reasoning. We then
turn to an analysis of the matching between workers and jobs and the decisions of individual
workers in this process. All this analysis gives us a better understanding of unemployment
and, more generally, the operation of labor markets. We conclude by evaluating labor market
policies in the United States and Europe.
[1] “Violent French Protests: 300 Held,” VOV News, March 18, 2006, accessed August 22,
2011,http://english.vov.vn/Home/Violent-French-protests-300-held/20063/36835.vov.
[2] In part, this is a review of material in Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy”. There, we
explained that the unemployment rate is one possible indicator of the overall health of the
economy.
8.1 Unemployment
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the unemployment rate, and how is it measured?
2. What are the differences and the similarities in unemployment rates in the United
States and Europe?
3. If the labor market functions perfectly, what is the rate of unemployment?
4. How does unemployment arise?
We begin by discussing the most commonly watched indicator of the state of the labor market:
the unemployment rate. In the United States, the unemployment rate is measured by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS; http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm). The BLS looks at the
population of individuals of working age who are not in the military. It sorts such people into
three separate categories:
1. Employed. Individuals with a job, either full time or part time
2. Unemployed. Individuals who do not currently have a job but are searching for
employment
3. Out of the labor force. Individuals who are not employed and not looking for work
Thus
civilian working age population = number employed + number unemployed+ number out of
the labor force.
Those out of the labor force include students, stay-at-home parents, those who are prevented
from working by disability, and people who have taken early retirement. The category also
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includes discouraged workers, those who are deemed to have dropped out of the labor
force because they have stopped looking for a job.
The civilian labor force comprises the employed and the unemployed. The
unemployment rate is calculated as follows:
unemployment rate =
number unemployed
civilian labor force
.
and the employment rate is calculated as follows:
employment rate =
number unemployed
civilian labor force
.
In the United States, the definition of “employed” is fairly liberal. To be classified as
employed, it is sufficient to have done any work for pay or profit in the previous week. People
may even be counted as employed if they did not work during the week—for example, if they
were on vacation, out sick, on maternity/paternity leave, or unable to work because of bad
weather.
In this chapter, we explore differences in unemployment in the United States and Europe. To
do this properly, we need to take care that unemployment is measured in a similar way within
the sample of countries. The European Commission defines as unemployed those aged 15 to
74
who were without work during the reference week, but currently available for work,
who were either actively seeking work in the past four weeks or who had already found a
job to start within the next three months. [1]
As in the United States, the unemployment rate is the number of people unemployed as a
percentage of the labor force, and the labor force is the total number of people employed and
unemployed.
The European Commission defines as employed those aged 15 to 74
who during the reference week performed work, even for just one hour a week, for pay,
profit or family gain,
were not at work but had a job or business from which they were temporarily absent
because of, e.g., illness, holidays, industrial dispute or education and training. [2]
These descriptions reveal that the definitions used in Europe are broadly similar to those in
the United States, meaning that we can legitimately compare employment and unemployment
rates in the two regions.
National and local governments help people cope with the risk that they might lose their jobs.
In the United States and many other countries, unemployed people are typically eligible to
receive payments from the government, called unemployment insurance, for some period
of time after losing their jobs. Some governments help the unemployed find jobs and may
even provide financial support to help people retrain and obtain marketable skills.
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Unemployment in the United States and Europe
Figure 8.2 “Unemployment Rates in France, the United States, and the Euro Area, 1985-
2011” shows quarterly unemployment rates for the United States, France, and Europe as a
whole. In the late 1980s, unemployment fell in both the United States and France, although
the US unemployment rate was about two percentage points lower than the French rate. The
1990s were a different story. Unemployment rates increased in both countries at the
beginning of the decade. Thereafter, the unemployment rate decreased in the United States,
but it continued to increase in France for about half of the decade and decreased only near the
end of century. From the early 1990s up to about 2008, the unemployment rate in Europe was
substantially higher than that in the United States. The pattern for Europe as a whole closely
matches the pattern for France, although unemployment in France is typically a little higher
than the European average.
The crisis of 2008, however, led to a dramatic rise in the unemployment rate in the United
States. At the end of 2007, the US unemployment rate was just under 5 percent. Two years
later, at the start of 2010, the rate was over 10 percent. Unemployment also rose in Europe,
but to nothing like the same degree. In early 2011, US and European unemployment rates
were almost identical.
One other feature of the data is noticeable: there is a regular seasonal pattern in the data. For
example, in the United States, unemployment is almost always higher in the first quarter of
the year than it is in the preceding or following quarter. This is because some sectors of the
economy are heavily affected by seasonal patterns. For example, stores may hire extra people
during the Christmas holiday period, while construction firms may employ fewer people
during the winter months. Sometimes, data such as these are “seasonally adjusted” to remove
these effects.
Figure 8.2 Unemployment Rates in France, the United States, and the Euro Area, 1985-2011
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Source: OECD, “Statistics Portal:
Labour,”http://www.oecd.org/topicstatsportal/0,2647,en_2825_495670_1_1_1_1_1,00.htm
l#499797.
The French labor law reforms with which we began the chapter were aimed at young workers,
so let us also look specifically at the unemployment experience of this group. Between 2000
and 2010, the unemployment rate in France for the age group 20–24 ranged between 17 and
21 percent, with an average of 18.6 percent. In the United States, in contrast, for the same
period and the same group of workers, the unemployment rate averaged 10 percent. [3] In
both countries, the unemployment rate is higher for younger workers than the overall
unemployment rate.
Although there are some similarities between France and the United States, there is also a
clear puzzle: unemployment, for both the overall population and young workers, was, until
very recently, much higher in France. We need to understand the source of this difference
before we can evaluate different policy remedies.
The Labor Market
Unemployment suggests a mismatch between supply and demand. People who are
unemployed want to have a job but are unable to find one. In economic language, they are
willing to supply labor but cannot find a firm that demands their labor. The most natural
starting point for an economic analysis of unemployment is therefore the labor market.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market”
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The labor market brings together the supply of labor by households and the demand for labor
by firms. You can review the labor market in the toolkit.
Figure 8.3 Labor Market
The labor market is depicted in Figure 8.3 “Labor Market”. “Price” on the vertical axis is
the real wage, which is the nominal wage divided by the price level. It tells us how much you
can obtain in terms of real goods and services if you sell an hour of your time. Recalling that
the price level can be thought of as the price of a unit of the real gross domestic product (real
GDP), you can equivalently think of the real wage as the value of your time measured in units
of real GDP.
At a higher real wage, households supply more labor. There are two reasons for this. First, a
higher real wage means that, for the sacrifice of an hour of time, households can obtain more
goods and services than before. Households are therefore induced to substitute away from
leisure to work and ultimately consume more. Second, as the wage increases, more individuals
join the labor force and find a job. Embedded in the upward-sloping labor supply curve is
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both an increase in hours worked by each employed worker and an increase in the number of
employed workers.
At a higher real wage, firms demand fewer labor hours. A higher real wage means that labor
time is more expensive than before, so each individual firm demands less labor and produces
less output. The point where the labor supply and demand curves meet is the equilibrium in
the labor market. At the equilibrium real wage, the number of hours that workers choose to
work exactly matches the number of hours that firms choose to hire.
Supply and demand in the labor market determine the real wage and the level of employment.
Variations in either labor supply or labor demand show up as shifts in the curves. If we want
to talk about unemployment, however, the labor market diagram presents us with a problem.
The idea of a market is that the price adjusts to reach equilibrium—the point where supply
equals demand. In the labor market, this means the real wage should adjust to its equilibrium
value so that there is no mismatch of supply and demand. Everyone who wants to supply labor
at the equilibrium wage finds that their labor is demanded—in other words, everyone who is
looking for a job is able to find one.
Remember the definition of unemployment: it is people who are not working but who are
looking for a job. The supply-and-demand framework has the implication that there should
be no unemployment at all. Everyone who wants to work is employed; the only people without
jobs are those who do not want to work.
Theories of Unemployment
So where do we go from here? One natural approach is to start from Figure 8.3 “Labor
Market” but look for circumstances in which we would see unemployment. Figure 8.4
“Unemployment in the Labor Market” shows us that there will be unemployment if the real
wage in the market is too high—that is, above the equilibrium real wage. In this case, the
amount of labor that workers want to sell is greater than the amount that firms want to buy.
Some workers will want a job at this wage but be unable to find one. They will be unemployed.
Figure 8.4 Unemployment in the Labor Market
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If the real wage is sticky, it may be higher than the equilibrium real wage, meaning that
some workers who want to work are unable to find a job.
Figure 8.4 “Unemployment in the Labor Market” shows us what the labor market must look
like for there to be unemployment, but it is hardly an explanation of unemployment.
Economists typically expect markets to look like Figure 8.3 “Labor Market”, not Figure 8.4
“Unemployment in the Labor Market”. That is, they think that the price in a market—in this
case, the real wage—adjusts quickly to ensure that supply equals demand. If we want to
explain unemployment with a picture like Figure 8.4 “Unemployment in the Labor Market”,
we also need some story of why real wages might be sticky, so they remain above the
equilibrium wage.
Inflexible Real Wages
Over the years, economists have offered several stories about why wages might be inflexible.
One story is that the wage is not allowed to decrease by law. Many economies have
minimum wage laws on their books. This could explain some unemployment. A difficulty
with this explanation is that the minimum wage affects only low-income workers. Most
workers in the economy actually earn a wage above the legal minimum and are unaffected
by minimum-wage legislation.
Another possibility is that firms find it difficult to adjust wages downward. The market for
people’s time is not like the market for bread. Pay cuts are very visible to workers and are
likely to meet a great deal of resistance. If a firm tries to cut wages, it is likely to find that
its workers become demotivated and that its best workers start looking for jobs at other
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firms.
Both of these stories are really explanations of why nominal wages may be unable to
adjust. Figure 8.4 “Unemployment in the Labor Market” has the real wage on the axis.
Remember that the real wage is calculated as follows:
real wage =
nominal wage
price level
.
Minimum wage laws specify a fixed minimum nominal wage. Even if the nominal wage is
fixed, the real wage decreases when the price level increases. It follows that rigidities in the
nominal wage translate into rigidities in the real wage only if the price level is also sticky.
Prices in an economy may indeed be sticky in the short run, so sticky wages and prices do
provide one explanation for short periods of unemployment. Such unemployment is
sometimes called cyclical unemployment. In the long run, however, we would expect the
labor market to return to an equilibrium with zero unemployment. Cyclical unemployment is
the component of unemployment that depends on the business cycle. During a recession,
cyclical unemployment is relatively high. In periods of economic expansion, cyclical
unemployment is low or nonexistent. But we always observe some unemployment, which
tells us that sticky nominal wages and prices cannot be the whole story.
Figure 8.4 “Unemployment in the Labor Market” tells us that the only way to get persistent
unemployment in this framework is for the real wage to be permanently above the
equilibrium wage. We need to find some reason why market forces will not cause the real
wage to adjust to the point where demand equals supply.
One possible story introduces labor unions into the picture. Unions give some market power
to workers. Just as we sometimes think about firms having market power, meaning that they
have some control over the prices that they set, so we can think about a union having some
control over the wage that workers are paid. If there were just a single union representing all
workers, then it could choose the real wage, much as monopoly firms choose their price.
Firms would then hire as many hours as they wanted at that wage. Generally, unionized
workers are paid more than the wage at which supply equals demand, just as in Figure 8.4
“Unemployment in the Labor Market”. The union accepts some unemployment but believes
that the higher wage more than compensates. A problem with this story is that, like the
minimum wage, it is relevant only for a relatively small number of workers. In the United
States in particular, only a small fraction of the workforce is unionized.
Another story goes by the name of efficiency wages. The idea here is that firms have an
incentive to pay a wage above the equilibrium. Workers who are paid higher wages may feel
better about their jobs and be more motivated to work hard. Firms may also find it easier to
recruit good workers when they pay well and find it easier to keep the workers that they
already have. The extra productivity and lower hiring and firing costs may more than
compensate the firm for the higher wage that it is paying.
Inside the Labor Market
So far, we have come up with four possible stories about unemployment. Can these theories
help to explain differences between Europe and the United States?
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First, it is generally the case that minimum wages are more generous in Europe than in the
United States, so it is certainly possible that higher minimum wages in Europe contribute to
higher levels of unemployment there. Second, there is some evidence that nominal wages are
in some sense “stickier” in Europe than in the United States. Third, we can observe that
unions are generally more prevalent and more powerful in Europe than in the United States.
Thus some of the stories that we have told are potentially helpful in explaining differences
between the United States and Europe.
However, all these theories are silent about the underlying movement of workers from
employment to unemployment and back again. Figure 8.4 “Unemployment in the Labor
Market” paints a static picture of a world that is in fact dynamic and fluid. There is no means
in the framework to explore the role of unemployment insurance and other policies that differ
across Europe and the United States. In addition, market forces may work differently in the
labor market. In Figure 8.4 “Unemployment in the Labor Market”, there are more workers
wanting to work than there are jobs offered by firms. The standard story of market adjustment
is that workers willing to work for a lower wage would approach a firm, offer to undercut the
wage of an existing worker, and be immediately hired as a replacement. This is not how hiring
and firing usually works in the labor market. Firms have a relationship with their existing
workers; they know if their workers are competent, hardworking, and reliable. Firms will not
readily replace them with unknown quantities, even for a lower wage.
For these reasons, researchers in labor economics think that Figure 8.4 “Unemployment in
the Labor Market” is too simple a framework to explain the realities of modern labor markets.
Instead, they frequently turn to a different framework more suited to thinking about labor
market flows.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The unemployment rate is the fraction of the civilian labor force looking for a job but
currently not employed. The BLS in the United States produces this number on a
monthly basis.
During the early part of the 1980s, the unemployment experiences in the United
States and Europe were similar. Up until 2008, the unemployment rate in Europe had
been significantly higher than the unemployment rate in the United States. Very
recently, however, the US unemployment rate climbed to European levels.
In a perfectly functioning labor market, the unemployment rate would be zero.
Possible explanations of unemployment include rigidities in wages, the market power
of unions, and incentive effects.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Explain in your own words why the standard supply-and-demand framework predicts
zero unemployment when it is applied to the labor market.
2. What wage is determined in labor market equilibrium—the real wage or the nominal
wage?
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[1] “Employment and Unemployment (LFS): Definitions,” European Commission, accessed
July 31,
2011,http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/employment_unemployment_lfs/
methodology/definitions.
[2] “Employment and Unemployment (LFS): Definitions,” European Commission, accessed
July 31,
2011,http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/employment_unemployment_lfs/
methodology/definitions.
[3] The figures on youth unemployment come from “Statistics Portal: Labour,”
OECD,http://www.oecd.org/topicstatsportal/0,2647,en_2825_495670_1_1_1_1_1,00.html#
499797.
8.2 Job and Worker Flows
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What key features of labor markets does the static model of labor supply and labor
demand fail to capture?
2. What are some of the key facts about worker labor market flows?
3. What is search theory, and how is it useful for understanding labor market outcomes?
4. What are the efficiency gains from flexible labor markets?
The labor market is a highly dynamic place. Workers are constantly moving from job to job, in
and out of the workforce, or from employment to unemployment and vice versa. Large firms
devote substantial resources to human resource management in general and hiring and firing
in particular. By contrast, is static because it shows the labor market at a moment in time. Our
understanding of the labor market—and, by extension, employment and unemployment—is
badly incomplete unless we look more carefully at the movement of workers. Further, when
workers and firms meet, they do not take as given a market wage but instead typically engage
in some form of bargaining over the terms of employment.
This vision of a dynamic labor market with bargaining is much closer to the reality of labor
relations than is the model of labor supply and demand. To better understand the
determinants of employment and unemployment, we therefore turn to labor market flows. We
begin with some more facts, again contrasting the experience of Europe with that of the
United States, and then develop a framework that allows us to think explicitly about the
dynamic labor market.
Facts
Our starting point is the classification of individuals in the civilian working age population.
Recall that economic statistics place them as one of the following: employed, unemployed, or
not in the labor force. Imagine taking a snapshot of the US economy each month. For a given
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month, you would be able to count the number of people employed, unemployed, and out of
the labor force. We could call these the stocks of each kind of individual.
Figure 8.5 Worker Stocks in the United States
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shows the number of people between 16 and 64 years old in the United States in three
different “states”—employment, unemployment, and out of the labor force—over the period
1996–2003. [1] On average, there were 122 million people employed, 6.2 million unemployed,
and 59.3 million considered out of the labor force. Adding these numbers together, there were
187.5 million working-age individuals, of whom 128.2 million were in the labor force. The
average unemployment rate was 4.8 percent over this period, and the employment rate was
95.2 percent. Notice, though, that many individuals are out of the labor force: only 65 percent
of the population is employed.
shows an average over many months, but you could also look at how these numbers change
from month to month. Even more informatively, you could count the number of people who
were employed in two consecutive months. This would tell you the likelihood of being
employed two months in a row. These calculations for the US economy are summarized in .
Look, for example, at the arrows associated with the box labeled unemployed. There are two
arrows coming in: one from the employed box and one from the out-of-the-labor-force box.
There are two arrows going out: one to the employed box and one to the out-of-the-labor-
force box. Each of these four arrows has a percentage attached, indicating the fraction of
people going from one box to another. Thus, on average, 28.3 percent of the unemployed
people in one month are employed in the next and 23.3 percent leave the labor force. The
remaining 48.4 percent stay in the group of unemployed.
The numbers in the figure are averages over a long period. Such flows change over the course
of the year due to seasonal effects. Around Christmas, for example, it may be easier for an
unemployed worker to find a job selling merchandise in a retail shop. These flows also change
depending on the ups and downs of the aggregate economy.
Figure 8.6 Worker Flows in the United States
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Do European countries exhibit similar patterns? Portugal makes for a good comparison with
the United States because the unemployment rates in the two countries were broadly similar
over most of the last two decades. Yet Portugal has very strong employment protection laws,
to the point where they are enshrined in the Portuguese Constitution: [2]
Article 53 Job Security
The right of workers to job security is safeguarded. Dismissals without just cause or for
political or ideological reasons are forbidden.
A study that compared the labor markets in Portugal and the United States uncovered the
following facts: [3]
The flows into unemployment from employment and the flows from employment to
unemployment are much lower in Portugal compared to the United States.
Average unemployment duration in Portugal is about three times that of the United States.
Job protection is very high in Portugal relative to the United States.
Even though Portugal and the United States have similar overall unemployment rates, the
underlying flows are quite different in the two countries. Flows between employment and
unemployment—and vice versa—are much smaller in Portugal. This means that if you lose
your job, it is likely to take a long time to find a new one. If you have a job, you are likely to
keep it for a long time. As we would expect from this, people typically spend much longer
periods of time in unemployment in Portugal than they do in the United States.
If we compare the United States with Europe more generally, we see similar patterns. In 2010,
the average unemployment duration for workers ages 15–24 was about 10.6 months in
Europe but only 5.9 months for the United States. For workers in the 25–54 age group, the
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duration was higher in both Europe (13.7 months) and the United States (8.2 months) than
for younger workers. [4] Recall that in 2010, Europe and the United States had similar rates of
unemployment. Employment duration, however, is still much higher in Europe than the
United States. In both places, older workers tend to be unemployed for longer periods than
younger workers. But European workers are typically unemployed for much longer periods of
time than US workers. [5]
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) conducted a large
study on the employment protection legislation in a variety of developed countries. The main
study (OECD Employment Outlook for
2004,http://www.oecd.org/document/62/0,3746,en_2649_33927_31935102
_1_1_1_1,00.html) created a measure of employment protection and then attempted to relate
it to labor market outcomes in different countries. The reasoning we have just presented
suggests that in countries with relatively high levels of employment protection, labor markets
would be much more sluggish.
Formulating a comprehensive measure of employment protection is not easy. In principle, the
idea is to measure the costs of firing workers and various regulations of employment.
Examples would include requirements on advance notice of layoffs and the size of severance
payments that firms are obliged to pay. In some countries, a firm must go to court to lay off
workers. For temporary workers, there are specific restrictions placed on this form of
contract, as in the discussion of France that opened this chapter. In reality, these costs are
difficult to detect and convert to a single measure. The OECD findings should be interpreted
with these challenges in mind.
Another OECD publication (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/56/36014946 ) examines
employment protection legislation across OECD countries in 1998 and 2003.[6] Portugal was
the country with the highest level of employment protection legislation, while the United
States was the lowest. France was above average, while the United Kingdom and Canada were
below average. The OECD analysis highlighted two effects of such legislation on labor market
flows:
1. It limits flows from employment into unemployment because it is costly to fire workers.
2. It limits flows from unemployment to employment because firms, when deciding to hire a
worker, will realize that they may wish to fire that worker sometime in the future.
The first effect is the more obvious one; indeed, it provides the rationale for employment
protection. If it is hard to fire workers, then firms are less likely to do so. The second effect is
less obvious and more pernicious. If it is hard to fire workers, then firms become more
reluctant to hire workers. Put yourself in the place of a manager wondering whether to make a
hire. One concern is that the person you are considering will turn out to be unsuitable, or a
bad worker. Another is that conditions in your industry will worsen, so you may not need as
many employees. In those circumstances, you want to be able to let the worker go. If you will
not be able to do so, you may decide it is safer simply to make do with the workers you already
have.
The OECD analysis particularly stressed the effects on the labor market experience of
relatively young workers. The report emphasized that stronger legislation is linked to lower
employment of young workers. If it is costly to sever a relationship, then a firm will not give a
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young worker a chance in a new job. The OECD also noted an important benefit of
employment protection legislation: it enhances the willingness of young workers to invest in
skills that are productive at their firms. Without a strong attachment to the firm, workers have
little incentive to build up skills that are not transferable to other jobs.
Job Creation and Job Destruction
In place of the supply-and-demand diagram, we can think about the decisions that workers
and firms make when they are trying to form or break an employment relationship. Individual
workers search for available jobs, which are called vacancies. On the other side, vacancies are
searching for workers. When a vacancy and a worker are successfully matched, a job is
created. When we say that a vacancy is searching for a worker, we, of course, really mean that
a firm with a vacancy is seeking to hire a worker. You can think of a firm as being a collection
of jobs and vacancies.
Whereas the standard supply-and-demand picture downplays differences among workers and
jobs, this “search-and-matching” approach places these differences at the center of the
analysis. Workers differ in terms of their abilities and preferences. Jobs differ in terms of their
characteristics and requirements. For an economy to function well, we need to somehow do a
good job of matching vacancies with workers. When a successful match occurs, we call this
“job creation.”
Search theory is a framework for understanding this matching process. Let us think about
how this process looks, first from the perspective of the worker and then from the perspective
of the firm. Workers care about the various characteristics of their jobs. These characteristics
might include how much the job pays, whether it is in a good location, whether it offers good
opportunities for advancement, whether it is interesting, whether it is dangerous, and other
attributes.
Vacancies are likewise “looking” for certain characteristics of workers, such as how much they
cost, what skills they possess, whether they have relevant experience, whether they are
hardworking and motivated, whether they are trustworthy, and so on. The firm cares about
these characteristics because it cares about profitability: its goal is to make as much profit as
possible.
Over time, the quality of the match between a worker and a vacancy may change. A job may
become less profitable to the firm and/or less attractive to the worker. To put it another way,
the amount of value created by the job may change. The worker may come to dislike
particular aspects of the job or may wish to change location for family reasons. The worker
may feel that he or she would be better matched with some other firm, perhaps because of
changes in his or her skills and experience. From the firm’s side, demand for the firm’s
product may decrease, or the firm might shift to a new production technique that requires
different skills. If the value created by a job decreases too much, then the firm or the worker
may choose to end the relationship, either by the worker’s choice (quitting the job) or the
firm’s (firing the worker). This is “job destruction.”
Jobs are created and destroyed all the time in the economy. The flows of workers among jobs
and employment states are a key characteristic of the labor market. As these flows occur,
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workers often spend time unemployed. After a job is destroyed, the worker may spend some
time unemployed until he or she finds a job with a different firm.
Labor Flows and Productivity
In a rapidly changing economy, the value of different jobs (worker-firm matches) changes
over time. To function efficiently, the labor market needs to be able to accommodate such
changes. For this discussion, we will think about efficiency as simply being measured by the
productivity of the match between workers and firms. In an efficient match, the worker is
productive at the chosen job. For the overall economy, if all matches are efficient, then it is not
possible to change the assignment of workers to jobs and produce more output.
Comparative and Absolute Advantage
Let us see how this works in a simple example. gives an example of an economy with two
workers and two jobs. Each entry in the table is the amount of output that a particular worker
can produce in each job in one day. For example, worker B can produce 4 units of output in
job 2 and 8 units of output in job 1.
Table 8.1 Output Level per Day in Different Jobs
Worker Job 1 Job 2
A 9 6
B 8 4
Before we begin, let us pause for a moment to think about this kind of example. This chapter
is motivated by the desire to explain the employment and unemployment experiences of
hundreds of millions of workers in the United States and Europe. It may seem ridiculous to
think that a story like this—with two workers, two jobs, and some made-up numbers—can tell
us anything about employment and unemployment across two continents. Economists often
refer to such stories as “toy” models, in explicit recognition of their simplicity. This kind of
model is not designed to tell us anything specific about US or European unemployment. The
point of this kind of model is to keep our thinking clear. If we cannot understand the workings
of a story like this, then we cannot hope to understand the infinitely more complicated real
world. At the same time, if we do understand this story, then we begin to get a feel for the
forces that operate in the real world.
If we were in charge of this economy, how would we allocate the workers across the jobs? In
this case, the answer is easy to determine. If we assign worker A to job 1 and worker B to job 2,
then the economy will produce 13 units of output per day. If we assign worker A to job 2 and
worker B to job 1, then the economy will produce 14 units of output per day. This is the better
option because—in the interest of efficiency—we would like the workers to be assigned to the
jobs they do best.
Notice, by the way, that worker A is better than worker B at both jobs. However, worker A is a
lot better at job 2 (50 percent more productive) and only a little better at job 1 (12.5 percent
more productive). The best assignment of workers is an application of the idea called
comparative advantage: each worker does the job at which he or she does bestwhen compared
to the other person.
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Comparative advantage and absolute advantage are used to compare the productivity
of people (countries) in the production of a good or a service. We introduce this tool here
assuming there are two people and two goods that they can each produce.
Toolkit:
A person has an absolute advantage in the production of a good if that person can produce
more of that good in a unit of time than another person can. A person has a comparative
advantage in the production of one good if the opportunity cost, measured by the lost output
of the other good, is lower for that person than for another.
In our example, worker A has a comparative advantage in job 2, and worker B has a
comparative advantage in job 1. We have defined comparative advantage in terms of
opportunity cost, so let us go through this carefully and make sure it is clear. The
opportunity cost of assigning a worker to one job is the amount of output the worker could
have produced in the other job.
We can measure opportunity cost in terms of the output lost from assigning a worker to job 2
instead of job 1. The opportunity cost of assigning worker A to job 2 rather than job 1 is 3 units
(9 − 6). The opportunity cost of assigning worker B to job 2 rather than job 1 is 4 units of
output (8 − 4). The opportunity cost is higher for worker B, which is another way of saying
that worker B has a comparative advantage in job 1. Worker B should be assigned to job 1, and
worker A should take on job 2.
We could equally have measured opportunity cost the other way around: as the output lost
from assigning a worker to job 1 rather than job 2. The opportunity cost of assigning worker A
to job 1 rather than job 2 is −3 units (6 − 9). The opportunity cost of assigning worker A to job
1 rather than job 2 is less, it is −4 units of output (4 − 8). Worker A has the higher opportunity
cost (−3 is greater than −4), so we again conclude that worker A should be assigned to job 2.
Changes in Productivity
Suppose that this simple economy is indeed operating efficiently, with worker A in job 2 and
worker B in job 1. Then imagine that the productivity of one of these matches changes. For
example, suppose that at some point worker B goes on a training course for job 2,
so becomes .
Table 8.2 Revised Output Level per Hour from Assigning Jobs
Worker Job 1 Job 2
A 9 6
B 8 7
If you compare these two tables, you can see that worker B is now more productive than
worker A in job 2. Worker A is still better at job 1, as before.
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If we want to produce the maximum amount of output in this economy, we now want to
switch the workers around: if worker A does job 1 and worker B does job 2, then the economy
can produce 16 units of output per day instead of 14.
How might this change happen in practice? Here are three scenarios.
1. Instantaneous reallocation. In this case, the labor market is very fluid. Workers A and
B trade places as soon as B becomes more productive. No one is unemployed, and real
gross domestic product (real GDP) increases immediately.
2. Stagnant labor market. This scenario is the opposite of the first. Here, there is no
reallocation at all. People are stuck in their jobs forever. In this case, worker B remains
assigned to job 1, and worker A remains assigned to job 2. Although this was the best
assignment of jobs when described the economy, it is not the best assignment for . Relative
to the better assignment, the economy loses 2 units of GDP every day.
3. Frictional unemployment. This scenario lies between these two extremes: workers and
firms adjust but not instantaneously. How might workers A and B exchange jobs? One
possibility is that worker A is fired from job 2 because the firm wants to attract worker B to
the job instead. At the same time, worker B might quit in the hope of getting job 1 when it
is vacant. Both workers move from employment into unemployment, as in the arrow from
employment to unemployment in .
During the time when workers A and B are unemployed, their production is reduced to
zero. So, during the period of adjustment, the economy in the third scenario undergoes a
recession. But once adjustments are made, the economy is much more productive than
before. Economists refer to the unemployment that occurs when workers are moving
between jobs as frictional unemployment.
How do these three scenarios compare? It is evident that fluid labor markets are the ideal
scenario. In this situation, there is no lost output due to unemployment, and the economy is
always operating in the most efficient manner. The choice between the second and third
scenarios is not so clear-cut. In the second scenario, there is no loss of output from
unemployment, but the assignment of workers to jobs is not efficient. In the third scenario,
the economy eventually gets back to the most efficient assignment of jobs, but at the cost of
some lost output and unemployment (and, in the real world, various other costs of transition
incurred by workers and firms).
You can think of the time spent in unemployment in the second scenario as a type of
investment. The economy forgoes some output in the short run to enjoy a more efficient
match of workers and firms in the long run. As with any investment decision, we decide if it is
worthwhile by comparing the immediate cost (the first four weeks of lost output) with the
discounted present value of the future flow of benefits. Discounted present value is a
technique that allows us to add together the value of dollars received at different times.
Toolkit:
Discounted present value is a technique for adding together flows at different times. If you are
interested in more detail, review the toolkit.
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Suppose, for example, that it takes four weeks for the economy to reallocate the jobs in the
third scenario. Assuming the workweek has 5 working days, the economy produces 0 output
instead of 14 units of output for a total of 20 days. The total amount of lost output is 20 × 14 =
280. Once the workers have found their new jobs, the economy produces 10 more units per
week than previously. After 28 weeks, this extra output equals the 280 lost units. If we could
just add together output this month and output next month, we could conclude that this
investment pays off for the economy after 28 weeks. Because output produced in the future is
worth less than output today, it will actually take a bit longer than 28 weeks for the
investment to be worthwhile.
Provided that changes to the relative productivity of workers do not occur too frequently, the
costs of adjusting the assignment of workers to jobs (the spells of unemployment) will be
more than offset by the extra output obtained by putting workers into the right jobs. This is
the gain from a fluid labor market, even though the process entails spells of unemployment.
Youth Unemployment
We observed earlier that the unemployment rate for young workers is higher than for older
workers, in both France and the United States. We can understand why by thinking about the
search and matching process.
When lawyers, doctors, professors, and other professionals change jobs, they typically do so
with little or no intervening unemployment. Search and matching is easy because they have
visible records, meaning their productivity at a particular job is relatively easy to figure out. In
general, the longer someone has been in the workforce, the more information is available to
potential new employers. Also, experienced workers have a good understanding of the kinds
of job that they like.
Just the opposite is more likely in the labor market for young workers. Firms know relatively
little about the young workers they hire. Likewise, young workers, with little employment
experience, are likely to be very uncertain about whether or not they will like a new job. The
result, at least in the United States, is a lot of turnover for young workers. Young workers
sample different jobs in the labor market until they find one suited to their tastes and talents.
They take advantage of the fluid nature of the US labor market to search for a good match.
The gain is a better fit once they find a job they like. The cost is occasional spells of
unemployment.
In Europe, search and matching is much harder. Some young workers are even effectively
guaranteed jobs for life by the government from the moment they finish college. By contrast,
young workers without jobs find it difficult to obtain employment. Given the lack of fluidity in
European labor markets, it is surprising neither that more young workers are unemployed,
nor that they stay unemployed for longer periods of time.
The Natural Rate of Unemployment
We expect there to be some frictional unemployment, even in a well-functioning economy. We
also know that there is cyclical employment associated with the ups and downs of the business
cycle. When cyclical unemployment is zero, we say that the economy is operating at full
employment. The natural rate of unemployment is defined as the amount of
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unemployment we expect in an economy that is operating at full employment—that is, it is the
level of unemployment that we expect once we have removed cyclical considerations.
The natural rate of unemployment can seem like an odd concept because it says that it is
normal to have unemployment even when the economy is booming. But it makes sense
because all economies experience some frictional unemployment as a result of the ongoing
process of matching workers with jobs. Government policies that affect the flows in and out of
employment lead to changes in the natural rate of unemployment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The static model of labor supply and labor demand fails to capture the dynamic
nature of the labor market and does not account for job creation and destruction.
In the United States, labor markets are very fluid. Each month, a significant fraction
of workers lose their jobs, and each month a significant fraction of unemployed
workers find jobs.
Search theory provides a framework for understanding the matching of workers and
jobs and wage determination through a bargaining process.
The economy is operating efficiently when workers are assigned to jobs based on
comparative advantage. Inflexible labor markets lead to inefficient allocations of
workers to jobs.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Is it best to assign workers to jobs based on absolute advantage or comparative
advantage?
2. Why is frictional unemployment not always zero?
[1] These data come from a study using a monthly survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) called the Current Population Survey and were compiled by Stephen J. Davis,
R. Jason Faberman, and John Haltiwanger. The numbers here come from S. Davis, R. J.
Faberman, and J. Haltiwanger, “The Flow Approach to Labor Market: New Data Sources and
Micro-Macro Links” NBER Working Paper #12167, April 2006, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.nber.org/papers/w12167.
[2] “Article 53,” Portugal-Constitution, adopted April 2, 1976, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/po00000_.html#A053_.
[3] See Olivier Blanchard and Pedro Portugal, “What Hides Behind an Unemployment Rate:
Comparing Portuguese and U.S. Labor Markets,” American Economic Review 91, no. 1,
(2001), 187–207.
[4] See “Unemployment Duration,” Online OECD Employment database, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.oecd.org/document/34/0,3746,en_2649_33927_40917154_1_1_1_1,00.ht
ml#uduration.
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[5] These figures come from “Average Duration of Unemployment,” OECD, accessed June 30,
2011, http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AVD_DUR.
[6] This discussion is based on Figure A.6 of OECD, “Annex A: Structural Policy
Indicators,”Economic Policy Reforms: Going for Growth, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/56/36014946 .
8.3 Hours Worked
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the facts about hours worked across countries?
2. What are the explanations for these differences in hours worked?
The total number of hours worked in an economy depends on both the number of people who
are employed and the number of hours worked by each employed person. So far, we have said
little or nothing about this second issue. But another significant difference between Europe
and the United States is that people work less in Europe than in the United States. If you hear
such a statement, perhaps on the radio, you might have some questions about this
comparison.
Does this difference stem from differences in productivity? That is, is it the case that
workers in Europe are less productive than workers in the United States, so it is less
worthwhile for them to work as much?
How is the difference measured? For example, suppose we simply divided the number of
hours worked in an economy by the total population and found that this number was
higher in the United States than in Europe. There are many possible reasons why this
might be true. It could be because labor force participation is higher in the United States.
Or it could be because the unemployment rate is lower in the United States. Or it could be
because the average employed person in Europe works fewer hours than the average
employed person in the United States.
Such questions simply mean that we had better be sure that we get our facts straight. We do
this in the next part of this chapter. After that, we again turn to some theory to understand
what is going on. [1]
Hours Worked in Europe and the United States
and show some basic facts about hours worked in the United States and Europe. [2]shows
how hours worked in a number of different European countries compare to hours worked in
the United States. More precisely, it shows the total hours worked by individuals between 15
and 64 years old divided by the number of people in that age group. The table does not
distinguish by employment status: all working age people are counted, not just employed
people.
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Three of the largest European countries—France, Germany, and Italy—average less than 75
percent of the hours worked in the United States. Part of this difference is due to longer
holidays in Europe, and part is due to the fact that the workweek in Europe is typically
shorter. Because the table counts all working age people, the higher unemployment rate in
Europe also contributes to the difference.
Figure 8.7 Hours in Europe Relative to the United States
looks at the hours worked in various countries over the 40 years from 1970 to 2009. The
measure of hours is calculated in the same manner as . Average hours worked have declined
significantly in most of these countries. Meanwhile average hours worked in the United States
have been more or less flat over these four decades. As a result, hours worked are now
significantly higher in the United States than in any of these countries.[3]
Research by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Edward Prescott paints a similar picture. He
reports that from 1993 to 1996, the hours worked per person in France were about 68 percent
of the level in the United States. In addition, US output per person was much higher than in
Europe. Prescott explains this difference based on the number of hours worked, not by
differences in output per hour worked. In other words, the United States is richer, not because
it is more productive but simply because people work more.
Figure 8.8 Annual Hours in Various Countries
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Where Do Differences in Hours Worked Come From?
The immediate question is, why do people work more in the United States? A natural place to
look for explanations is the labor supply decisions of households. One possibility is simply
that the tastes of US and European households are different. Perhaps Europeans prefer
having fewer goods and more leisure. Although this is possible, economists prefer to start
from the presumption that people have broadly similar tastes and look first to see if there are
other plausible explanations.
The differences in hours worked are not explained by Europeans having poorer technology.
Both the United States and European countries are highly developed, so technologies used in
one country are used in the others as well. Supporting this is the fact that, as we already noted,
productivity does not appear to be lower in Europe.
Another candidate explanation is that there are differences in the tax system. shows an
individual labor supply curve—in either Europe or the United States. Notice in the wage
on the vertical axis is the real wage after taxes. This is defined as follows:
real wage after taxes = real wage × (1 − tax rate).
In this equation, the tax rate is a marginal tax rate. This means that it is the tax paid on
the extra amount you earn if you work a little bit more. Suppose the tax rate is 0.40 and your
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real wage per hour is $10. Then, if you work an extra hour, you pay $4 to the government, and
you retain $6.
Figure 8.9 Labor Supply
Toolkit:
If you want to see the underpinnings of the labor supply curve, you can look in the toolkit.
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shows that an increase in the after-tax real wage will cause an individual to supply more time
to the market and thus consume less time as leisure. The increase in the wage creates an
incentive for the individual to substitute away from leisure because it has become more costly.
Suppose that we compare two identical individuals in Europe and the United States. If the
marginal tax rate in Europe is higher than it is in the United States, then the after-tax wage in
Europe will be smaller. Since labor supply is upward sloping, individuals in Europe will work
less than individuals in the United States. For this to be a convincing explanation, two things
must be true:
1. Marginal tax rates must be higher in Europe.
2. Labor supply must slope upward enough to match the differences in hours.
Marginal tax rates are indeed lower in the United States than in Europe. Recent research finds
that the marginal tax rate on labor income is about 34.5 percent in the United States
compared to 57.7 percent in Europe (Germany, France, Italy, and the United
Kingdom).[4] So, if you work an extra hour and earn a pretax wage of $10, then you would
keep $6.55 in the United States and $4.23 in Europe.
The evidence is also consistent with the view that labor supply increases as the after-tax real
wage increases. shows the implication of this. On the vertical axis are two different levels of
the after-tax real wage: a low one for Europe and a higher one for the United States. These
differences in the after-tax real wage translate into differences in hours, using the labor supply
curve of an individual. Thus, as in , individuals in the United States work more hours than in
Europe. As this is true for everyone in the labor force, this argument immediately translates
into a statement about hours worked for the aggregate economy.
Figure 8.10 Differences in Hours Supplied
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There are two real wages after taxes shown: one for Europe and one for the United States.
These differences in real wages translate into differences in hours worked.
Can the difference in the after-tax real wage explain the observed difference in hours worked?
This depends on how responsive labor supply is to changes in the real wage.shows two labor
supply curves. In one case (the solid curve), labor supply is very responsive to changes in the
wage. Relatively small differences in taxes then have substantial effects on hours worked. In
the other case (the dashed curve), labor supply is not very responsive to the wage. Differences
in tax rates are then unlikely to be able to explain the differences in hours worked.
Figure 8.11 Responsive and Unresponsive Labor Supply
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For the solid labor supply curve, hours worked responds strongly to changes in the real
wage after taxes, while for the dashed curve, the response is very weak.
Prescott argues that the difference in taxes between the United States and Europe is enough to
account for the differences in hours worked. To make this argument, Prescott holds fixed the
labor supply curve () across countries and asks how much of the observed difference in hours
can be explained by tax policy. This is a movement along the labor supply curve because the
vertical axis measures the after-tax real wage. To support this argument, however, Prescott
assumes that labor supply is indeed quite responsive to changes in after-tax wages.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
The average hours worked varies over countries. In the United States, the average
hours worked are greater than in Europe.
One way to explain differences in hours worked is through the higher marginal labor
income taxes paid in Europe.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Draw a diagram of the labor market to show how taste differences might explain
differences in hours worked across countries.
2. In , why is a tax policy change a movement along the labor supply curve and not a shift in
the labor supply curve?
[1] Discussions of this topic by academics have been prompted by the work of Nobel Prize–
winning economist Edward C. Prescott. The following article provides an overview and
analysis of the key issues: Edward S. Prescott, “Why Do Americans Work So Much More Than
Europeans?”Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (July): 2–13,
accessed August 22,
2010, http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=905.
[2] Richard Rogerson, “Understanding Differences in Hours Worked,” Review of Economic
Dynamics 9 (2006): 365–409.
[3] The data come from OECD (2010), “Hours Worked: Average annual hours actually
worked”,OECD Employment and Labour Market Statistics (database). doi: 10.1787/data-
00303-en (Accessed on 18 October
2011)http://scholar.harvard.edu/alesina/files/work_and_leisure_in_the_u.s._and_europe.p
df. Figure 1 shows a similar pattern of divergence in hours worked for employed people,
though the hours worked per employed person has declined in all countries over this period.
[4] Alberto F. Alesina, Edward L. Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Work and Leisure in the U.S.
and Europe: Why So Different?” (Harvard Institute for Economic Research, Working Paper
#2068, April 2005), accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.colorado.edu/Economics/morey/4999Ethics/AlesinaGlaeserSacerdote2005
.
8.4 The Government and the Labor Market
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are common forms of government intervention in labor markets?
2. Why do governments intervene in labor markets?
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The employment and unemployment experience of Europe is quite different from that of the
United States. We have developed some frameworks that help us understand the sources of
these differences. But we have not yet really addressed the question at the heart of this
chapter: what is the impact of different labor market policies in the two places?
Government interventions in the labor market are commonplace in most European countries.
In Europe, there are many examples of restrictions on hiring, firing, the closing of plants, and
so forth. There are some restrictions of this kind in the United States as well but not to the
extent that we observe in Europe. In part this is because public opinion in Europe is more
supportive of such regulations, as compared to the United States. For example, in 2003, the
French food producer Danone decided to close two unprofitable factories in France. This
news, which would almost certainly have been unexceptionable in the United States, led to
massive protests, boycotts, and condemnation by politicians.
Europe is not the only part of the world in which governments intervene directly in labor
markets. Labor regulations have recently been under consideration in China as well. [1]
The new labor contract law, enacted by the Standing Committee of the National People’s
Congress, requires employers to provide written contracts to their workers, restricts the
use of temporary laborers and makes it harder to lay off employees.
Because of China’s communist history, most workers are not represented by labor unions. It is
the government that steps in to represent workers. The need to do so is enhanced by the
increasing share of private rather than publically owned firms in China’s economy.
We finish this chapter by considering some of the policies that have been adopted by
governments in an attempt to influence the functioning of labor markets. We are interested
both in why policymakers think these policies are a good idea and in the effect of these
policies on the economy.
Unemployment Insurance
In , we described the flow of workers between situations of employment, unemployment, and
out of the labor force. We also argued that having a flexible labor market in which people can
change jobs easily may more than compensate for the fact that people may sometimes spend
time in unemployment.
But this is abstract economist-speak. People who lose their jobs, even if only temporarily, see
their livelihood vanish. The reallocations of jobs that are beneficial to the economy as a whole
may be costly, even devastating, to the affected individuals. For this reason, most developed
economies have some kind of unemployment insurance to protect their workers.
Unemployment insurance means that, if you are unemployed, you will receive some income
from the government. Exactly how long you receive this income for and exactly how much you
get depends on where you live. Some countries have much more generous unemployment
insurance than others. Even if you live in the United States, the amount of insurance varies
from state to state.
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When it comes to buying car insurance, home insurance, or life insurance, households
typically decide for themselves how much insurance to purchase. It is not a decision made by
the government. Unemployment insurance is different: it is provided by the government
rather than by private companies. This insurance is funded by taxes levied on firms and
workers together.
The reason unemployment insurance is provided by the government is because it might be
difficult for private firms to provide this coverage. Private insurance companies rely on the
fact that not everyone makes claims on insurance at the same time. For example, a provider of
home insurance knows that 20 percent of the houses that they insure will not burn down in
the same month. But in a recession, the high rate of unemployment means that a lot of people
claim benefits at the same time. If private insurers were providing the benefits, insurance
companies might go bankrupt, leaving workers without insurance. The government, by
contrast, can use its ability to borrow, so it can finance unemployment insurance in one year
from tax receipts it will receive in the future.
In the United States, the amount of insurance you receive typically depends on how much you
have earned over the past year. A rule of thumb is that workers get about 25 percent of their
wage income paid back through unemployment insurance. Benefits are available for only 26
weeks, although this is usually extended when the economy is in a recession. Other countries
have much more generous programs. [2] In Denmark, for example, unemployment benefits
are about 90 percent of labor income and can last for up to 4 years.
Unemployment insurance has two main effects. First, and most obviously, this insurance
makes it easier for unemployed people to sustain their level of consumption until they regain
employment. Thus this form of insurance helps support consumption smoothing. Second,
unemployment insurance affects the incentives of the unemployed. If individuals know they
will receive some income even when they are unemployed, they are more likely to be willing to
search extensively for good jobs. Instead of feeling the need to take the first job that comes
along, people can wait longer and search longer for a job that is a really good match.
Unemployment insurance therefore contributes to labor market flexibility. It is, however,
tricky to decide just how much unemployment insurance should be provided. After all, if
unemployment insurance is too generous, then unemployed workers will be tempted to defer
getting a new job for a long time—perhaps indefinitely. For this reason, governments usually
restrict the period of time for which a worker can collect insurance to provide an incentive for
them to search for a job.
Firing Costs
Imagine that you are the human resources (HR) manager of a firm in the United States.
Suppose that the demand for your firm’s product has declined, so you need to lay off some
workers. You will be obliged to provide two weeks’ notice to them. In many cases, that will be
the end of your firm’s obligations, although workers may sometimes be entitled to additional
severance payments as part of their employment contracts. In the United States, employment
contracts are largely a private matter between a firm and its workers. A firm cannot fire a
worker for a discriminatory reason, but otherwise the government stays out of the contractual
agreements among workers and firms. According to the Department of Labor, “In general, if
the reason for termination is not because of discrimination on these bases, or because of the
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employee’s protected status as a whistleblower, or because they were involved in a complaint
filed under one of the laws enforced by the Department of Labor (see Whistleblower and Non-
Retaliation Protections), then the termination is subject only to any private contract between
the employer and employee or a labor contract between the employer and those covered by
the labor contract.” [3]
In other countries, matters are not so simple. Imagine now that you are the HR manager of a
firm in Portugal. Your product demand has fallen off, and you want to reduce output. In
contrast to the United States, you may not be able to simply lay off workers. In Portugal, and
in many other countries, there are numerous laws that make it costly to dismiss workers.
If you want to design a public policy to reduce the unemployment rate, it is tempting to make
it harder to fire workers. If it is difficult to fire people, then fewer individuals will move from
employment into unemployment. As we discussed earlier, though, spells of unemployment
are sometimes necessary if workers are to move from less productive jobs to more productive
ones. An increase in firing costs makes the labor market less flexible, so the economy will
adjust less effectively to changes in workers’ productivities.
There is also a more subtle unintended consequence of firing costs. If it is harder to fire
workers, then firms become more reluctant to hire workers. Neither firms nor workers know
the true value of a match in advance. When you take a part-time job, your productivity at that
job and job satisfaction cannot be known ahead of time. Suppose there was a law that stated
that once you accept a job you must stay with that employer for five years. You would certainly
become very careful about deciding to accept a job offer. Exactly the same applies to firms. If
the cost of laying off a worker is very high, then the firm will simply not hire the worker. A
policy designed to promote employment can actively discourage it.
The French government, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, made an attempt to
introduce labor market reforms based on exactly this reasoning and tried to make the
argument that we have just outlined to the protesters in the streets. If there were more
flexibility in the firm’s employment decision, they argued, firms would become more willing to
hire young workers. This would help to reduce youth unemployment. The following New York
Times article tells what happened next. [4]
President Jacques Chirac crumbled under pressure from students, unions, business
executives and even some of his own party leaders on Monday, announcing that he
would rescind a disputed youth labor law intended to make hiring more flexible. The
retreat was a humiliating political defeat for both Mr. Chirac and his political protégé,
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin […]
It also laid bare the deep popular resistance to liberalizing France’s rigid labor market,
and makes any new economic reform politically impossible before a new government is
in place, and perhaps not even then.
“Dead and buried,” is how Jean-Claude Mailly, leader of the leftist union Force
Ouvrière, described the fate of the labor law. “The goal has been achieved.”
[…]
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The new law was intended to give employers a simpler way of hiring workers under 26
on a trial basis without immediately exposing companies to the cumbersome and costly
benefits that make hiring and firing such a daunting enterprise. Opposition to the law
reflects the deep-rooted fear among the French of losing their labor and social
protection in a globalized world.
[…]
In its initial form, the law allowed employers to fire new employees within two years
without cause. In the face of mounting pressure, Mr. Chirac watered it down so that
employers could subject new employees to only a yearlong trial period, and then would
have to offer a reason for any dismissal.
Students and unions, bolstered by support from the opposition Socialists and even some
business leaders, had vowed to continue their street protests until the law was
rescinded.
The Socialists were quick to proclaim victory on Monday. “This is an unquestionable
retreat,” Francois Hollande, the leader of the Socialist Party, told reporters. “It is a
grand success for the young and an impressive victory for the unity of the unions.”
[…]
Restrictions on Hours
Another tempting policy to increase employment is to limit the number of hours an employee
can work. Suppose that a firm needs 1,200 hours of labor time a week. If a typical worker
works 40 hours per week, then the firm will need to hire 30 workers. But if the government
were to legislate a 30-hour workweek, then the firm would need to hire 40 workers instead.
This idea of “spreading work” through restrictions on hours was part of the response in the
United States to the Great Depression. During the early 1930s, the US government instituted
such restrictions under the heading of the “National Economic Recovery Act.” The idea
persists to the present day. In France, the government passed a law limiting hours worked to
35 hours per week (for workers at large firms) starting in the year 2000. In Germany, the
government operates a policy called Kurzarbeit, whereby it subsidizes firms who retain
workers for shorter hours in times of recession.
One problem with such policies is that restrictions on hours reduce the value of a match
between a worker and a firm. Consequently, fewer matches will be formed, and more workers
will be unemployed. Another problem is that it reduces flexibility in the labor market, which
leads to less efficient functioning of the economy.
As a concrete example, consider auto manufacturers in the years following the Great
Depression in the United States. This industry had substantial variations in hours worked
over the model year. During times of high demand for cars (the spring), factories and their
workers were working overtime to meet the increased demand. Restrictions on hours meant
that overtime working had to be replaced by increased hiring. Firms that wanted to produce
more output had to hire and train new workers. This was costly, so firms sometimes found it
was better simply to accept that they would not meet the high demand.
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In the case of France’s 35-hour workweek, matters were a bit more complicated. The
mandated short workweek imposed some rigidity on firms. However, during the negotiations
for this change in the laws, French labor unions agreed to some other changes that improved
the flexibility of the labor market. France later moved away from the 35-hour workweek by
permitting firms and workers to agree to longer work hours if they wish.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Most governments provide workers with unemployment insurance. In many
countries, governments also impose costs on firms that fire workers and also restrict
hours worked.
One rationale for intervention by governments is to provide insurance to workers that
is not available in private markets. Governments also take action in an attempt to
increase employment rates.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Can a firm in the United States fire a worker without permission of the government?
2. What was one of the arguments in France for restricting the hours worked per week?
[1] Joseph Kahn and David Barboza, “China Passes a Sweeping Labor Law,” New York Times,
World Business, June 30, 2007, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/business/worldbusiness/30chlabor.html.
[2] “The Ins and Outs of Long-Term Unemployment,” OECD Employment Outlook 2002,
accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/36/48/17652683 . Table 4.1
provides an extensive cross-country comparison.
[3] “Termination,” US Department of Labor, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/termination/index.htm.
[4] Elaine Sciolino, “Chirac Will Rescind Labor Law That Caused Wide French Riots,” New
York Times, April 11, 2006, accessed June 30,
2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/world/europe/11france.html?_r=1.
8.5 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
Europe and the United States differ in many ways. From the perspective of macroeconomists,
some of the most striking differences are in the laws governing labor markets.
In the United States, labor markets are relatively flexible. It is relatively easy for firms to hire
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and fire workers, and it is relatively easy for workers to move between jobs. This brings many
benefits to the economy as a whole, the most important being that it helps ensure good and
productive matches between workers and firms. It also has some less attractive implications,
particularly for workers. Job security is very limited, and workers might find themselves out
of a job with very little warning.
In Europe, labor markets tend to be more rigid. We have explored some of the ways in which
this is true. Minimum wages are often higher, unemployment insurance is more generous,
and the costs of hiring and firing workers are greater. As a consequence, European countries
are typically characterized by higher unemployment than the United States. In addition,
unemployment duration tends to be longer: workers who become unemployed tend to take
longer to find a new job. This makes the labor market a more difficult place for workers who
do not have jobs but a better place for those who do have jobs because they typically enjoy
higher salaries and greater security.
We have analyzed the differences between these two parts of the world, but we have not
explained why these different economies have settled on such different configurations of labor
laws. The explanation is not simple and goes well beyond economics into questions of history,
politics, and sociology. Still, there is probably some truth in the simplest explanation: voters
have different preferences about how their working lives should look. Perhaps voters in
Europe prefer a world of greater job security for the employed, even if it comes at the cost of
unemployment problems and a less-efficient economy. Perhaps voters in the United States
prefer a dynamic economy, even if it comes at the cost of more uncertainty for working
people.
Key Links
US Department of Labor, information on unemployment
insurance:http://www.ows.doleta.gov/unemploy/aboutui.asp
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) key employment
statistics:http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_2825_495670_42788213_1_1_1
_1,00.html
European Union statistics: labor market
policies:http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/labour_market/introductio
n
Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor force statistics:http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm
International Labour Organization, labor policies:http://www.ilo.org/empelm/lang–
en/index.htm
EXERCISES
1. A Washington Post article quoted the following opinion from a French
student. [1] Do you agree or disagree with these views? Do you think of the labor
market experience in your country differently?
“They’re offering us nothing but slavery,” said Maud Pottier, 17, a student at
Jules Verne High School in Sartrouville, north of Paris, who was wrapped in
layers of scarves as protection against the chilly, gray day. “You’ll get a job
knowing that you’ve got to do every single thing they ask you to do because
otherwise you may get sacked. I’d rather spend more time looking for a job
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http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/labour_market/introduction
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http://www.bls.gov/cps/home.htm
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and get a real one.”
2. (Advanced) What effect does unemployment insurance have on the savings behavior of
employed households? Think about the life-cycle model, discussed inChapter 13 “Social
Security” (and in the toolkit). How would you add the prospect of unemployment to the
household’s life-cycle decisions on consumption and saving?
3. Explain how each of the following factors might affect the duration of unemployment
for a single unemployed worker: (a) rate of unemployment in the economy, (b) age of
the worker, (c) skills of the worker, (d) country of the worker, (e) generosity of
unemployment insurance, (f) wealth of the worker, and (g) employment status of the
worker’s spouse. What other factors can you contribute to this list?
4. The following table contains information about worker output in two jobs. Explain why
worker B has an absolute advantage in both jobs. What is the most efficient
assignment? Which worker has a comparative advantage in job 1? Calculate the
opportunity cost of assigning the workers to job 2. Which worker has a lower
opportunity cost of taking job 2?
5. Consider the following job assignment problem based on the table titled “Output Level
per Hour from Assigning Jobs”. Here there are three workers, three jobs, and the
prospect of not working. In the table, the value of output produced not working can be
interpreted as the value of either leisure time or the output produced at home (say, in
the garden). Find the optimal assignment of workers to jobs. Should anyone be
unemployed? If not, how would you change the table so that someone was not
working?
6. Explain why making it easier to fire people might reduce the unemployment rate.
7. Suppose that there is a legal minimum wage, set in nominal terms. Draw a diagram
to show how this can lead to unemployment. Now suppose that there is inflation.
What happens to the employment rate? What happens to the unemployment rate?
TABLE 8.3 OUTPUT LEVEL PER DAY IN DIFFERENT JOBS
Worker
Job
1
Job 2
A 1 9
B 2 12
TABLE 8.4 OUTPUT LEVEL PER HOUR FROM ASSIGNING JOBS
Worker Job 1 Job 2 Job 3 Not
Working
A 10 12 6 0
B 8 1 1 2
C 6 3 5 3
Economics Detective
1. Go to the website for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(http://www.oecd.org/home/0,2987,en_2649_201185_1_1_1_1_1,00.html). Find
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the latest table reporting unemployment rates in Europe. How is unemployment
defined in this table?
2. Find a recent discussion of employment protection laws across countries. In which
countries are jobs most regulated? Has this changed much over time? Can you find
any evidence relating the measure of employment protection laws with the
unemployment experience of the individual countries?
3. Go to the website for the Current Population Survey (http://www.bls.gov/cps).
Develop a figure similar to Figure 8.6 “Worker Flows in the United States” for the
current month. Why do the numbers differ from those reported in Figure 8.6 “Worker
Flows in the United States”? Find a year when the United States was in a recession.
What were the rates of job flows like during the recession?
4. Find a discussion of the unemployment insurance that would apply to you if you lost a
job where you currently live. Does it matter in your state/country why you are not
currently employed? In your state/country, do you have to continue to look for a job
to receive unemployment insurance? If so, what do you have to do?
5. In Europe, is the amount of unemployment insurance determined by individual
countries or by the European Union?
6. Go to the website for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov) and find out
what ages are classified as working age in the United States.
[1] Molly Moore, “French Students Hit Streets to Protest New Labor Law,” Washington Post,
World News, March 17, 2006, accessed July 7, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601908.html.
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http://www.bls.gov/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601908.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601908.html
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Chapter 9
Money: A User’s Guide
The Color of Money
You wake up one morning, drag yourself out of bed, and, bleary-eyed, throw on some
clothes. You stumble out of your apartment and across the road to your neighborhood
coffee shop. “Coffee, please,” you say to the barista, those being the only two words that
you are capable of getting out of your system before you get some caffeine into it. She
pours a cup of the coffee of the day and places it on the counter in front of you. Just
smelling the coffee makes you feel a little bit better already.
“That’ll be a dollar.” You reach into your pocket, pull out a crumpled twenty, hand it to
her, and reach for the cup. “I’m sorry,” she says, pulling the cup away from you, “I can’t
accept that.” “Why on earth not?” you ask, bemused. “It’s the wrong color,” she says.
“You could have used that yesterday, but—look—this is what bills look like now.” And she
reaches into her register and shows you a bright purple $20 bill, like the one in the
following figure .
Figure 9.1 The New $20 Bill
Imagine if you woke up one morning and found that all money was now this color.
In this story, normal green dollar bills were accepted as money yesterday, while purple dollar
bills were worthless colored pieces of paper. But today, purple dollar bills are accepted as
money, and green dollar bills are just worthless pieces of paper. This sounds absurd. Yet it is
not so far from what happened in a dozen different countries on January 1, 2002. If you had
awakened in Italy on that day and gone down the street to a neighborhood café, you would
have noticed that the simple act of buying coffee had changed from the day before. Your local
café still looked as it did on December 31, 2001. But where you had previously paid with notes
and coins called Italian lira, you would now pay with a completely new currency called the
euro.
The same was true in France, Finland, Germany, Greece, and seven other European countries.
On that day, 12 countries all officially gave up their own currencies and instead adopted a
common currency—the euro. Admittedly, the transition was not quite as stark as in our story:
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there was a period of about 2 months in which euros and the old local currencies both
circulated. But the essence is the same. At one time, euro notes were just colored pieces of
paper that shopkeepers would not accept for transactions. Then, not that long afterward,
those colored pieces of paper became valuable, while the old currencies turned into worthless
pieces of paper.
This was an amazing event for the international economy. Familiar currencies like the French
franc, the German deutschmark, the Greek drachma, and the Spanish peseta simply
disappeared. The following figure shows some of these vanished currencies. Some of the
world’s largest economies changed their currency. [1] To make sense of this event, we need to
answer a disarmingly simple-looking question, which is the theme of this chapter:
Why do people want to hold apparently worthless pieces of paper?
Figure 9.2 Some Vanished Currencies
Here are some of the banknotes that disappeared from circulation in Europe upon the
advent of the euro.
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Road Map
Understanding what happened in Europe requires us to answer two more basic questions:
What is money? and Why is it valuable?
We begin this chapter by looking at what makes something a money. Surprisingly, this is not
straightforward: we will see that money has several attributes, and many different things can
act as money. Then we look at what we can do with money. We use money to buy goods and
services, we use money to buy other kinds of money, and we use money to buy money in the
future.
Before exploring the world of money, we need to make one clarification. In everyday language,
if you bought a camera for $200 and sold it for $300, we would say that you made money
from the deal. Economists, however, use the term money more precisely, in ways that we
make clear in this chapter. An economist would say that your resale of the camera earned you
income, and you received that income in the form of money.
[1] In Chapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”, we take up another aspect of this event: what
it means for a country to disband its central bank and delegate monetary policy to a
centralized entity.
9.1 What Is Money?
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What gives money value?
2. What are the functions of money?
Take a look at some currency—a dollar bill, for example. It is nothing more than a piece of
paper with writing on it. A very pretty piece of paper, perhaps, with fancy writing and some
pictures, but it is still just a piece of paper. Yet people voluntarily give up valuable goods or
services in exchange for pieces of paper. This is the mystery of money.
The question motivating this chapter—why do people want money?—is a deep one. That may
seem a surprising claim because obviously we all like having money. But questions that seem
trivial sometimes provide insights into how the world works. If we can understand why people
want these intrinsically worthless pieces of paper, then we can understand why money is
valuable. And to understand why people want these pieces of paper, we need to know what
people want to do with their money.
The Characteristics of Money
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A striking feature of modern developed economies is that people are typically specialists in
production and generalists in consumption. By this we mean that most of us work at one or at
most two jobs, producing (or, more often, helping to produce) a very small number of things—
for example, a cattle farmer produces beef, a software designer produces computer code, and
a nurse produces health services. However, we all purchase hundreds of goods and services.
There is no law that says that we have to buy goods and services using money. An alternative
is to trade goods or services directly for one another. This is called barter. We do see some
barter in the world. A restaurant may allow its employees free meals at the end of the night,
which means that some of the employees’ wages effectively takes the form of food. If a car
mechanic and a caterer live next door to each other, they may have an informal arrangement
whereby the mechanic repairs the caterer’s truck in exchange for food for a birthday party.
Sometimes we know exactly where to buy the goods and services that we want. At other times,
we go looking—perhaps walking or driving from store to store, perhaps searching using a
phone book or the Internet. We do this because we don’t know which store has the goods we
want in stock; in addition, we might not know the prices that different stores are charging,
and we want to hunt around for the best deal.
To understand the role that money plays in an economy, begin by imagining a world where we
must search for the goods and services that we want to buy and there is no money, so all
trades take place through barter. Imagine, for example, that you are a web designer, and you
want to buy a used car. You must look around for someone who has a car for sale. This search
takes time: it has an opportunity cost in that you would prefer to spend that time working or
enjoying leisure. Eventually, you find someone who has a car that you are interested in
buying. But your problems are not over. He has a car for sale, but what can you give him in
exchange? You have to hope that he is interested in obtaining some web design services in
exchange for the car. Successful barter requires a coincidence of wants: you must have what
the other person wants, and they must have what you want.
A world of nothing but barter is hard to imagine. Each time you wanted to buy something
from a seller in a store, you would have to exchange some good or service for that good. If you
went to a café, you might have to wash the dishes in return for a coffee. Professors of
economics wanting a meal would have to go from restaurant to restaurant trying to find a chef
who wanted to hear an economics lecture. They would probably go hungry. It is easy to see
why all societies find some way of making these transactions easier.
If you can carry some kind of money around with you to make purchases like these, life is
much easier. You still have to hunt for the goods and services that you want, but you don’t
have to worry about whether the other party in the transaction wants the product that you
sell. Money, therefore, plays a key role in ensuring that trades occur. Trades, in turn, create
value in our economy. People are not forced to buy or sell things; they do so only if the trade
leaves them better off than they were prior to trading. Money therefore plays a critical role in
value creation.
The reason that we rarely see exchange without money is that it is so inefficient. Without
money, a coincidence of wants is unlikely, so desirable trades do not occur, and value is not
created. With money, transactions are much easier. If you want a meal in a restaurant, the
owner will always serve it to you if you have money. Likewise, you obtain money by working at
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your job. You don’t care what good or service your employer produces; as long as your
employer pays you in money, you are happy to supply your labor time to them.
Let us think for a moment about what characteristics this money needs to have:
Money must be portable. If you are going to walk around searching for goods and services,
you want to be able to carry money with you. Sacks of coal would not make a very good
money.
Money must be divisible. Different goods have different prices, and the money we use
must accommodate that. Watches would not make a very good money.
Money must be durable. Daffodils would not make a very good money.
It is easy to list many things that are reasonably portable, divisible, and durable: chocolate
chip cookies, cigarettes, and printer paper are just a few examples. These are not typically
used as money, although they could be. If you went into a fast-food restaurant, asked for a
burger, and then offered to pay using chocolate chip cookies, you can be confident that you
would not get the food that you want. That is because there is a fourth characteristic of money
that is rather different from the other three.
Money must be acceptable.
Something can function as money only if people are willing to accept it as money. It is not
impossible to imagine a world where chocolate chip cookies function as money. If everyone
else is willing to accept cookies in payment for goods and services, then you will be willing to
do so as well. But if other people accept only printed pieces of paper as money, then you would
be foolish to accept chocolate chip cookies for the product that you sell.
Fiat Money
We know of no country, of course, that actually uses chocolate chip cookies for money. In
most countries, money takes a particular form called fiat money. Fiat money is money that is
not backed by any physical commodity, such as gold. Instead, the currency is intrinsically
useless pieces of paper that attain value in exchange.
Fiat is a Latin word that means “let it be.” Fiat money is money just because the government
says so. In a fiat money system, the government does not promise to exchange goods for
money. In addition, money is not generally something that we can directly consume: most
people would not enjoy eating a dollar bill. So if it doesn’t taste good and the government
doesn’t promise to give you something in exchange for it, what gives fiat money value? Why
are we all willing to work hard to get pieces of these—intrinsically worthless—pieces of paper?
The answer is because these pieces of paper are acceptable as money. Other people will accept
them, so you and I will as well. To put it another way, fiat money has value because everyone
believes it has value. Think back to the story with which we opened the chapter. The US
economy uses green and white pieces of paper as money. US residents are willing to give up
valuable goods and services in exchange for these green and white pieces of paper because
they believe that others, in turn, will accept them. Such an arrangement sounds fragile, and it
is. If everyone stopped believing that fiat money had value, this would be a self-fulfilling
prophecy. [1]
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Suppose the money in an economy changed overnight from green pieces of paper to purple
pieces of paper, as we fancifully suggested at the beginning of this chapter. Everyone now
works for and accepts the new purple currency. You are forced to follow. It would be foolish
for you to work and accept green paper because no one would give you goods or services in
exchange. Instead, you demand to be paid in purple paper because that is what you now need
to buy goods and services.
Of course, we do not often observe these switches across colors of paper within an economy.
People get used to one type of currency, and it is difficult to change everyone’s behavior at
once. Still, Europe did, in effect, switch from green pieces of paper to purple pieces of paper.
Sure enough, no one in Europe these days is willing to accept French francs, Portuguese
escudos, or Finnish marks. These are the old pieces of paper. Now people will accept only the
new pieces of paper.
That conversion was not truly instantaneous. Prior to the changeover to the euro, there was a
switch to a dual unit of account: French bank statements in 2001 gave balances in both
French francs and euros, for example. Even now, years after the changeover, bills in Europe
often still appear in both the old local currency and euros. It was also possible to use the euro
as a store of value before the changeover because banks started establishing accounts in euros.
Even though fiat money issued by the government is, in the end, just pieces of colored paper,
it typically does have one particular property that stems from the power of the state. The US
government states that it will accept dollars in settlement of government debts—most
importantly, tax bills. The government also states that dollars can be used in settlement of
private debts. Dollars are legal tender. [2]
The Functions of Money
Thus far, we have thought about money in terms of its characteristics. We can also think about
what makes a good or bad money in terms of the functions that it serves.
Medium of Exchange
If you walk into an electronics store and see a camera with a price tag of $500, the store is
making an offer to you and other customers: if you hand over ten $50 bills, you can have the
camera in exchange. Money serves as a medium of exchange.
There are other ways to purchase a camera rather than cash. You could write a check, for
example, or use a debit card (a card that immediately deducts the $500 from your bank
account and pays it into the store’s account). The fact that there are different ways of paying
for something is a clue that there is, in fact, no single thing that we can call money. Money is
anything that does what money does.
Interestingly, one common form of purchase does not involve money at all. If you use a credit
card to buy a camera, you do not pay at all at the time of purchase, so no money—by any
definition—changes hands. In this case, you receive the camera in exchange for a promise to
pay for the camera later. It is only when that promise to pay is fulfilled that you hand over the
money for the purchase.
Store of Value
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Any medium of exchange must also serve as a store of value. This just means that money
should keep its value between the time that you receive it (in exchange for goods that you sell
or work that you do) and you spend it again.
If an object lost all or most of its value over a short period, then it would not be acceptable in
exchange. So something that serves as money must be a store of value. Imagine for a moment
an economy in which ice played the role of money. Except on the coldest days, the ice you
receive on payday would not last long enough for you to buy anything with it. It would be a
terrible store of value and, as a result, would not do a good job of facilitating exchange.
Paper money and coins are not like ice. They are durable and do not dissolve with use.
Because of this, you can be confident that the dollar you have in your pocket today will still be
a dollar you can spend tomorrow. The fact that people are willing to hold money for long
periods of time is indicative of the role of money as a store of value. If money were not a store
of value, then all people would want to get rid of cash as soon as they received it. To mix our
metaphors: if money were ice, it would become a hot potato.
Being a store of value is more than just a physical property of money. Currency in your pocket
can remain there for a long periods of time before disintegrating. So, in a physical sense, that
currency retains its worth. But, if prices are increasing, then in terms of what the currency can
buy, the money in your pocket is not retaining its value. In times of inflation, money functions
less well as a store of value.
Unit of Account
Almost universally, prices are quoted in terms of some currency, such as pesos, dollars, or
euros. Goods and services sold in the United States have prices in terms of US dollars. The
dollar serves as a unit of account. But when the very same goods and services are sold in
Europe, they are priced in a different unit of account: euros. This role of money is so familiar
as to be mundane, yet our economy simply could not function without a commonly accepted
monetary measuring stick. It would be like building a house without an accepted measure of
length or running an airline without an accepted measure of time.
The unit that people use to keep account of their monetary transactions varies from country to
country. In Mexico, prices are quoted in pesos, in India prices are quoted in rupees, and so on.
In most countries, the medium of exchange and the unit of account are the same thing, but
this need not be true.
Because the US dollar is known throughout the world, it is often used as a unit of account in
unexpected places. Prices of commodities in international transactions may be quoted in
terms of the dollar even when the transaction does not directly involve the United States.
Luxury hotels in China and elsewhere sometimes quote prices in US dollars even to guests
who are not coming from the United States. [3] As another example, after the changeover to
the euro, that currency became the medium of exchange and the “official” unit of account. But
many people—at least in terms of their own thinking and mental accounting—continued to
use the old currencies. In everyday conversation, people continued to talk in terms of the old
currencies for months or even years after the change.[4] Even today, some bills and bank
statements in Europe continue to quote the old currency along with the euro.
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Meanwhile, merchants in countries who have not adopted the euro may still quote prices in
that currency. In Hungary, the local currency is called the forint. Figure 9.3 “The Euro as a
Unit of Account” shows a sign at a restaurant in Budapest, Hungary, advertising goods in both
currencies: goulash soup, for example, is sold for 1,090 forint or 4.40 euro. If, as may well be
the case, the restaurant is also willing to accept euros in payment, then the euro is also acting
as a medium of exchange alongside the forint.
Figure 9.3 The Euro as a Unit of Account
A sign at a restaurant in Hungary quotes prices in euros and the local currency (forint).
Source: Image taken by the authors
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Fiat money has value because everyone believes it has value.
The three functions of money are medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of
account.
Checking Your Understanding
1. In what sense are you a specialist in production and a generalist in consumption?
2. Why is money less effective as a store of value when inflation is high?
3. In times of inflation, money is also less effective as a unit of account. Why?
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[1] Something very much like this happens in the circumstances of very high inflation rates, as
explained in Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”.
[2] There is a subtle question here about whether this aspect of money means that even
intrinsically worthless currency must always have some value. If people owe debts to the
government that are specified in money terms, then they will be willing to pay something for
legal tender currency.
[3] In Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy”, we discuss both nominal and real gross domestic
product (real GDP). Nominal GDP is the value of all the goods and services produced in an
economy, measured in terms of money. Money is used as a unit of account to allow us to add
together different goods and services. Even the concept of real GDP uses money as a unit of
account: the difference is that we use money prices from a base year to value output rather
than current money prices.
[4] On a bike trip in the summer of 2002, one of the authors had lunch in a French country
restaurant. Though it was many months after the change to the euro, the menu was still in
French francs. An elderly lady running the restaurant painstakingly produced a bill in euros:
for each entry (in French francs), she multiplied by the exchange rate (euros to francs) and
then added the amounts together.
9.2 Using Money to Buy Goods and Services
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is arbitrage?
2. What is the law of one price?
Having defined money through its characteristics and functions, we now turn to the uses of
money. By looking at what we can do with money, we can understand how intrinsically
worthless pieces of paper acquire their value.
Let us imagine, then, that you are lucky enough to find a $100 bill on the sidewalk. You have
no way of returning it to its rightful owner. What might you do with this money? The first and
most obvious answer is that you can use it to buy something you want: you can take the $100
and purchase some goods and services.
The Value of Money
The observation that we use money to buy things tells us more about the value of money.
Economists often make a distinction between real and nominal values; this distinction can be
applied to money as well. First, what is the nominal value of money? This is almost a trick
question: we are asking, “How many dollars is a dollar bill worth?” The answer, which does
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not require a doctorate in economics, is that a dollar bill is worth $1.
Nominal variables—those measured in dollars or other currencies—can be converted into real
variables—that is, those measured in units of real gross domestic product (real GDP). To
convert a nominal variable to a real variable, we simply divide by the price level. For example,
if your nominal wage is $20 per hour and the price level is $10 (meaning that a typical unit of
real GDP costs this amount), then your real wage is 2 units of real GDP.
Toolkit: Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
If you want to review the process of correcting for inflation, you will find more details in the
toolkit.
Exactly the same principle can be applied to money itself. The real value of a dollar is obtained
by dividing one by the price level.
Thus
real value of money =
1
price level
.
Think of an economy in which real GDP is measured in pizzas and suppose the price level—
the price of a pizza—is $10. Then the value of a dollar bill is 1/10 of a pizza.
Although $1 is always worth $1, you are not guaranteed that the dollar bill in your pocket will
buy the same amount of goods and services from one day to the next. If your local café
increases the price of a cookie from $1.00 to $1.25, then your $1 will no longer buy you a
cookie; its value, measured in cookies, has declined. If the price level increases, then the real
value of money decreases. For notes and coins to be a good store of value, it must be the case
that prices are not increasing too quickly. [1]
Using Money to Make Money: Arbitrage
An old joke has it that the secret to getting rich is very simple: buy at a low price and sell at a
high price. So another use of your $100 would be to buy goods not to consume but to resell—a
process known as arbitrage.
Suppose you discovered that a particular model of digital camera could be bought much more
cheaply in Minneapolis, Minnesota, than in Flagstaff, Arizona. Then you could purchase a
large number of cameras in Minneapolis, load them into a suitcase, fly to Flagstaff, and sell
them for a profit. If the gap in price were large enough to compensate for your time and travel
costs, then this would be a money machine. By buying cameras at a low price and selling them
at a high price, you could make as much profit as you wished.
This situation would not persist. You, and other entrepreneurs as well, would start to bid up
the price of cameras in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the increased supply of cameras in Flagstaff
would cause prices there to decrease. Before too long, your money machine would have dried
up: the gap between the Flagstaff price and the Minneapolis price would no longer justify the
effort.
Arbitrage ensures that the prices of individual goods do not vary too much across different
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regions of the United States. Taken to its extreme, it would imply that the price level would be
the same throughout the country. Economists call this idea the law of one price. The law of
one price says that different prices for the same good or service cannot persist because
arbitrage eliminates such differences. Arbitrageurs would buy the good at the low price and
sell it at the high price. Demand would increase in the market where the price was low,
causing that price to increase. Supply would increase in the market where the price was high,
causing that price to decrease. This process would continue until the prices were equalized
across the two markets.
There are, of course, differences in the prices of individual goods and services in different
states and different cities. These differences are primarily due to the fact that some items
cannot be arbitraged. If cameras are cheaper in Minneapolis than in Flagstaff, then they can
be bought and sold as we described. But if apartments in Flagstaff are cheaper than in
Minneapolis, it isn’t possible to ship them across the country. Likewise services typically
cannot be arbitraged. Thus we do not expect the law of one price to be literally true for every
good and service. Nevertheless, the law of one price does lead us to expect that the overall
price level will not differ too much in different parts of the country.
It can be difficult to apply the law of one price in practice because we have to be careful about
what we mean by the “same” product. An apparently identical shirt at two different retailers
might not qualify as the same—perhaps one retailer allows goods to be returned, while the
other does not allow returns. Identical goods are not the same if they are in different places: a
Toyota on a dealership lot in Kentucky is not the same as the identical model car on a lot in
Pretoria, South Africa, and so on. In such situations, the law of one price tells us that we
should not expect prices of goods to be “too different,” depending on the costs of
transportation and the other costs of arbitrage.
We said earlier that money makes an economy more efficient because it makes transactions
easier. Money makes arbitrage easier as well. Arbitrage would be a less certain way of making
money in an economy with barter. First, the lack of a clear unit of account would make
arbitrage opportunities less transparent. Second, the lack of a reliable medium of exchange
would make arbitrage risky: the person in Flagstaff who wants to buy a digital camera from
you might not have anything you want, so you might end up giving up something you own and
not getting something you want in return.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Arbitrage is the process of making a profit by buying goods at a low price and selling
them at a higher price.
When arbitrage is possible, we expect the same good to sell at the same price. There
are no arbitrage profits to be made when the law of one price holds.
Checking Your Understanding
1. All else being the same, if the price level increases, what happens to the real value of
money?
2. Explain why the law of one price is less likely to hold for a service than for a good.
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[1] We discuss this problem in more detail in Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”.
9.3 Using Money to Buy Other Monies: Exchange Rates
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the difference between the nominal exchange rate and the real exchange rate?
2. How is the law of one price related to the nominal exchange rate?
As we all know, there are multiple currencies in the world. These are most often associated
with a single country: the yen in Japan, the yuan in China, the peso in Mexico, and so on.
Sometimes many countries will use the same money, with the leading example being the use
of the euro by the member countries of the European Union
(http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/index_en.htm). Sometimes multiple currencies
are in use in a single place: when you land at a major European airport, such as Frankfurt,
Germany, or Amsterdam, the Netherlands, you will see that you can buy a cup of coffee at the
airport using many different currencies. Likewise, the US dollar is freely accepted in some
countries in addition to the local currency, British pounds formerly were freely accepted in
Ireland, and so on.
If you happened to find your $100 right before going on a trip to another country, you might
decide to use it to buy the money of that country. For example, if you were about to take a trip
to Canada, you could take the bill into a bank or a foreign exchange merchant and exchange it
for Canadian dollars. If you want to buy goods and services in Canada, you need Canadian
dollars because they are the medium of exchange in that country.
When you make such an exchange, you buy the local currency using your home currency. If
you travel from the United States to Europe, you buy euros using dollars. The price you pay is
the dollar price of the euro: the amount in dollars you must pay to obtain 1 euro. This is
completely analogous to using a dollar to buy a bottle of soda, when you pay the dollar price of
soda.
In practice, it is often unnecessary to carry out a physical exchange of notes and coins. In most
countries, you can go to an automated teller machine (ATM) and withdraw local currency
directly. Your bank deducts the equivalent sum in your home currency from your bank
account. You are still carrying out an exchange, of course, but it is hidden from view, and you
will see it only when you look at your next statement. The same is true if you make a purchase
using a credit card.
Just as a US resident traveling to Europe wishes to buy euros with dollars, a visitor to the
United States from, say, Holland will need to buy dollars with euros. The price she pays is the
euro price of the dollar: the number of euros needed to obtain $1. The price of one currency in
terms of another is called an exchange rate.
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Toolkit:
If you want to review the definition of an exchange rate, you will find more details in the
toolkit.
If we think of two currencies—euros and dollars, for example—then there are two exchange
rates to keep in mind: the price of euros in dollars and the price of dollars in euros. (You
might suspect, correctly, that these two prices are linked; we return to this shortly.) In a world
of 3 currencies, each has a price in terms of the other two currencies, so there are 6 (= 3 × 2)
different prices. And in a world of 100 currencies, then for each one, there are 99 prices for
the other currencies. So there are 100 × 99 = 9,900 prices to quote! A Zambian traveling to
Armenia wants to know about the kwacha price of drams, a Malaysian traveling to Oman is
interested in the ringgit price of rials, and so on.
Foreign Exchange Markets
Imagine a series of three visitors traveling from the United States to Europe. First, we have
someone arriving on vacation. Chances are that she will want to exchange dollars for euros to
have money to spend on hotels, meals, and so on. She also buys souvenirs in Europe—goods
that she imports back to the United States. Our second visitor spends a lot of time in Europe
for work purposes. He might open a bank account in, say, Germany. If he wanted, he could
use this bank account to keep some of his wealth in Europe. He would buy euros with his
dollars, deposit these euros in the bank to earn interest, and then—at some point in the
future—he would take his money out of the bank in Germany and exchange the euros for
dollars. (Later, we will consider how you can decide if this is a good investment strategy. For
now, our point is that this type of financial investment is another source of demand for euros.)
Our third visitor to Europe is a professional wine buyer who wants to purchase wine to sell in
a US restaurant. She travels to the wine-growing regions of Europe (France, Spain, Italy,
Germany, Portugal, etc.) and must exchange dollars for euros to pay for her purchases.
Our three visitors represent a microcosm of the transactions that take place in the foreign
exchange market every day. Households and firms buy euros to pay for their imports of goods
and services (souvenirs, wine, etc.). Many different goods and services are produced in Europe
and sold in the United States. Some are imported by retailers, others by specialist import-
export firms, and still others by individuals, but in all cases there is an associated purchase of
euros using dollars.
The demand for euros also arises from financial investment by households, firms, and
financial institutions. For example, a wealthy private investor in the United States may
purchase stock issued by a company in Europe. To buy that stock, the US investor sells dollars
and buys euros. In practice, such transactions are typically carried out by financial institutions
that undertake trades on behalf of households and firms.
Most exchanges of dollars for euros do not actually entail someone traveling to Europe. Think
about the foreign currency needs of a large multinational firm that produces goods and
services in Europe but sells its output in the United States. The company naturally needs
euros to pay workers and suppliers in Europe. Since it sells goods and thus earns revenues in
dollars, the company must convert from dollars to euros very frequently. But you will not see
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the company’s chief financial officer in an airport line to exchange money. Instead, such
currency operations are conducted through financial institutions, such as commercial banks.
Because of all these transactions, there are very active and sophisticated markets in which
currencies are traded. We can represent these markets using the familiar supply-and-
demand framework. shows a picture of the market where euros are bought and sold. Buyers
from the United States buy euros with dollars, and European traders sell euros in exchange
for dollars. [1] The supply and demand curves refer to the object being traded—euros. Thus
the quantity of euros is shown on the horizontal axis. The price on the vertical axis is in
dollars.
This market is just like any other you encounter. The demand curve is downward sloping: as
the price of euros increases, the quantity of euros demanded decreases. This is the
law of demand at work. As the price of euros increases, people in the United States will find
that goods and services produced in Europe are more expensive. For example, suppose that 1
euro costs $1, and a Mercedes automobile costs EUR 50,000. [2] Then its cost in dollars is
$50,000. Now imagine that euros become more expensive, so that EUR 1 now costs $2. You
now need $100,000 to buy the same Mercedes in Europe. So an increase in the price of euros
means that Americans choose to buy fewer goods and services produced in Europe. Exactly
the same logic tells us that an increase in the price of the euro makes European assets look
less attractive to investors. A German government bond, a piece of real estate in Slovenia, or a
share in a Portuguese firm might look like good buys when the euro costs $1 yet seem like a
bad idea if each euro costs $2.
The supply curve also has a familiar upward slope. As the price of euros increases, more
people in Europe sell their euros in exchange for dollars. They do so because with the higher
dollar price of euros, they can obtain more dollars for every euro they sell. This means that
they can buy more US goods and services or dollar-denominated financial assets.
Figure 9.4 The Market for Euros
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This diagram shows the foreign exchange market in which euros are bought and sold. As the
price of euros (in dollars) increases, more euros are supplied to the market, but fewer euros
are demanded.
The price where supply equals demand is the equilibrium exchange rate. (The market also
shows us the equilibrium number of euros traded, but here we are more interested in the price
of the euro.)
Toolkit:
The foreign exchange market is an example of a market that we can analyze using the tool of
supply and demand. You can review the supply-and-demand framework and the meaning of
equilibrium in the toolkit.
Arbitrage with Two Currencies
So far, we have talked about buying foreign currencies to purchase either assets or goods and
services. Another reason to buy foreign currencies is in the hope that you could make money
by trading them. Let us think about how you might try to make money in the foreign exchange
market. You might start with some dollars and exchange them for euros. Then you could take
those euros and exchange them for dollars again. Is it possible that, by doing this, you could
end up with more money than you started with? Could you buy euros cheaply and then sell
them at a high price, thus making a profit?
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Begin by supposing that dollars and euros are only two currencies in the world, and there are
only two economies: the United States and Europe (a shorthand for “those European
countries that use the euro”). Imagine that there are two separate markets: in the euro
market, the price of 1 euro is $2; in the dollar market, the price of one dollar is EUR 1. With
these two prices, there is money to be made by buying and selling currencies. Start with 1
euro. Sell that euro in the market for euros and obtain $2. Use those dollars to buy euros in
the market for euros and obtain 2 euros. Now we are talking business: you started with 1 euro,
made some trades, and ended up with 2 euros.
There is, of course, a catch. The prices that we just suggested would not be consistent with
equilibrium in the foreign exchange markets. As we have just seen, there is a simple recipe for
making unlimited profit at these prices, not only for you but also for everyone else in the
market. What would happen? Everyone would try to capitalize on the same opportunity that
you saw. Those with euros would want either to sell them in the euro market—because euros
are valuable—or to use them to buy dollars in the dollar market—because dollars are cheap.
Those with dollars, however, would not want to buy expensive euros in the euro market, and
they would not want to sell them in the dollar market. Hence, in the euro market, the supply
of euros would shift rightward, and the demand for euros would shift leftward. The forces of
supply and demand would make the dollar price of euros decrease. In the dollar market, the
supply of dollars would shift leftward, and the demand for dollars would shift rightward,
causing the euro price of dollars to increase.
The mechanism we just described is arbitrage at work again. The arbitrage possibility between
the dollar market for euros and the euro market for dollars disappears when the following
equation is satisfied:
price of euro in dollars × price in dollar in euros = 1.
When this condition holds, there is no way to buy and sell currencies in the different markets
and make a profit. As an example, suppose that EUR 1 costs $2 and $1 costs EUR 0.5. These
prices satisfy the equation because 2 × 0.5 = 1. Imagine you start with $1. If you use it in the
dollar market for euros to buy euros, then you will have EUR 0.50. If you then use these in the
euro market for dollars to buy dollars, you will get $2 for each euro you supply to the market.
Since you have half of a euro, you will end up with $1, which is what you started with. There is
no arbitrage opportunity.
By now you have probably realized that there is a close connection between the market for
euros and the market for dollars (where dollars are bought and sold using euros). Whenever
someone buys euros, they are selling dollars, and whenever someone sells euros, they are
buying dollars. In our two-country, two-currency world, the market for euros and the market
for dollars are exactly the same market, just looked at from two different angles.
Figure 9.5 The Market for Euros and the Market for Dollars
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Here we show the market where euros are bought and sold with dollars (a) and the market
where dollars are bought and sold with euros (b). Because of arbitrage, these are just two
different ways of looking at the same market.
We illustrate this in . In part (a) of , we show the market where euros are bought and sold, and
in part (b) of the market where dollars are bought and sold. The supply curve for dollars is just
the demand curve for euros, and the demand curve for dollars is the same as the supply curve
for euros. For example, suppose 1 euro costs $2. From part (a), we see that, at this price,
people would supply EUR 3,200. In other words, there are individuals who are willing to
exchange EUR 3,200 for $6,400. If we think about this from the perspective of the market for
dollars, these people would demand $6,400 in the market when $1 costs EUR 0.50—and,
indeed, we see that this is a point on the demand curve in part (b). The market is in
equilibrium when EUR 1.00 costs $1.25, or equivalently when $1 costs EUR 0.80. At this
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exchange rate, holders of dollars are willing to give up $2,500, and holders of euros are willing
to give up EUR 2,000.
Arbitrage with Many Currencies
We live in a world with many different currencies, not just two. shows some exchange rates
from http://www.oanda.com, a site that provides current and historical data on exchange
rates and that is also an online market where you can trade currencies. So, on March 11, 2007,
just after midnight, the price of a euro in dollars was 1.3115. At the same time, the price of a
dollar in British pounds was 0.5176.
Figure 9.6 Exchange Rates
These tables come from http://www.oanda.com. The table on the left shows exchange rates
among four currencies and the table on the right shows the rates at which you can actually
conduct trades at this site.
If you look at the table on the left side of , you see that it provides both the dollar price of the
euro and the euro price of the dollar (and similarly for the other currency pairs). Tables such
as this one have already built in the arbitrage condition, so you cannot keep buying and selling
the same currency in exchange for dollars and make money.
When there are multiple currencies, we can imagine more complicated trading strategies. As
an example, consider the following string of transactions.
1. Take a dollar and use it to buy euros.
2. Take the euros and buy Japanese yen.
3. Take the yen and buy dollars.
If you end up with more than $1, then there are profits to be made buying and selling
currencies in the manner outlined here. Can you make a profit this way? The answer, once
again, is no. If you could, then the markets for foreign currency would not be in equilibrium:
everyone would buy euros with dollars, sell them for yen, and then sell the yen for dollars.
Once again, exchange rates would rapidly adjust to remove the arbitrage opportunity.
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To verify this, let us go through this series of transactions using . One dollar will buy you EUR
0.7625. Now take these and use them to buy yen. You will get 0.7625 × 155.1910 = JPY
118.3331. Now, use these yen to buy dollars, and you will get 118.3331 × 0.00845 = $0.9999.
You start with $1; you end with $1 (give or take a rounding error).
These calculations assume that there are no costs to trading foreign currencies. In practice,
there are costs involved in these exchanges. A traveler arriving at an airport in need of local
currency does not see rates posted as in the left-hand table in . Instead, they see something
that looks like the right-hand table, where rates are posted in two columns: bid (buying) and
offer (selling). The bid is a statement of how much the currency seller is willing to pay in local
currency for the listed currency. The offer column is the price in local currency at which the
seller is willing to sell to you. Naturally, the offer price is bigger than the bid: the seller buys
currencies at a low price and sells them at a high price. The difference between the bid and
offer prices is called the spread. The existence of the spread means that if you try to buy and
sell currencies with the dealer, you will actually lose money. At the same time, the spread
creates a profit margin for the dealer and thus pays for the service that the dealer provides.
Arbitrage with Goods and Currencies
We have talked about arbitrage with goods and arbitrage with foreign currencies. We can also
put the two together to study the prices of goods that are traded across international borders.
Arbitrage of goods from one country to another is a bit more complicated because it involves
buying and selling currencies as well as goods. To see how this works, imagine you are going
on a trip to Europe. You are allowed two suitcases filled with belongings free of charge on the
airplane. What about filling a suitcase full of new blue jeans, transporting them to Europe,
and then selling them there? Could you make money that way?
Suppose that the dollar price of 1 euro is $1.50. Further, suppose that the price of a pair of
blue jeans is $70.00 in the United States and EUR 50.00 in Paris. Consider the following
sequence of actions.
1. Take $70 out of your pocket and buy a pair of blue jeans.
2. Travel with these blue jeans to Paris.
3. Sell the jeans for euros.
4. Buy dollars with your euros.
The question is whether you can make money in this way. The answer is given by how many
dollars you will have in your pocket at the end of these steps. When you sell the jeans in Paris,
you will have EUR 50.00. If the dollar price of euros is $1.50, then by selling the jeans in Paris
you will get 50 × $1.50 = $75. This is a profit of $5 for each pair of jeans—you are in business.
Once again, the opportunity for arbitrage suggests that this situation is unlikely to persist.
Entrepreneurs will buy jeans in the United States, take them to Paris, and sell them there.
Market forces in three different markets will work to eliminate the profit. First, the activity of
arbitrageurs will increase the demand for jeans in the United States, causing the US price of
jeans to increase. Second, the increased supply of jeans in Paris will cause the price there to
decrease. And third, there will be an increased supply of euros in the foreign exchange market,
which will cause the euro to depreciate. This is shown in.
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Figure 9.7 International Arbitrage Restores the Law of One Price
When blue jeans cost $70 in the United States and EUR 50 in France, and the exchange rate
is $1.50 per euro, arbitrageurs can make a profit by importing blue jeans to Europe from the
United States.
These price changes continue until there are no profits to be made by arbitrage. Exactly how
much of the adjustment will take place in each market depends on the slopes of the supply
and demand curves. In , we have drawn the new equilibrium as follows: blue jeans cost EUR
49 in Europe and $71.05 in the United States; and the exchange rate is $1.45 per euro. At
these prices,
price of blue jeans in dollars = price of blue jeans in euros × price of euro in dollars,
and there is no longer any possibility of arbitrage. This is another illustration of the law of one
price. If we were literally talking just about arbitrage in blue jeans, most of the adjustment
would take place in the markets for blue jeans in the United States and Europe, and there
would be a negligible effect on the exchange rate. But if the same kinds of arbitrage
opportunities exist for lots of goods, then there will be an impact on the exchange rate as well.
For tradable goods, the law of one price says that the
dollar price of good = euro price of good × dollar price of euro.
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When this condition holds, there are no arbitrage profits to be gained by purchasing the good
with dollars, selling it for euros, and then buying dollars with euros. Likewise, if this condition
holds, there are also no arbitrage profits from purchasing the good with euros, selling it for
dollars, and then buying euros with dollars. In general, we expect that such arbitrage will
occur very quickly. There are no profits to be made from arbitrage when the law of one price
holds.
The Economist has kept track of the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac in a number of countries
for many years, creating something they call the “the Big Mac index.” contains some of their
data. The last column of gives the price of a Big Mac in each selected country in July 2011,
converted to US dollars at the current exchange rate. That is, the last column is calculated by
dividing the local currency price (the second column) by the exchange rate (the third column).
A Big Mac costs $4.07 in the United States but more than twice as much in Norway. China is a
real deal at only $1.89.
Table 9.1 The Economist’s Big Mac Index, July 2011
Country Local Currency
Price of Big Mac
Local Currency
Price of a Dollar
Price in US
Dollars
United
States
USD 4.07 1 4.07
Norway NOK 45 5.41 8.31
Euro Area EUR 3.44 0.70 4.93
Czech
Republic
CZK 69.3 17.0 4.07
China CNY 14.7 6.45 1.89
Source: “The Big Mac Index: Currency Comparisons, to Go,” Economist online, July 28, 2011,
accessed August 2, 2011,http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/07/big-mac-
index.
The price differentials in this table violate the law of one price: there is (apparently) profit to
be made by buying Big Macs at a low price and selling them at a high price. Applying the
principle of arbitrage, we should all be flying to China, buying Big Macs, traveling to Norway,
and selling them on the streets of Oslo. Of course, there are a few small problems with this
scheme, such as the following:
It is expensive to fly back and forth between China and Norway.
There is a limited capacity for transporting Big Macs on the airplane.
The quality of the Big Mac might deteriorate while it is being transported.
You might not be permitted to import meat products from China into Norway.
You might have to pay taxes when you bring Big Macs into Norway.
It might be tough to open a McDonald’s in Oslo.
This long list easily explains the deviations from the law of one price for Big Macs. Similar
considerations explain why the law of one price might not hold for other goods. The law also
does not apply to services, such as tattoos, since these cannot be imported and exported. The
law of one price is most applicable to goods that are homogeneous and easily traded at low
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cost. Economists use the law of one price as a guide but certainly do not expect it to hold for
all products in all places.
Using the Law of One Price to Understand the Exchange Rate
There is another way to interpret the finding that Big Macs do not cost the same in each
country. The Economist uses this information to draw conclusions about the values of
different currencies and how these values are likely to change over time.
From this perspective, the Big Mac is more expensive in Europe than in the United States
because dollars are cheap in Europe. Put differently, we say that the dollar is
undervalued relative to the euro. If the price of a dollar in euros were 0.85 instead of 0.70,
then a Big Mac would cost the same in the United States and Europe. Completely equivalently,
we can say that that the euro is overvalued relative to the dollar. With this in mind, we
might expect the undervalued dollar to increase in value relative to the euro. That is, we would
expect the price of a dollar in euros to increase. Similarly, we would conclude that the
Norwegian kroner is overvalued relative to the dollar, the Chinese yuan is undervalued, and
the Czech Koruna is neither overvalued nor undervalued.
To see how this works more generally, look back at our arbitrage condition for blue jeans. If
we divide both sides by the price of blue jeans in euros, we get
price of euro in dollars =
price of blue jeans in dollars
price of blue jeans in euros
.
This equation says that, according to the law of one price, the dollar price of the euro should
equal the dollar price of blue jeans divided by the price of blue jeans in euros. This is exactly
the kind of calculation that underlies the Big Mac index, only with blue jeans instead of Big
Macs. Equivalently, the law of one price says that the
price of dollar in euros =
price of blue jeans in euros
price of blue jeans in dollars
.
Suppose we think about this equation applying (approximately) to all goods and services. We
can then get a better prediction of the exchange rate by looking at a general price index in
each country:
price of dollar in euros =
price of bundle of goods in Europe
price of same bundle of goods in the United States
.
Because of all the reasons why the law of one price does not literally hold, economists
certainly do not expect this equation to give an exact prediction of the exchange rate.
Nevertheless, it can provide a useful indication of whether a currency is undervalued or
overvalued.
A currency is undervalued if, following this equation, its price is too low compared to the ratio
of price levels in the two countries. A currency is overvalued if, following this equation, its
price is too high compared to the ratio of price levels in the two countries. As in our discussion
of the euro, if a currency is overvalued, then we would expect its value to decrease over time.
This is called a depreciation of the currency. Likewise, we would expect the price of an
undervalued currency to increase over time. This is called an appreciation of the currency.
The market forces behind these currency movements come from the buying and selling of
currencies for trading purposes. If the Chinese yuan is undervalued, goods produced in China
will be relatively cheap in US dollars. The demand for Chinese exports will be high, and this
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will lead to a large demand for the yuan. Eventually the dollar price of the yuan will increase—
that is, the yuan will appreciate, and the dollar will depreciate.
Changes in the Exchange Rate
Even though the law of one price does not literally hold for all goods and services, it reminds
us that the value of $1 in the United States is linked to its value in the rest of the world. As a
result, we expect that price level changes are likely to lead to changes in the exchange rate. We
see this more clearly if we write our previous equation in terms of growth rates. Using the
formula for growth rates, we find the following:
growth rate of price of dollar in euros = growth rate of price of European bundle of goods−
growth rate of price of US bundle of goods.
Toolkit:
The formulas for using growth rates can be found in the toolkit.
If the bundle of goods in each country corresponds roughly to the goods in the
Consumer Price Index (CPI), then the growth rate of these prices corresponds to the
inflation rate. The growth rate of the exchange rate is just another term for the percentage
appreciation of the currency. Thus we get the following:
percentage appreciation of the dollar ≈ European inflation rate − US inflation rate.
So, if the inflation rate in the United States is higher than it is in Europe, we expect the euro
price of the dollar to decrease. We expect depreciation of the dollar if US inflation exceeds
European inflation. Inflation reduces the real value of money domestically; it will also tend to
reduce the value of money in terms of what it can purchase in the rest of the world. This
makes sense. If our currency is becoming less valuable at home, then we should also expect it
to become less valuable in the rest of the world.
The Real Exchange Rate
The law of one price is connected to another measure of the exchange rate—the
real exchange rate. This exchange rate is a measure of the price of goods and services in
one country relative to another when prices are expressed in a common currency. It is about
exchanging goods, rather than money, across countries.
The real exchange rate between the United States and Europe is given as follows:
real exchange rate = (
U.S. price level
European price level ) × price of the dollar in euros.
You can think of the real exchange rate as the number of units of European gross domestic
product (GDP) you can get for one unit of US GDP. [3] For example, if the price level in the
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United States is $1,600, the price level in Europe is EUR 400, and the price of dollars in euros
is EUR 0.5, then the real exchange rate is as follows:
1,600
400
× 0.5 = 4 × 0.5 = 2.
One unit of US GDP will get you two units of European GDP.
The real exchange rate is intimately linked to the law of one price. The easiest way to see this
is to suppose that we measure US real GDP and European GDP in the same units: that is,
suppose we use the same bundle of goods in each case. We know that the law of one price
should hold for tradable goods—that is, goods for which arbitrage is possible and practical. If
every good that went into GDP were tradable, then the law of one price would hold for every
good, and the real exchange rate would equal 1. If the real exchange rate was not 1, you could
make arbitrage profits by buying and selling “units of GDP.”
As before, suppose the US price level is $1,600, the European price level is EUR 400, and the
nominal exchange rate (dollars per euro) is 0.5. Imagine that US GDP and European GDP
measure the same bundle of (tradable) goods. Then you could take $800 and buy EUR 400.
With these euros, you could buy a basket of goods in Europe. You could sell this basket in the
United States for $1,600. The law of one price is violated. We would expect the following:
Prices in the United States would increase.
Prices in Europe would decrease.
The nominal exchange rate would depreciate (the dollar would become less valuable).
Because arbitrage is not possible for all goods and services, we do not expect—nor do we
observe—the real exchange rate to be exactly one. But this benchmark is still useful in
understanding movements in the real exchange rate.
The Real Exchange Rate in Action
The real exchange rate matters because it is the price that is relevant for import and export
decisions. Suppose you are trying to decide between buying a mobile phone manufactured in
the United States and one manufactured in Finland. If the dollar appreciates against the euro,
then the US phone retailer needs fewer dollars to purchase euros, so Finnish phones will be
cheaper in US stores. If prices decrease in Finland, the imported phone again becomes
relatively cheaper. If prices increase in the United States, the US phone will be more
expensive. In other words, increasing prices in the United States, decreasing prices in Finland,
and appreciation of the dollar all make you more likely to buy the imported phone rather than
the domestically produced phone.
More generally, anything that causes the real exchange rate to increase will make imports look
more attractive compared to goods produced in the domestic economy. Examined from the
point of view of Europe, the same increase in the real exchange rate makes US goods look
more expensive relative to goods produced in Europe, so Europeans will be likely to import
fewer goods from the United States. An increase in the real exchange rate therefore leads to an
increase in US imports and a decrease in US exports—that is, it leads to a decrease
in net exports.
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The real exchange rate can and does vary substantially over time. Argentina in the 1990s
provides a nice illustration of real exchange rates in action. [4] Argentina had
acurrency board during this period. Under a currency board, a country maintains a fixed
exchange rate by backing its currency completely with another currency. Although Argentina
did have its own currency (the Argentine peso), each peso in circulation was backed by a US
dollar held by the Argentine central bank. You could at any time exchange pesos for dollars at
a nominal exchange rate of 1.
shows what happened to prices in Argentina and the United States over this period. Look at
1992–95. Both countries had some inflation. But prices were increasing faster in Argentina
than in the United States. The real exchange rate (Argentina–United States) is given by
real exchange rate = (
Argentine price level
US price level
) × price of the peso in dollars
= (
Argentine price level
US price level
)
because the price of the peso in dollars was 1. Therefore the real exchange rate appreciated as
Argentine inflation outpaced US inflation.
The appreciation of the real exchange rate meant that Argentine goods became more
expensive in other countries, so Argentine exports became less competitive. (The problem was
compounded by the fact that the US dollar [and hence the peso] also appreciated against the
currencies of neighboring countries such as Brazil.) Without the currency board, it would have
been possible for the nominal exchange rate (price of the peso in dollars) to decline, offsetting
the effects of the inflation rate. Instead, this appreciation of the real exchange rate ended up
causing substantial economic problems in Argentina in the 1990s. In the second half of the
decade, the real exchange rate began to depreciate because the inflation rate in Argentina was
lower than in the United States. The appreciation at the start of the decade had been so large,
however, that the real exchange rate in 1999 was still higher than it had been in 1992.
Figure 9.8 The Real Exchange Rate in Argentina
Argentina’s real exchange rate appreciated between 1992 and 1995 because the nominal (US
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dollar–Argentine peso) exchange rate was constant and equal to one, and the price level
increased more rapidly in Argentina than in the United States.
Source: CPI inflation figures from International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook
database (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2006/01/data/dbcselm.cfm?G=205)
and Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov).
If countries want to have a permanently fixed exchange rate, there is an option that is more
radical than a currency board. Countries can decide to adopt a common currency, like the
European countries that adopted the euro. There are several reasons why countries might
decide to take such a course of action. The first advantage of a common currency is that it
enhances the role of money as a medium of exchange. There is no longer a need to exchange
one currency for another, making it easier to trade goods and services across countries. People
do not have to deal with the inconveniences of exchanging currencies: individuals do not have
to exchange cash at airports, and firms do not need to manage multiple currencies to conduct
international business. In the jargon of economics, a single currency removes transaction
costs. These costs might be individually small, but they can add up when you consider just
how many times households and firms needed to switch from one of the euro area currencies
to another.[5]
One way to picture this advantage is to imagine the reverse. Suppose, for example, that each
state in the United States decided to adopt its own currency. Trade across state lines would
become more complicated and more costly. Even more starkly, imagine that your hometown
had its own currency, so you had to exchange money whenever you traveled anywhere else.
A second advantage of a single currency is that it makes business planning easier. A firm in
Belgium can write a contract with another firm in Spain without having to worry about the
implications of currency appreciation or depreciation. Thus an argument for the move to a
single currency was that such a change was likely to encourage trade among countries of the
European Union. Again, imagine how much more complicated business would be in the
United States if each state had its own freely floating currency.
Finally, a common currency enhances capital flows. Just as it is easier for businesses to trade
goods and services, it is also easier for investors to shift funds from country to country. With a
common currency, investors do not have to pay the transactions costs of converting
currencies, and they no longer face the uncertainty of exchange rate changes. When capital
flows more easily across borders, investment activity is more productive, enhancing the
growth of the countries involved.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The nominal exchange rate is the price of one currency in terms of another. The real
exchange rate compares the price of goods and services in one country to the cost of
these goods and services in another country when all prices are in a common
currency.
From the law of one price, a tradable good in one country should have the same price
as that same good in another country when the goods are priced in the same currency.
This means that the exchange rate is equal to the ratio of the prices expressed in the
two different currencies. Put differently, by the law of one price, the real exchange
rate between tradable goods should be 1.
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Checking Your Understanding
1. If the price of a euro was $2 and the price of a dollar was 1 EUR, how would you make a
profit?
2. If goulash sells for either 1,090 forint or 4.40 euro, what is the price of the forint in
terms of the euro? Do the two prices of cabbage quoted in yield a different euro price for
the forint? Is there an arbitrage possibility here (or elsewhere on the menu)?
[1] Of course, it is not literally the case that everyone who is buying is from the United States
and that everyone selling is from Europe. If you have dollars, you can buy euros; if you have
euros, you can sell them for dollars. But it is simpler to explain if we think of Europeans
selling euros and Americans buying them.
[2] There is an established set of three-letter symbols for all the currencies in the world. Euros
are denoted by EUR, US dollars are denoted by USD, Australian dollars are denoted by AUD,
and so forth. In this book we use the familiar $ symbol for US dollars and the three-letter
symbols otherwise. A list of the currency codes can be found
at http://www.xe.com/iso4217.php.
[3] Let us check the units of the real exchange rate. The US price level over the European price
level is in dollars/euros: it is the price of a unit of US real GDP divided by the price of a unit of
European real GDP. The nominal exchange rate is measured in euros per dollar. Thus the
units are as follows:
$
euros
×
euros
$
.
The dollars and the euros cancel out in this expression, so the real exchange rate is just a
number.
[4] We discuss this in more detail in .
[5] According to studies supporting a common currency, these gains from reduced
transactions costs were substantial. One of the key analyses was the Delors report. A summary
of that report is available at “Phase 3: the Delors Report,” European Commission, October 30,
2010, accessed August 22,
2011, http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/emu/road/delors_report_en.htm. A
complete report on the history of the euro is available at “One Currency for One Europe: The
Road to the Euro,” European Commission, 2007, accessed August 22,
2011,http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/publication6730_en .
9.4 Using Money to Buy Assets: Interest Rates
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the difference between nominal interest rates and real interest rates?
2. What is the yield curve?
3. What is the Fisher equation?
We have now discussed how you could use your $100 to buy goods and services or the money
of another country. You can also use your money to buy money in the future. When we say
this, we are simply describing a familiar transaction in an unfamiliar way: we are talking
about saving. If you put money in a bank, then you are buying money in the future with
money you give up today. When you save in this way, you become a participant in
the credit markets (or loan markets).
Toolkit: Section 16.4 “The Credit (Loan) Market (Macro)”
A credit market (or loan market) brings together suppliers of credit, such as households who
are saving, and demanders of credit, such as businesses and households who need to borrow.
You can review the credit market in the toolkit.
Arbitrage with Credit and Assets
Suppose you do not want to spend your $100 until next year. You could just put the money
under your mattress, but a better option is to find some way of getting more than $100 next
year. One way to do this is to lend your money to someone else. For you, this might simply
mean taking it to your bank and putting it in your savings account. When you do that, you are
making a loan to the bank. Of course, the bank probably will not leave the money in its vault;
it will lend that money to someone else. Banks and other financial institutions act as
intermediaries between those who want to save and those who want to borrow.
Figure 9.9 The Credit Market and the Asset Market
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Credit markets and asset markets are two ways of looking at the same market: the market
for $100 loans (a) with an equilibrium interest rate of 5 percent is the same as the market
for an asset that promises to pay $105 in a year’s time (b).
The credit market brings together the suppliers and demanders of credit, and the
nominal interest rate is the price that brings demand and supply into balance. The supply
of credit increases as the interest rate increases: as the return on saving increases, households
will generally save more and thus supply more funds to the credit market. The demand for
credit decreases as the interest rate increases: when it is expensive to borrow, households and
firms will borrow less. At the equilibrium interest rate, the quantity of credit supplied and the
quantity of credit demanded are equal. This is shown in part (a) of Figure 9.9 “The Credit
Market and the Asset Market”.
There is another way to look at credit markets. Borrowers get money today in exchange for a
promise to pay money later. Lenders purchase those promises by giving up money today.
Instead of asking how much the interest rate is for a given $100 loan, we could ask what
people would be willing to pay today for the right to receive $105 in a year’s time.
The market for the promise to pay $105 in a year is illustrated in part (b) of Figure 9.9 “The
Credit Market and the Asset Market”. The units on the horizontal axis are $105 payments.
These are assets: buyers are purchasing a piece of paper that is a promise to deliver $105 in a
year’s time. The price on the vertical axis is the current price of that asset.
The nominal rate of return on an asset is the amount that you obtain, in percentage terms,
from holding the asset for a year. In the case of the simple one-year asset we are considering,
the return is given as follows:
nominal rate of return on asset =
repayment amount
price of asset
−1.
We can also rearrange this to give us the price of the asset:
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price of asset =
repayment amount
1 + nominal rate of return on asset
.
Notice what happens when we look at the market in this way. Buyers have become sellers, and
sellers have become buyers. Borrowers are sellers: they sell the promise to pay. Lenders are
buyers: they purchase the promise to pay. If we are looking at the same group of buyers and
sellers as before, then the current equilibrium price of this asset would be $100.
The nominal interest rate and the nominal rate of return defined through these two markets
must be the same. If not, there would be an arbitrage possibility. Imagine, for example, that
the interest rate is 5 percent but the price of the asset is $90. In this case, the rate of the
return on asset is 11090−1, which is 22.2 percent. So you could make a lot of money by
borrowing at a 5 percent interest rate and then purchasing the promises to pay $110 at price of
$90.
If you could do this, so also could many major financial institutions—except that they would
operate on a much larger scale, perhaps buying millions worth of assets and borrowing a lot in
credit markets. So the demand for credit would shift outward, as would the demand for assets.
This would cause the interest rate to increase and the asset price to increase, so the rate of
return on the asset decreases. This would continue until the arbitrage opportunity
disappeared.
In summary, we would say there is no arbitrage opportunity when the
nominal rate of return on asset = nominal interest rate.
The rate of return on the asset, in other words, is equivalent to the interest rate on the asset.
Equivalently this means that
price of asset =
repayment amount
1 + nominal rate of return on asset
=
repayment amount
nominal interest factor
.
In the second line we replaced (1 + nominal interest rate) with the nominal interest factor.
The two are equivalent, but sometimes we find it more convenient to work with interest
factors rather than interest rates.
The argument that we have just made should seem familiar. It is analogous to the argument
for why there cannot be distinct dollar-euro and euro-dollar markets; they are just ways of
looking at the same asset. Likewise, we can think of the sale of any asset as equivalent to
borrowing, while for any example of credit we can also think of there being an underlying
asset.
Different Assets
Very often economists and others talk about “the” interest rate, as if there were just a single
asset in the economy. In fact, there are many different assets that you could buy with your
$100, each with an associated interest rate. The following are various assets that you might
purchase:
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Currency and coin. To begin with, your $100 is itself an asset. If you put the money
under a mattress and retrieve it after a year, it is very easy to calculate the nominal interest
rate on $100. If you give up $100 today, you will get exactly $100 back next year. The
nominal interest rate is zero.
Bank deposits. Bank deposits are also an asset. If you put your money in the bank, you
are extending credit to the bank. Depending on the type of bank account, you may or may
not earn interest on your deposits.
Foreign exchange. The money of other countries is likewise an asset. You can take
dollars today and use them to purchase, say, euros or Japanese yen (JPY). Even in this
case, there is a rate of return. For example, suppose that today you can buy JPY 100 with
$1. Suppose also that in a year’s time, there are JPY 90 to the dollar. Then with your JPY
100, you can buy $1.11 (100/90 = 1.11). You obtained a nominal rate of return of 11
percent.
Gold and other precious metals. You could take your $100 and use it to buy gold.
Unless you are a dentist or a jeweler, you will not have any direct use for the gold; you
simply keep it and resell it at some future date. The rate of return on gold is purely a
matter of what happens to the price of gold. If the price of gold (in dollars) increases by 10
percent, then you get a 10 percent rate of return.
Government bonds. A government bond is also a loan contract; if you buy a
government bond, you are extending credit to the government. The bond is a promise to
pay a certain amount at some future date. Because the loan will be paid off a number of
years in the future, it is slightly more complicated to calculate the interest rate.
Shares. Another example of an asset is a share in a company, such as Dell Inc. If you
purchase a Dell share, you have bought the right to a share in Dell’s profits. In this case,
you expect not only one payment at a specified future date but also a sequence of payments
whenever Dell pays out dividends. Notice that there is also a lot of uncertainty here: you do
not know, when you purchase the share, how big these payments will be. The implied
interest rate is therefore uncertain as well.
Real estate. If you purchase a house, you own yet another kind of asset. The value of a
house comes from the fact that people can live in it. If you rent your house out, then it
gives you a flow of income, much like a share in a company. If you live in your house, then
you consume that flow of services, but we still think of the house as an asset because at any
time you can sell your house and transfer that flow of services to someone else.
We could list many more assets, but you should be getting the general idea. Most of these
assets are more complicated than the simple one-year credit contract with which we began.
For one thing, they often involve a whole stream of repayments at different dates, rather than
just one repayment. For another, the amounts of these payments may be uncertain.
In Section 9.1 “What Is Money?”, we pointed to the different characteristics and functions of
money. For most of us, the word money conjures up images of currency and coins. But some
of the other assets that we listed also can perform more or less well as money. For example,
bank deposits in a checking account or with a linked debit card are portable, durable,
divisible, and widely acceptable and serve as a medium of exchange. In general, any asset that
performs the functions of money is money. Gold can be used as a store of value and perhaps
also as a unit of account, but it is not often used as a medium of exchange. There are many
different assets in the world, and they vary in the extent to which they perform these different
functions and thus how good they are as money.
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Arbitrage with Different Assets: The Term Structure of Interest Rates
We just observed that there are many different assets and thus many interest rates in the
economy. But these interest rates are all linked to each other because the same people
(particularly banks and other financial institutions) trade in many different markets.
One way in which assets differ is in terms of their maturity. To see how the returns on assets
of different maturity are linked, consider two government bonds of different maturities: one-
year bonds and two-year bonds. Here are two different ways you could save for two years.
1. Buy a one-year government bond. Collect the payment at the end of the year and then
reinvest that money in another one-year bond.
2. Buy a two-year government bond.
There are three interest rates relevant to your choice. The first one is the current interest rate
on a one-year bond. The second is the interest rate on a one-year bond next year. The third
interest rate is the annualized nominal interest rate on a two-year government bond.
An annualized interest rate is the interest rate earned each year on a loan that lasts many
years, and the annualized interest factor is (1 + the annualized interest rate). For example,
suppose that the annualized rate on a two-year loan is 6 percent. Then you would earn 6
percent per year for two years, and
repayment after two years = $100 × 1.06 × 1.06 = $112.36.
As you might expect, these three interest rates are connected, and we can understand how by
again thinking about arbitrage. If you purchase the two-year government bond return, you get
100 × (annualized nominal interest factor on two-year bond)2.
Conversely, if you purchase the two one-year bonds, you get
100 × (nominal interest factor this year) × (expected nominal interest factor next year).
Notice that we have referred to next year’s interest factor as “expected.” This is because when
you make your decision, you do not know what the interest rate will be.
When
(annualized nominal interest factor on two-year bond)2 = nominal interest factor this year×
expected nominal interest factor next year,
the two transactions have the same return. Once again, we can appeal to an arbitrage
argument to say that we expect this equation to hold. There is one twist, however. When you
make this decision, you do not know for sure what the interest rate will be on one-year bonds
next year. You have to make a guess. Thus this arbitrage involves some risk.
This relationship is an example of the term structure of interest rates, which describes
the relationship between the actual and expected returns on assets that are identical except
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for their maturities. A version of the relationship applies to not only assets of one-year and
two-year maturity but also assets of all maturities.
From the term structure of interest rates, we learn something very significant: if the annual
one-year interest rate is below the annual rate on a two-year loan, then interest rates are
expected to increase in the future. For example, if the annual one-year interest rate is 5
percent and the annual rate on two-year loans is 6 percent, this means both borrowers and
lenders expect one-year interest rates to be higher than 6 percent next year. (If desired, you
can calculate exactly what the expected rate is by using the previous equation.)
We can see the connection between assets of different maturities by looking at the
yield curve. [1] The yield curve shows the current annual return for assets of different
maturities. Figure 9.10 “The Yield Curve” shows the yield curve for US Treasury securities in
2011. [2] On the horizontal axis of the yield curve is the number of years to maturity of the
asset. On the vertical axis is the current annual yield on the asset. Notice that the yield curve is
upward sloping: the longer the maturity, the higher the annual interest rate. This is generally
what we observe, although sometimes the yield curve is inverted, meaning that higher
maturity debt has a lower interest rate.
Figure 9.10 The Yield Curve
All assets are linked, not just government bonds of different maturities. Suppose that the
interest rate on one-year government bonds increases. To buy these bonds, financial
institutions will start selling other assets—not only bonds at other maturities but also stocks,
holdings of foreign currencies, and so on. As they sell those other assets, their prices will
decrease, and their rate of return will increase. An increase in the interest rate on one-year
treasuries therefore increases interest rates on other assets. Thus different interest rates
typically move together, and it is usually not too misleading, at least for the purposes of
macroeconomics, to think about there being a single interest rate in an economy.
Arbitrage with Assets and Goods: The Real Interest Rate
The exchanges we have described so far have all been in terms of dollars. The interest rates
paid on such exchanges are nominal interest rates. In a world where prices are increasing,
however, the nominal interest rate does not represent the true cost of borrowing and lending.
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To see why, begin by recalling that the inflation rate is defined as the percentage change in the
price level. This means that the price level next year is equal to the price this year multiplied
by (1 + inflation rate). [3] Now imagine that two individuals, Bert and Ernie, want to write a
credit contract. Bert wants to borrow some money to buy a pizza. The price of a pizza this year
is $10, so Ernie lends Bert $10, and they agree on a nominal interest rate for this credit
arrangement. This means that next year he will repay $10 × (1 + nominal interest rate).
We could also imagine that Bert and Ernie decide to write a different kind of contract to
guarantee a return in terms of pizzas. Because this rate of return is specified in terms of goods
rather than money, it is a real interest rate. Ernie agrees to give Bert (enough dollars to
buy) 1 pizza this year in return for being repaid (enough dollars to buy) (1 + real interest rate)
pizzas next year. Ernie lends Bert $10 as before (the equivalent of 1 pizza). To repay this loan
next year, Bert must give Ernie enough money to buy (1 + real interest rate) pizzas. The price
of a pizza has increased to $10 × (1 + inflation rate), so Bert must give Ernie $10 × (1 + real
interest rate) × (1 + inflation rate).
If you have worked through this chapter carefully, you probably know what is coming next.
Because of arbitrage, we know that these two contracts must be equivalent:
1 + nominal interest rate = (1 + real interest rate) × (1 + inflation rate).
As an approximation, this equation implies that the [4]
nominal interest rate ≈ real interest rate + inflation rate.
This relationship is called the Fisher equation.
Toolkit: Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
Nominal interest rates and real interest rates are related by the Fisher equation. To convert
from nominal interest rates to real interest rates, we use the following formula:
real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − inflation rate.
If you want to know more about the Fisher equation, you can look in the toolkit.
For example, if a loan has a 12 percent interest rate and the inflation rate is 8 percent, then
the real return on that loan is 4 percent. Since the nominal interest rate and the inflation rate
are easily observed by most of us, we can use the Fisher equation to calculate the real rate of
interest. We use the Fisher equation whenever we see a nominal interest rate and wish to
convert it to a real interest rate. Just as it is the real exchange rate that matters for people
trading goods and assets between countries, so it is the real interest rate that ultimately
matters to borrowers and lenders in the economy.
In macroeconomics, we often look at the credit market for the entire economy, where savings
and investment are matched in the economy as a whole. The price in this market is the real
interest rate. The response of savings and investment to the real interest rate is shown
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in Figure 9.11 “The Credit Market”. Once we know the equilibrium real interest rate, we
calculate the implied nominal interest rate using the Fisher equation.
Figure 9.11 The Credit Market
Adjustment of the real interest rate ensures that the flows in and out of the financial sector
balance.
The (net) supply of loans in the domestic credit market comes from three different sources:
1. The private savings of households and firms
2. The savings or borrowing of governments
3. The savings or borrowing of foreigners
Households will generally respond to an increase in the real interest rate by reducing current
consumption relative to future consumption. Households that are saving will save more;
households that are borrowing will borrow less. Higher interest rates also encourage
foreigners to send funds to the domestic economy. Government saving or borrowing is little
affected by interest rates.
National savings are defined as private savings plus government savings (or, equivalently,
private saving minus the government deficit). The total supply of savings is therefore equal
to national savings plus the savings of foreigners (that is, borrowing from other countries).
The matching of savings and investment in the aggregate economy is described as follows:
investment = national savings + borrowing from other countries
or
investment = national savings − lending to other countries.
This is the same thing as saying that the flows in and out of the financial sector in the circular
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flow must balance.
The demand for loans comes from firms who borrow to finance investment. As the real
interest rate increases, investment spending decreases. For firms, a high interest rate
represents a high cost of funding investment expenditures. This is evident if the firm borrows
to purchase capital. It is also true if the firm uses internal funds (retained earnings) to finance
investment since the firm could always put those funds in an interest-bearing asset instead.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
The toolkit provides more detail on the flows in and out of the financial sector.
Arbitrage with Assets and Currencies: Uncovered Interest Parity
If you are like most people, you do not own assets in another country. You may own multiple
assets—a savings account that pays you some interest every month, perhaps a certificate of
deposit, or shares of some company—but the chances are that all your financial assets are
denominated in a single currency. In fact, there is no reason why you should not own assets
denominated in other currencies, such as euros, or pesos, or British pounds. You might
consider opening a bank account in another country. Or you might even consider other
financial investments in another country, such as purchasing a share in an international
mutual fund, buying shares of a foreign company, or buying the debt of a foreign government.
Most of us do not know exactly how to go about making such investments. In fact, they are
easy to carry out if you make use of the services of professional financial advisers. In any case,
we are not really interested in the mechanics of foreign investment here. We want to answer a
more fundamental question: how do you know if buying foreign assets would be a good idea?
Consider the choice between two investment strategies.
1. Investing in the United States
Deposit $100 in a US bank.
Wait for a year.
2. Investing in Europe
Take $100 and use it to buy euros.
Deposit the euros in a European bank.
Wait for a year.
Withdraw the deposit and interest and use it to buy dollars.
To decide which is the better strategy, you need to determine how much you will earn in each
case.
It is straightforward to determine how much you will get with the first option: you will get
your $100 plus the interest payments. For example, if the interest rate at the US bank is 10
percent, then after a year you will earn $10 interest for a total of $110.
What about the second strategy? How many dollars will you have if you deposit money in the
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European bank? This is a bit more complicated. First, you buy euros with your $100. Second,
you deposit these euros in a European bank and earn interest. Third, at the end of the year,
you withdraw your euros from the bank and sell them for dollars. For example, suppose that
the current dollar price of euros is $1.25 and the interest rate paid on deposits in Europe is 5
percent. Suppose you also expect that the price of a dollar in euros will be EUR 0.70 in a year’s
time. With the second investment strategy,
You take your $100 and buy EUR 80.
You put these EUR 80 in the European bank for a year, giving you EUR 84 at the end of
the year.
You take these EUR 84 and use them to purchase $120.
The second strategy therefore earns you more than the first strategy. It would be better to
invest in Europe compared to the United States. Moreover, a slight variation on this strategy
seems like it is a money machine. Consider the following.
Borrow $100 from a US bank for one year.
Take the $100 and use it to buy euros.
Deposit the euros in a European bank.
Wait for a year.
Withdraw the deposit and interest and use it to buy dollars.
Repay the dollar loan plus interest.
Using the same interest rates and exchange rates as previously, this transaction works as
follows: you borrow $100, obtain $120 at the end of the year, pay back $110 to the bank, and
end up with $10 profit.
To evaluate this arbitrage possibility, you need to know (1) the current dollar price of euros,
(2) the annual return on deposits in Europe, and (3) the price of a dollar in euros a year from
now. Look carefully at the language we used. You need to know “the euro price of dollars a
year from now.” But when we went through the example, we said “you expect that the price of
dollar in euros will be EUR 0.70 in a year’s time.” As with the term structure of interest rates,
there is some risk involved here. You cannot know the future exchange rate with certainty.
This strategy entails a gamble about the future exchange rate. Still, if everyone has the same
guess about the future exchange rate as you do, then such a situation could not last. Everyone
would pursue the same strategy: borrow in the United States, buy euros, invest in Europe, and
convert back in a year’s time. What would happen?
The demand for credit would increase interest rates in the United States.
The demand for euros would increase the dollar price of euros.
The extra supply of savings in Europe would drive down the interest rate in Europe.
Investors might anticipate the extra demand for dollars in a year’s time and expect the
euro price of dollars to increase.
These forces would all tend to eliminate the profit opportunity.
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So when do we expect this arbitrage opportunity to disappear? It disappears when investors
expect to make the same profit whether they invest in Europe or the United States. The
condition for this is as follows:
nominal interest factor ($) =(
euro price of dollars
expected euro price of dollars next year
)× nominal interest factor (EUR).
The left side is the return on investing in the United States. The terms on the right give the
return on investing in Europe. When this condition holds, the returns on deposits in US and
European banks are the same. This condition is called uncovered interest parity.
Because we do not know the price of euros next year for sure, this equation does not hold
exactly when we look at actual data from the past. That is, the actual exchange rates combined
with the actual returns on deposits do not quite satisfy this equation. This does not contradict
the theory. Hindsight is perfect. The important point is that if people hold similar beliefs, then
uncovered interest parity will hold ahead of time.
Using Uncovered Interest Parity to Understand the Exchange Rate
We can rearrange the uncovered interest parity condition as follows:
euro price of dollars =
nominalinterestfactor ($)
nominal interest factor (EUR)
× expected euro price of dollars next year.
Written this way, the equation tells us that beliefs matter. Suppose everyone in the market
believes that the dollar will depreciate relative to the euro in the future: that is, everyone
expects a decrease in the euro price of the dollar. This makes investment in euro-denominated
assets a better deal since we will get a lot of dollars per euro in the future. Investors will
respond by selling dollars now to buy euros. This increase in the supply of dollars will cause
the current euro price of dollars to decrease.
Thus we see that if everyone expects the euro price of dollars to decrease in the future, then
the euro price of dollars will decrease today. When we talk about the market for currencies,
demand and supply today depend on what households and firms think about the future
exchange rate.
We can also rearrange the equation to see what it tells us about exchange rate beliefs:
expected euro price of dollars next year
euro price of dollars
=
nominal interest factor (EUR)
nominal interest factor ($)
.
If the interest rate in Europe is greater than the interest rate in the United States, then the
condition tells us that investors must be expecting the dollar to appreciate.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The nominal interest rate is the return on an asset in terms of money. The real
interest rate is the return on an asset measured in terms of goods.
The yield curve describes the relationship between the (annual) return on an asset
and its maturity. Normally, the yield curve is upward sloping: assets with a longer
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maturity have a higher annual return.
The Fisher equation links the real interest rate to the nominal interest rate. The real
interest rate is approximately equal to the difference between the nominal interest
rate and the inflation rate.
Checking Your Understanding
1. If the nominal interest rate is 5 percent and the inflation rate is 3 percent, what is the
real interest rate?
2. Can the real interest rate ever be negative?
3. What are the risks involved in investing in a foreign bank?
[1] For more details and additional graphs, see J. Huston McCulloch, “The US Real Term
Structure of Interest Rates: With Implicit Inflation Premium,” updated October 30, 2009,
accessed August 22, 2011, http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/ts/ts.html.
[2] This is an average of rates in 2011 for US Treasury securities of different maturities
fromhttp://www.econstats.com/r/rusa_ew6.htm.
[3] If this is not clear to you, write out the inflation rate as follows:
inflation next year =
price level next year − price level this year
price level this year
=
price level next year
price level this year
−1
Then add one to both sides and multiply by the price level this year.
[4] To see this, multiply out the right-hand side and subtract $1 from each side to obtain
nominal interest rate = real interest rate + inflation rate + real interest rate × inflation rate.
Now, if the real interest rate and the inflation rate are small numbers, then when we multiply
them together, we get a very small number that can be safely ignored. For example, if the real
interest rate is 0.02 and the inflation rate is 0.03, then their product is 0.0006, and our
approximation is about 99 percent accurate.
9.5 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
We began this chapter with a deceptively simple question about money: why do people want
it? To answer that question, we first looked at what money is. We discovered that money is an
asset that has certain defining characteristics, such as portability, divisibility, and durability.
Most importantly of all, though, we said that money must have acceptability. What turns an
asset into a money, ultimately, is the simple fact that enough people are willing to treat it as
such.
If we look through history, we find that many different things have served as money in
different places and at different times. As well as the familiar notes and coins, these include
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seashells, stones, cigarettes, cans of food, gold, and silver. These could successfully function as
money because they were acceptable as money in their particular context.
We then imagined that you were lucky enough to find a $100 bill on the sidewalk and
explored the various things that you could do with this money, including buying goods and
services, buying other currencies, and buying assets. As we did so, we explored a number of
different arguments, all based on arbitrage, that help us to understand the relationships
between interest rates, exchange rates, asset prices, and inflation rates. We argued that
arbitrageurs will step in when there are easy profit opportunities. Arbitrage does not say that
riskless profit opportunities cannot exist. It says that they will not persist. If a riskless profit
opportunity were to exist, then people would very quickly take advantage of it and, by so
doing, eliminate it.
Expressed more metaphorically, economists often say that there are no $100 bills lying on the
ground waiting to be picked up. It is not that it is impossible for someone to drop a $100 bill,
but if one person has dropped a large bill, someone else will almost certainly pick it up very
quickly. There is an immediate and powerful lesson of arbitrage, one that you should bear in
mind throughout life. If someone tells you of a surefire way to make easy money, beware!
Key Links
History of currencies: http://www.frbsf.org/currency/index.html
Value of a dollar:http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc
Euro overview: http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/index_en.htm
The Economist: Big Mac Index: http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac
Exchange rates: http://www.oanda.com
US Department of the Treasury Daily Treasury Yield
Curve:http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/Pages/index.aspx
EXERCISES
1. Suppose you go to a local café to order a drink. Instead of paying with the currency
used in your home country, imagine you try to pay with the currency of another
country. What do you think the response would be at the café? Why? What could you
do to convince them to accept foreign currency at a local café? Imagine that you are at
the border of two countries, say in a café near the US border with Canada. Do you
think you could use Canadian currency in a US café near the border?
2. When you are traveling in a foreign country and want to use your debit card, what
type of fees do you pay to withdraw money in foreign currency? Usually fees take two
forms: a fixed fee, say $5, for any size transaction or a fee that is proportional to the
amount you withdraw. If you want to make a large withdrawal, which type of fee do
you prefer? If the fee is fixed, will this create an incentive to make more or fewer
withdrawals? What does the fixed fee do to the size of the withdrawal you make?
3. Suppose the dollar price of euros is $10 and the euro price of dollars is EUR 1. Explain
how you could make a profit in this market. What would you buy and what would you
sell? Can this be an equilibrium in the foreign exchange market? Show that there are
no arbitrage profits if the dollar price of the euro is $1.25 and the euro price of the
dollar is EUR 0.80.
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4. (Advanced) Using the relationship
price of euro in dollars × price of dollar in euros = 1,
how would you draw the supply and demand curves and depict equilibrium in
the market for dollars and the market for euros?
5. Look at the left-hand table in Figure 9.6 “Exchange Rates”. How are the numbers on
the bottom left connected to the numbers on the top right? The diagonal has been left
blank. What number could go on the diagonal?
6. Look at the left-hand table in Figure 9.6 “Exchange Rates”. Suppose you start with
GBP 100. Convert those pounds into euros and then convert the euros into dollars.
How many dollars would you get? How many pounds do you get if you then convert
your dollars into pounds?
7. Perform the same exercise as in Question 6 but use the table on the right-hand side
of Figure 9.6 “Exchange Rates”. How many pounds do you end up with?
8. If the nominal interest rate is 5 percent in France and 3 percent in Europe, according
to uncovered interest parity, what do investors think is going to happen to the euro-
dollar exchange rate?
9. If the real interest rate is 2 percent in China and 6 percent in India, and investors are
not expecting any change in the rupee-yuan exchange rate, then what can you
conclude about inflation rates in China and India?
10. Explain how inflation reduces the real value of a currency both domestically and in
other countries.
Economics Detective
1. Think of a “basket of goods” you buy often. It should include at least four items (for
example, an espresso, a CD, a hamburger, and a copy of Newsweek). E-mail a friend
in another country to find the prices for that same basket of goods. Check the
exchange rate between your country’s currency and that in your friend’s country.
Contrasting the prices in the two countries, look for violations of the law of one price.
Is there some way you could make some profit?
2. Check rental car rates across two countries. (This is easy to do online at large car
rental companies.) Make sure you choose the same car and insurance options. How
might you explain the differences in these rates? Are there arbitrage profits for you to
make?
3. Find an issue of the Economist from the period in the 1990s when Argentina was
pegging the peso to the US dollar through a currency board, and look up the Big Mac
index. What was the exchange rate then? What was the price of a Big Mac in
Argentina during that period? Compare the peso prices of Big Macs and dollars
between the two time periods.
4. Which countries use the kwacha, the dram, the ringgit, the leke, the baht, and the
rial?
5. Suppose you want to convert some US dollars to euros, deposit them in a bank in Italy
for one year, and then convert your euros to dollars. Search the Internet to determine
how you could arrange now to buy dollars with euros in one year’s time. What price
would you have to pay for dollars?
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6. Go to http://www.oanda.com and look at the latest exchange rate data. Find two
currencies that have recently appreciated relative to the dollar and two currencies that
have recently depreciated relative to the dollar.
7. Find a currency that has appreciated relative to the dollar since March 2007. Can you
discover any explanations about why there was this change in the exchange rate?
8. Find data on the dollar price of the euro starting from the inception of the euro. Find
periods when the dollar was appreciating relative to the euro. Find periods when the
dollar was depreciating relative to the euro.
9. Who holds US government debt? What type of foreign exchange supported this?
10. Use http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community%5Feducation/teacher/calc to
calculate the value of a dollar at different points in time. What would a dollar in 1955
buy today?
11. When you deposit money in the United States, you receive deposit insurance. If you
deposit money in a bank in Italy or Japan or Mexico, will you receive deposit
insurance? How does the existence of this insurance influence your decision about
making deposits in foreign banks?
12. Call your bank to ask a hypothetical question: What will you have to do to deposit a
large euro check in your dollar account? What will the bank charge you for this
transaction? Are these costs proportional to the size of the euro check or is the cost a
fixed number?
Spreadsheet Exercises
1. Suppose there are three currencies: dollars, pesos, and yuan. Write a spreadsheet
program to find the dollar price of yuan given the dollar price of a peso and the peso
price of the yuan such that there are no arbitrage profits to be made.
2. Suppose there are two countries: the United States and Mexico. Write a spreadsheet
program to determine the interest rate on deposits in Mexico given the interest rate
on deposits in the United States, the current exchange rate, and the expected future
exchange rate so that there are no arbitrage profits to be made. All else being the
same, how does a change in the US deposit rate affect the current exchange rate?
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Chapter 10
Understanding the Fed
Money and Power
In August 2011, these 10 individuals were among the most powerful people in the world.
Ben S. Bernanke
William Dudley
Elizabeth Duke
Charles Evans
Richard Fisher
Narayana Kocherlakota
Charles Plosser
Sarah Raskin
Daniel Tarullo
Janet L. Yellen
You may not have heard any of these names before. It is certainly unlikely that you have heard
of more than one or two of these individuals. Yet they decide how easy or difficult it will be for
you to get a job when you graduate. They decide how expensive it is for you to buy a car. They
decide how many pesos you get for a dollar if you travel from the United States to Mexico.
They decide if the Dow Jones Industrial Average is going to increase or decrease. They decide
whether the stock markets in Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt are going to increase
or decrease. They decide the cost of your vacation abroad and the cost of the clothes that you
buy at home.
So who are they?
They are the members of a group called the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). They
are responsible for setting monetary policy in the United States. Of course, they do not
literally decide all the things we just mentioned, but their decisions do have a major influence
on everything we listed. This chapter is about what these people do and why their choices
matter so much for our day-to-day life. We begin with an example of this group at work.
FOMC Policy Announcement: February 2, 2005
For immediate release
The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to raise its target for the federal
funds rate by 25 basis points to 2-1/2 percent.
The Committee believes that, even after this action, the stance of monetary policy
remains accommodative and, coupled with robust underlying growth in productivity, is
providing ongoing support to economic activity. Output appears to be growing at a
moderate pace despite the rise in energy prices, and labor market conditions continue to
improve gradually. Inflation and longer-term inflation expectations remain well
contained.
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The Committee perceives the upside and downside risks to the attainment of both
sustainable growth and price stability for the next few quarters to be roughly equal.
With underlying inflation expected to be relatively low, the Committee believes that
policy accommodation can be removed at a pace that is likely to be measured.
Nonetheless, the Committee will respond to changes in economic prospects as needed to
fulfill its obligation to maintain price stability.
Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Alan Greenspan, Chairman;
Timothy F. Geithner, Vice Chairman; Ben S. Bernanke; Susan S. Bies; Roger W.
Ferguson, Jr.; Edward M. Gramlich; Jack Guynn; Donald L. Kohn; Michael H.
Moskow; Mark W. Olson; Anthony M. Santomero; and Gary H. Stern.
In a related action, the Board of Governors unanimously approved a 25-basis-point
increase in the discount rate to 3-1/2 percent. In taking this action, the Board approved
the requests submitted by the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis,
Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. [1]
This FOMC statement is from February 2005. We have deliberately chosen a statement from a
few years ago because we want to begin with monetary policy prior to the economic crisis that
began in 2008. This policy statement contains all the essential elements of monetary policy in
normal times.
The 12 people listed in the second-to-last paragraph of this announcement were the FOMC
members in February 2005. (These names are different from those we named at the start of
the chapter because the composition of the FOMC changes over time.) The president of the
United States was not one of them. And none of them are members of Congress. You did not
vote for any of them. None of the three main branches of the US government (executive,
legislative, or judicial) is involved in the setting of US monetary policy. The FOMC is part of a
government body called the US Federal Reserve Bank, commonly known as the Fed. The Fed
is independent: decisions made by the Fed do not have to be approved by other branches of
the government.
In this statement we find the following phrases:
“The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to raise its target for the federal
funds rate by 25 basis points to 2-1/2 percent.”
“The Committee perceives the upside and downside risks to the attainment of both
sustainable growth and price stability for the next few quarters to be roughly equal.”
“In a related action, the Board of Governors unanimously approved a 25-basis-point
increase in the discount rate to 3-1/2 percent.”
The first phrase indicates an action undertaken by the Fed: it changed its “target” for
something called the “federal funds rate.” This is a particular interest rate related to the rate
banks pay each other for loans. Although you will never borrow to buy a car or a house at this
rate, the interest rates you confront are heavily influenced by the federal funds rate. For
example, over the past few years, the federal funds rate has decreased from 5.25 percent in
2006 to a value of 0.25 percent at the time of writing (mid-2011). Over this same period of
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time, rates on other types of loans, including mortgages and car loans, decreased as well. For
example, typical car loan rates were about 7–8 percent in 2006 and about 3–4 percent in mid-
2011. In this way, the actions of the Fed affect all of us.
The second phrase contains the FOMC’s assessment of the state of the economy, expressed in
terms of two goals: economic growth and the stability of prices. The Fed is charged with the
joint responsibility of stabilizing prices and ensuring the full employment of economic
resources. The final statement details another action with respect to a different interest rate,
called the discount rate.
The FOMC issues statements such as this on a regular basis. Our goal in this chapter is to
equip you with the knowledge to understand these statements, which will in turn help you
make sense of the discussions of the Fed’s actions on television or in the newspapers. We want
to answer the following questions:
What does the Federal Reserve do? And why are its actions so important?
Road Map
The FOMC statement reveals that, to understand the Fed, we need to know both the goals and
the tools of the Fed. From the statement, we learn that the goals of the Fed are sustainable
growth and stable prices. The Fed cannot do much to affect the long-run growth rate of the
economy, but it can and does try to keep the economy close to potential output. At the same
time, it tries to ensure that the overall price level does not change very much—in other words,
it tries to keep inflation low. The Fed pursues these goals by means of several tools that it has
at its disposal. The FOMC statement informs us that these tools include two different interest
rates.
We begin with a little bit of background information. We briefly explain what the Federal
Reserve does, and we note that other monetary authorities are similar, although not identical,
in terms of goals and behavior. Because we have seen that the Fed’s actions frequently revolve
around interest rates, we make sure that we know exactly what an interest rate is.
We then get to the meat of the chapter, which discusses the workings of monetary policy. We
explain how the Fed uses its tools to affect the things it ultimately cares about. Broadly
speaking, we can summarize the cyclic behavior of the Fed as follows:
The Fed observes current economic conditions.
The Fed decides on policy actions.
These policy actions affect real GDP (gross domestic product) and inflation.
The Fed observes the new economic conditions.
There is a long chain of connections between the Fed’s tools and the ultimate state of the
economy. To make sense of what the Fed does, we follow these connections, step by step. As
we do so, we create a framework for understanding the effects of monetary policy, called the
monetary transmission mechanism. We must also look at the connection in the other
direction: how does the state of the economy influence the Fed’s decisions? Figure 10.1 “The
Links between Monetary Policy and the State of the Economy”, which we use as a template for
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the chapter, summarizes the interaction between the monetary transmission mechanism and
the behavior of the Fed. We conclude the chapter by looking at the tools of the Fed in more
detail and by discussing some historical episodes through the lens of monetary policy.
Figure 10.1The Links between Monetary Policy and the State of the Economy
The Federal Reserve looks at current economic conditions and decides on a policy response.
This policy affects the state of the economy. The Fed then observes the new economic
conditions and decides on a new policy response, and so forth.
[1] Federal Open Market Committee, “Press Release,” Federal Reserve, February 2, 2005,
accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/press/monetary/2005/20050202/default.ht
m.
10.1 Central Banks
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. When and why was the Federal Reserve System created in the United States?
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2. What are the connections between the Federal Reserve System and the executive and
legislative branches of the US government?
3. How does our study of monetary policy apply to other central banks around the
world?
We start our discussion with institutions.
The Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve System was formally established in an act of Congress on December 23,
1913, called the Federal Reserve Act (http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fract.htm).
The stated purpose of the act was as follows: “To provide for the establishment of Federal
reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial
paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other
purposes.” [1] The Federal Reserve System is built around a 7-member Board of Governors
together with 12 regional banks. The members of the board are appointed by the president
and approved by Congress to serve for 14 years. The FOMC, which is instrumental in the
conduct of monetary policy, has 12 members.
Although the president and Congress play a role in the appointment of members of the Fed,
their direct control stops there. The Fed is an independent body. The executive and
congressional branches of the government have no formal input into the determination of
monetary policy. Congressional control is limited to the fact that the chair of the Fed is
required to report to Congress periodically and to Congress eventually having the power to
change the laws governing the Fed’s conduct.
The goals of the Fed are specified in the section of the Federal Reserve Act titled “Monetary
Policy Objectives”: “The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal
Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit
aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as
to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-
term interest rates.” [2] These objectives provide guidance to the Fed: it is required to pay
attention to the level of economic activity (“maximum employment”) and to the level of
inflation (“stable prices”). Exactly how the Fed promotes these goals—and chooses among
them if necessary—is not specified. In some cases, the different aims of the Fed may conflict.
For example, promoting employment may not be consistent with low inflation. The February
2, 2005, statement explicitly notes the balance between these goals.
The Fed has three main ways of affecting what goes on in the economy. The first was alluded
to, although not mentioned by name, in the February 2, 2005, policy announcement. It is
called open-market operations and represents the main way that the Fed influences interest
rates. A second tool—the discount rate—was mentioned explicitly in the policy announcement.
The third tool—reserve requirements—was not mentioned on February 2, 2005, but is
nonetheless an important weapon in the Fed’s arsenal. Later on in this chapter, we examine
the tools of the Fed in detail. For the moment, it is enough to know that the Fed affects the
economy through changes in interest rates.
Central Banks in Other Countries
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Our discussion in this chapter applies to not only the United States but also other countries.
Wherever there is a currency, there is a monetary authority—a central bank—charged with the
control of that currency. For example, in Europe, the European Central
Bank (ECB; http://www.ecb.int/home/html/index.en.html) dictates monetary policy for all
those countries that use the euro. In Australia, the Reserve Bank of
Australia (RBA;http://www.rba.gov.au) manages monetary policy.
Different central banks do not all function in exactly the same way. To illustrate, here are
policy announcements from the Bank of
England (BOE;http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/news/2006/078.htm),
the Central Bank of
Egypt (CBE;http://www.cbe.org.eg/public/PRESS_Release_For_Monetary_Policy/2011/MP
C_PressRelease_09_06_2011_E ), and the RBA (http://www.rba.gov.au/media-
releases/2011/mr-11-09.html). The details of the announcements are not critical. However, all
have a “Monetary Policy Committee” rather than an FOMC. The different banks target slightly
different interest rates: the BOE targets the “Bank rate paid on commercial bank reserves”;
the CBE refers to overnight deposit and lending rates, the “7-day repo,” and the discount rate;
and the RBA refers to the “cash rate.” You do not need to worry about exactly what these
different rates are. All three banks are looking at the overall state of the economy, in terms of
both output and inflation, and are setting interest rates to pursue broadly similar goals.
News Release: Bank of England Raises Bank Rate by 0.25 Percentage Points
to 4.75 Percent, 3 August 2006[3]
The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee today voted to raise the official Bank
rate paid on commercial bank reserves by 0.25 percentage points to 4.75 percent.
The pace of economic activity has quickened in the past few months…As a result, over
the past few quarters GDP [gross domestic product] growth has been at, or a little
above, its long-run average and business surveys point to continued firm growth.…
CPI [Consumer Price Index] inflation picked up to 2.5 percent in June, and is expected to
remain above the 2.0 percent target for some while. Higher energy prices have led to
greater inflationary pressures, notwithstanding muted earnings growth and a squeeze
on profit margins.…
Against the background of firm growth, limited spare capacity, rapid growth of broad
money and credit, and with inflation likely to remain above the target for some while,
the Committee judged that an increase of 0.25 percentage points in the official Bank rate
to 4.75 percent was necessary to bring CPI inflation back to the target in the medium
term.
Press Release, June 9, 2011: The Central Bank of Egypt Decided Not to Raise
Its Policy Rates [4]
In its meeting held on June 9, 2011, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decided to
keep the overnight deposit and lending rate unchanged at 8.25 and 9.75 percent,
respectively, and the 7-day repo at 9.25 percent. The discount rate was also kept
unchanged at 8.5 percent.
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Headline CPI increased by 0.20 percent in May [month to month] following the 1.21
percent in April, bringing the annual rate down to 11.79 percent from 12.07 percent
registered in April. …
Meanwhile, real GDP contracted by 4.2 percent in 2010/2011 Q3 which marks the first
negative year-on-year growth since the release of quarterly data in 2001/2002. …
Against the above background, the slowdown in economic growth should limit upside
risks to the inflation outlook. Given the balance of risks on the inflation and GDP
outlooks and the increased uncertainty at this juncture, the MPC judges that the current
key CBE [Central Bank of Egypt] rates are appropriate.
Media Release Number 2011-09: Statement by Glenn Stevens, Governor:
Monetary Policy Decision [5]
At its meeting today, the Board decided to leave the cash rate unchanged at 4.75 per
cent.
The global economy is continuing its expansion, led by very strong growth in the Asian
region, though the recent disaster in Japan is having a major impact on Japanese
production, and significant effects on production of some manufactured products
further afield. Commodity prices have generally softened a little of late, but they remain
at very high levels, which is weighing on income and demand in major countries and
also pushing up measures of consumer price inflation. …
Growth in employment has moderated over recent months and the unemployment rate
has been little changed, near 5 per cent. Most leading indicators suggest that this slower
pace of employment growth is likely to continue in the near term…
CPI inflation has risen over the past year, reflecting the effects of extreme weather and
rises in utilities prices, with lower prices for traded goods providing some offset. The
weather-affected prices should fall back later in the year, though substantial rises in
utilities prices are still occurring. The Bank expects that, as the temporary price shocks
dissipate over the coming quarters, CPI inflation will be close to target over the next 12
months.
At today’s meeting, the Board judged that the current mildly restrictive stance of
monetary policy remained appropriate. In future meetings, the Board will continue to
assess carefully the evolving outlook for growth and inflation.
In this chapter, we talk, for the most part, about the Federal Reserve. We focus on the United
States principally because we do not want to get too bogged down in learning the different
languages used by different central banks. From looking at the statements of the Fed, the
BOE, the CBE, and the RBA, we see that the terminology of monetary policy varies greatly
from country to country, the names of the key interest rates differ, and so forth. The
underlying principles of monetary policy are largely the same in all countries, however.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The Federal Reserve System of the United States was created in 1913. A key
motivation for the creation of a central bank was to manage the stock of currency and
thus influence the state of the aggregate economy, particularly output and prices.
2. In the United States, the central bank is independent. Decisions about monetary
policy are made within the Federal Reserve System. Members of the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve System are nominated by the president and
approved by the Senate.
3. There are central banks around the world, conducting monetary policy with similar
tools and with the same basic model of the aggregate economy in mind.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What is the input of the US president in determining monetary policy?
2. By learning about how the Federal Reserve System in the United States conducts
monetary policy, what can we learn about other countries?
[1] The Federal Reserve Act is found at “Federal Reserve Act,” Board of Governors of the
Federal Reserve System, accessed September 20,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fract.htm, and the structure of the Federal
Reserve System is presented at “The Structure of the Federal Reserve System,” The Federal
Reserve Board, accessed September 20,
2011, http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/frseries/frseri.htm.
[2] “Federal Reserve Act: Monetary Policy Objectives,” Federal Reserve, December 27, 2000,
accessed August 6, 2011, http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/section2a.htm.
[3] “News Release,” Bank of England, August 3, 2006, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/news/2006/078.htm.
[4] “Press Release,” Central Bank of Egypt, June 9, 2011, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.cbe.org.eg/public/PRESS_Release_For_Monetary_Policy/2011/MPC_Pres
sRelease_09_06_2011_E .
[5] Glenn Stevens, “Media Release,” Reserve Bank of Australia, June 7, 2011, accessed July 20,
2011, http://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2011/mr-11-09.html.
10.2 The Monetary Transmission Mechanism
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the link between the actions of the Fed and the state of the economy?
2. What interest rate does the Fed target?
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http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/section2a.htm
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/news/2006/078.htm
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3. What components of aggregate spending depend on the interest rate?
The actions of monetary authorities, such as the Fed and other central banks around the
world, influence interest rates and thus the levels of employment, output, and prices. The
links between a central bank’s actions and overall economic performance are far from
straightforward, however. The process is summarized by the
monetary transmission mechanism (shown in Figure 10.2 “The Monetary Transmission
Mechanism”), which is the heart of this chapter. The monetary transmission mechanism is
more than just some theory that economists have devised to try to make sense of monetary
policy. It summarizes how the Fed thinks about its own actions.
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Figure 10.2 The Monetary Transmission Mechanism
The Fed targets a short-term nominal interest rate. Changes in this rate lead to changes
in long-term real interest rates, which affect spending on investment and durable goods,
ultimately leading to a change in real GDP.
The monetary transmission mechanism explains how the actions of the Federal Reserve Bank
affect aggregate economic variables, and in particular real gross domestic product (real GDP).
More specifically, it shows how changes in the Federal Reserve’s target interest rate affect
different interest rates in the economy and thus influence spending in the economy. Through
open-market operations, the Fed targets a short-term nominal interest rate. Changes in
that interest rate in turn affect long-term nominal interest rates. Changes in long-term
nominal rates lead to changes in long-term real interest rates. Changes in long-term real
interest rates affect investment and durable goods spending. Finally, changes in spending
affect real GDP. We will examine every step of this process.
This chapter focuses on the effects of Fed actions, but essentially the same analysis applies to
the study of monetary policy in other countries. The channels of influence are to a large degree
independent of which country we study, although the magnitudes of the policy effects might
differ across countries. Monetary policy differs across countries more through the targets set
by different central banks than through the transmission mechanism.
How Well Can the Fed Meet Its Target?
On February 2, 2005, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided to increase the
target federal funds rate to 2.5 percent. The word target is critical here. If you listen to
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television news, you might get the impression that the Fed sets interest rates. It does not. It
influences them, with greater or lesser success at different times.
Figure 10.3 “Target and Actual Federal Funds Rate, 1971–2005” shows the monthly target and
actual federal funds rate between 1971 and 2008. From this picture, it is evident that the
target and actual federal funds rates move together. We can conclude that the first stage of the
monetary transmission mechanism is reliable. The Fed can influence the federal funds rate.
So far so good—at least for this period of time. As we shall see later, when we consider more
recent events, the Fed was much less successful in targeting the federal funds rate during the
periods of financial distress in 2007 and 2008.
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Figure 10.3 Target and Actual Federal Funds Rate, 1971–2005
The target and actual federal funds rates move closely together.
From Short-Term Interest Rates to Long-Term Interest Rates
The next question is, do movements in the federal funds rate lead to corresponding
movements in long-term interest rates? By “long-term,” we mean the rates on assets that have
a maturity of at least 1 year and, in particular, assets that have a maturity of 5 years, 10 years,
or even longer. Arbitrage among different assets means that annual interest rates on assets
with different maturities are linked. As a result, the actions of the Fed to influence short-
term rates also affect long-term rates.
Figure 10.4 “Short-Term and Long-Term Interest Rates” shows the relationship between the
federal funds rate and longer-term interest rates. Broadly speaking, these long rates move
with the federal funds rate. But it is also clear that the longer the horizon on the debt, the less
responsive is the interest rate to movements in the federal funds rate.
This is one of the difficulties faced by the Fed: it can target short-term rates very accurately,
but its influence on long-term rates is much less precise. Since—as we shall see—many
economic decisions depend on long-term rates, the Fed’s ability to influence the economy is
imperfect. Some writers have suggested that the Fed is an all-powerful organization that can
move the economy around on a whim. There is no doubt that the Fed wields a great deal of
power over the economy. Nevertheless, the Fed’s influence is substantially limited by the fact
that it cannot control long-term interest rates with anything like the same precision that it
brings to bear on the federal funds rate.
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Figure 10.4 Short-Term and Long-Term Interest Rates
The Fed’s ability to influence long interest rates is much more limited than its ability to affect
short rates.
From Nominal Interest Rates to Real Interest Rates
So far in this section, we have been considering nominal interest rates, but we know that the
decisions of firms and households are based on real interest rates. The link between nominal
and real interest rates is given by the Fisher equation:
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real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − inflation rate.
To use this relationship, we simply subtract the inflation rate from the nominal interest rate.
So if the nominal interest rate were 15 percent, as it was in the early 1980s, and the inflation
rate were 12 percent, then the real interest rate would be 3 percent. But if the inflation rate
were higher—say, 18 percent—then the real interest rate would be minus 3 percent.
Toolkit: Section 16.14 “The Fisher Equation: Nominal and Real Interest Rates”
The toolkit reviews the derivation of the Fisher equation.
Figure 10.5 “Real and Nominal Interest Rates” shows the nominal and real rates of return for
a one-year Treasury bond. Because inflation is positive, the nominal interest rate exceeds the
real rate. The figure shows that the nominal and real rates typically move closely together. In
the early 1980s, for example, the real interest rate was negative. Presumably when households
lent money in the early 1980s, they did not expect a negative return on their saving but
instead expected that the nominal interest rate would exceed the inflation rate. From that
perspective, the negative real interest rate is a consequence of higher than anticipated
inflation.
The Fed’s ability to influence longer-term nominal rates through its influence on the federal
funds rate apparently extends to the real interest rate as well. The connection is not perfect,
however. On some occasions, movements in nominal rates are decoupled from movements in
real rates.
Figure 10.5 Real and Nominal Interest Rates
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Changes in nominal interest rates generally lead to changes in real interest rates, but the
link between the two is imperfect.
From Real Interest Rates to Spending on Durable Goods
Real rates of interest influence spending by both households and firms. The main categories
of purchases that are affected by interest rates are as follows:
Investment spending by firms
Housing purchases by households
Durable goods purchases by households
What do these have in common? In each case, the purchase yields a flow of benefits that
extends over some significant period of time. If a firm builds a new factory or purchases a new
piece of machinery, it typically expects to be able to use that plant and equipment for years or
decades. When a household buys a new home, it expects either to live there for a long time or
else to sell it to someone else who can live there. If you buy a durable good such as a new car
or a refrigerator, you expect to obtain the benefits of that purchase for several years.
Figure 10.6 “Real Interest Rates and Spending on Durable Goods” shows the relationship
between the real interest rate and spending on durable goods. The higher the real interest rate
is, the lower is the amount of spending on durable goods. Of course, the relationship need not
be a straight line; we have just drawn it this way for simplicity. As you might imagine,
monetary policymakers are very interested in the exact form of this relationship. They want to
know exactly how big a change in durable goods spending is likely to follow from a given
change in interest rates.
Figure 10.6 Real Interest Rates and Spending on Durable Goods
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At higher interest rates, firms are less likely to borrow for investment projects, and
households are less likely to borrow to purchase housing and durable goods such as new
cars. Thus spending on durable goods is lower at higher interest rates and vice versa.
Discounted Present Value and Spending on Durable Goods
To understand in more detail why interest rates affect spending on durable goods, consider
the purchase of a machine by a firm. Firms carry out such investment spending because they
expect the machine to yield a flow of profits not only in the present but also for several years
into the future. A machine is a capital good; it is used in the production of other goods and
is not used up during the production process. The fact that the returns from the machine
accrue over several years is what we mean by the term durable.
It is not correct to simply add profit flows in different years because a dollar today is usually
worth more than a dollar next year. Why? If you take a dollar today and put it in a savings
account at the bank, you will get your dollar plus interest back next year. If the interest rate is
10 percent, then $1 this year is worth $1.10 next year. Turning it around, $1 next year is worth
only about 91 cents this year (because 1/1.1 = 0.91).
The technique for adding together flows of resources in different periods is calleddiscounted
present value. To work out whether a given investment is profitable, a firm must calculate
the value, in today’s terms, of the flows of profits that it expects to receive. It then compares
this to the cost of the investment. If the discounted present value of the profits exceeds the
cost, the firm will undertake the investment.
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Toolkit: Section 16.3 “Discounted Present Value”
You can review discounted present value in the toolkit.
Table 10.1 “Return on Investment” illustrates a simple investment decision. In year 1, you pay
for a machine, and it yields some profit in that year. The next year, the machine yields further
profit. Suppose you, as a manager of a firm, must decide whether or not to buy this machine.
How do you make this decision? In the first year, you pay $970 for the machine and earn only
$500 back, so you are down $470. In the second year, you will earn an additional $500—but
you have to wait a year to get this money. Think of the profits in year 2 as being in real terms—
that is, already corrected for inflation.
Table 10.1 Return on Investment
Year Payment for
Machine
Real Profit from
Machine
1 970 500
2 0 500
To decide about the purchase of the machine, you need to know the interest rate. If the
interest rate were zero, the calculation would be easy. You could just add together the profit
flows in the 2 years, observe that $1,000 is more than the $970 that you have to pay for the
machine, and conclude that the purchase is a good idea. Now suppose the real interest rate
is 5 percent, which means that the real interest factor is 1.05. Then the discounted present
value of the profit flows from the machine is given by the following equation:
discounted present value = year 1 profits +
year 2 profits
real interest factor
= 500 +
500
1.05
= 500 + 476
= 976.
In this case, the purchase is still a good idea. You will earn $976 in present value terms,
exceeding the $970 that you have to pay, so you still come out ahead.
But what if that the real interest rate is 10 percent? In this case,
discounted present value = 500 +
500
1.1
= 500 + 455
= 955.
This is less than the amount that you had to pay for the machine. The investment no longer
looks like a good idea. The higher the interest rate, the more we must discount future
earnings, so the less likely it is that a current investment will be profitable.
In most real-life cases, the flow of profits extends for several years, so the discounted present
value calculation is somewhat harder. (Still, even harder calculations can be done easily with a
calculator or a spreadsheet.) Our example may be simple, but it illustrates our key point. As
the real interest rate decreases, the discounted present value of profits from a machine
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increases. In the economy, there are at any given time many possible investment
opportunities. Some have higher profit flows than others. At lower interest rates, more
machines will be profitable to purchase: investment increases as the real interest rate
decreases.
Households purchase homes and durable consumption goods, such as cars and household
appliances. If the household borrows to make such purchases (through mortgages, car loans,
or other personal loans), then exactly the same logic applies. Higher interest rates will tend to
deter the household from these purchases, whereas lower interest rates will encourage
purchases. [1] Households usually have some choice about when exactly to purchase such
goods. If interest rates are high this year, it probably makes sense to put off that purchase of a
new washing machine until next year, when rates might be lower.
The effect of an increase in the real interest rate on spending on durable goods is captured
in Figure 10.7 “The Relationship between the Real Interest Rate and Spending on Durable
Goods”.
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Figure 10.7 The Relationship between the Real Interest Rate and Spending on Durable
Goods
When the real interest rate increases, spending on durable goods decreases.
From Spending on Durable Goods to Real GDP
Look again at Figure 10.2 “The Monetary Transmission Mechanism”. We have so far explored
the links from the Fed’s decision on a target to spending on durable goods and net exports.
Now we examine how changes in spending affect total output in the economy.
The aggregate expenditure model allows us to see how changes in aggregate spending
translate into changes in GDP, at a given price level. The idea underlying the aggregate
expenditure model is that, by the rules of national income accounting, real GDP must equal
both production and spending. If spending increases, then it must be the case that production
increases as well. The key diagram of the aggregate expenditure model is shown in Figure 10.8
“Aggregate Spending Depends Positively on Income”.
Variations in the real interest rate influence the level of aggregate spending through the level
of autonomous spending (the intercept term). To see why, recall that total spending is the sum
of consumption, investment, government purchases, and net exports. The intercept term of
the expenditure relationship includes all the influences on spendingother than output. Thus
any changes in consumption, investment, or net exports that arenot induced by changes in
output show up as changes in the intercept term. In particular, if an increase in interest rates
causes firms to cut back on their investment spending, then the planned spending line shifts
downward.
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Figure 10.8 Aggregate Spending Depends Positively on Income
The economy is in equilibrium when spending equals real GDP.
We saw in Figure 10.7 “The Relationship between the Real Interest Rate and Spending on
Durable Goods” that, as the real interest rate increases, the level of spending on durables
decreases. This leads to a decrease in spending, given the level of income, and thus a decrease
in the intercept of the spending line, as shown in Figure 10.9 “Increases in Real Interest Rates
Reduce Real GDP”. The magnitude of the reduction in spending—that is, the shift downward
in the spending line—will depend on the sensitivity of durable spending to real interest
rates. The more sensitive durable spending is to changes in the real interest rate, the larger
the shift in the spending line will be when the real interest rate changes.
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Figure 10.9 Increases in Real Interest Rates Reduce Real GDP
As a consequence of increases in real interest rates, aggregate spending decreases.
The initial reduction in spending induced by the increased real interest rate is then magnified
by the multiplier process. The reduction in durable spending leads to a contraction in
output. The resulting decrease in income leads households to spend less, leading to further
contractions in output and income. In the end, the overall reduction in output exceeds the
initial reduction in spending. This is visible in Figure 10.9 “Increases in Real Interest Rates
Reduce Real GDP” from the fact that the horizontal difference between the old and new
equilibrium points is larger than the vertical shift in the spending line.
Toolkit: Section 16.19 “The Aggregate Expenditure Model”
You can review the aggregate expenditure model and the multiplier in the toolkit.
The Real Interest Rate–Real GDP Line
We can summarize much of the monetary transmission mechanism by means of a relationship
between real interest rates and real GDP, as shown in Figure 10.10 “The Relationship between
the Real Interest Rate and Real GDP”. After we work through all the connections from real
interest rates to the various components of spending and real GDP, we find that there is a
level of real GDP associated with each real interest rate. The higher the interest rate, the lower
is real GDP.
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Figure 10.10 The Relationship between the Real Interest Rate and Real GDP
This picture summarizes several steps in the monetary transmission mechanism to show
the relationship between real interest rates and real GDP.
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As the monetary authority changes the real interest rate, the economy moves along this curve.
So, for example, a reduction in the real interest rate leads to increased spending on durables,
which, through the multiplier process, increases aggregate output. The shape of the curve
tells us something about the Fed’s ability to influence the economy. Suppose that (1) durable
spending is very sensitive to the real interest rate and (2) the multiplier is large; then imagine
that the Fed cuts interest rates. Firms and households both respond to this change. Firms
decide to carry out more investment: they buy new machinery, open new plants, and so forth.
Households, attracted by the low interest rates, borrow to buy new cars and new homes. As a
result, durable spending increases substantially. Furthermore, this increase in spending leads
to higher income and thus to further increases in spending by households. The end result is a
large increase in real GDP. In this case, the curve is flat.
Figure 10.11 The Fed’s Influence on the Economy Depends on the Real Interest Rate–Real
GDP Relationship
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When the curve is flat, the Fed is able to have a big influence on the economy. When the
curve is steep, it is harder for the Fed to affect economic activity.
Figure 10.11 “The Fed’s Influence on the Economy Depends on the Real Interest Rate–Real
GDP Relationship” shows both this case and the case where it is harder for the Fed to
influence the economy. If spending on durable goods is not very responsive to changes in the
real interest rate and the multiplier is small, then changes in interest rates end up having only
a small effect on real GDP. In the diagram, this shows up as a steep curve. The Fed’s ability to
use the monetary transmission mechanism to its advantage requires good knowledge of the
shape of this relationship between interest rates and output.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The monetary transmission mechanism describes the links between the actions of the
Fed and the state of the aggregate economy.
2. The Fed targets a short-term nominal interest rate called the federal funds rate. The
Fed does not set this rate directly but rather uses its tools to influence this interest
rate.
3. The main components of spending that depend on the real interest rate are spending
by households on durable goods and investment. When these components of
spending are sensitive to the interest rate, then the Fed can influence the economy
through small variations in its target federal funds rate.
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Checking Your Understanding
1. Which interest rate determines investment spending—the real interest rate or the
nominal interest rate?
2. Some newspapers state that the Fed sets the interest rate. Is that right?
[1] Even if the household uses its own accumulated saving to buy the durable good, there is an
opportunity cost of using these funds: it could have put the money in the bank instead. The
higher the real interest rate, the better it looks to put money in the bank.
10.3 Monetary Policy, Prices, and Inflation
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How do prices adjust in the economy?
2. What are the effects of monetary policy on prices and inflation?
3. What is the Taylor rule?
We now understand the effect of an interest rate increase on output. According to the
monetary transmission mechanism, we expect that this will result in lower spending and a
lower real gross domestic product (GDP). Remember, though, that the Fed is also charged
with worrying about prices and inflation. Look back at the Federal Open Market Committee
(FOMC) announcement with which we opened the chapter. Much of that announcement
concerns inflation, not output. It states that “inflation and longer-term inflation expectations
remain well contained,” that “underlying inflation [is] expected to be relatively low,” and that
“the Committee will respond to changes in economic prospects as needed to fulfill its
obligation to maintain price stability.” [1]
The statements by the Bank of England, the Central Bank of Egypt, and the Reserve Bank of
Australia likewise betray a strong concern with inflation. The policy of many central banks is
directed toward the inflation rate. This policy, appropriately called inflation targeting, focuses
the attention of the monetary authority squarely on forecasting inflation and then controlling
inflation through its current policy choices.
Price Adjustment and Inflation
The inflation rate is defined as the growth rate of the overall price level. In turn, the price
level in the economy is based on the prices of all the goods and services in an economy. From
one month to the next, some prices increase, others decrease, and still others stay the same.
The overall inflation rate depends on what is happening to prices on average. If most prices
are increasing and few are decreasing, then we expect to see inflation.
A complete explanation of inflation requires an understanding of all the decisions made by
managers throughout the economy as they decide whether to change the prices of the goods
and services that they sell. Some managers might find themselves facing increasing costs and
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strong demand for their product, so they would choose to increase prices. Others might have
decreasing costs and weak demand, so they would choose to decrease prices. The overall
inflation rate depends on the aggregation of these decisions throughout the economy and is
summarized in a price adjustment equation. The price adjustment equation is shown
in Figure 10.12 “Price Adjustment”.
Toolkit: Section 16.20 “Price Adjustment”
The net effect of all the price-setting decisions of firms yields a price adjustment equation,
which is as follows:
inflation rate = autonomous inflation − inflation sensitivity × output gap.
The price adjustment equation summarizes, at the level of the entire economy, all the
decisions about prices that are made by managers throughout the economy. It tells us that
there are two reasons for increasing prices. The first is that there may be underlying
(autonomous) inflation in the economy, even when it is at potential output. This depends,
among other things, on the inflation rate that firms anticipate. The second reason for
increasing prices is if the output gap is negative. The output gap is the difference between
potential output and actual output:
output gap = potential real GDP − actual real GDP.
A positive gap means that the economy is in recession—below potential output. If the
economy is in a boom, then the output gap is negative.
Figure 10.12 Price Adjustment
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The price-adjustment equation tells us that when real GDP is below potential output, the
output gap is positive, and the actual inflation rate is below its autonomous level. The
opposite is true if real GDP is above potential output.
The output gap matters for inflation because as GDP increases relative to potential output,
labor and other inputs become scarcer. Firms see increasing costs and increase their prices as
a consequence. The second term of the price adjustment equation shows that when real GDP
is above potential output (the output gap is negative), there is upward pressure on prices in
the economy. The inflation rate exceeds autonomous inflation. By contrast, when real GDP is
below potential output (the output gap is negative), there is downward pressure on prices. The
inflation rate is below the autonomous inflation rate. The “inflation sensitivity” tells us how
responsive the inflation rate is to the output gap.
If the output gap were the only factor affecting prices in the economy, then we would often
expect to see deflation—decreasing prices. In particular, we would see deflation whenever
the economy was in a recession. Although the United States and some other economies have
occasionally experienced deflation, it is relatively rare. We can conclude that there must be
factors other than the output gap that cause inflation to be positive.
Autonomous inflation is the inflation rate that prevails in the economy when the economy is
at potential output (the output gap is zero). In the United States in recent decades, the
inflation rate has been positive but low, meaning that prices have been increasing on average
but at a relatively slow rate. Autonomous inflation is typically positive because most
economies have some growth of the overall money supply in the long run. A positive output
gap then translates not into deflation but simply into an inflation rate below the level of
autonomous inflation. Thus in the FOMC statement with which we opened this chapter, the
discussion is not about how contractionary policy will cause deflation; it is about how this
policy will moderate the inflation rate. Positive autonomous inflation means that firms will
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typically anticipate that their suppliers or their competitors are likely to increase prices in the
future. A natural response is to increase prices, so actual inflation is positive.
Figure 10.13 Interactions among Interest Rates, Output, and Inflation
The Effect of an Increase in Interest Rates on Prices and Inflation
The monetary transmission mechanism teaches us that an increase in real interest rates
reduces spending and hence leads to a reduction in real GDP. In the (very) short run, the
reduction in spending translates directly into a decrease in real GDP because prices are fixed.
The reduction in GDP increases the output gap in the economy. Our price adjustment
equation tells us in turn that this will tend to reduce the inflation rate in the economy.
Some firms will then adjust prices very quickly to the changing economic conditions. We do
not think that the price level in the economy is literally fixed—unable to move—for any
significant period of time. That said, some firms are likely to keep their prices unchanged for
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several months, even in the face of changing economic conditions. Thus the adjustment of
prices in the economy takes some time. It will be months, perhaps years, before all firms have
adjusted their prices.
In summary, an increase in interest rates leads to a gradual reduction in the inflation rate in
the economy. Contractionary monetary policy leads to a reduction in economic activity and,
over time, lower inflation. US monetary policy in the early 1980s provides a good illustration.
At the start of that decade, the inflation rate was over 10 percent. To reduce inflation, the Fed,
under Chairman Paul Volcker, conducted a contractionary monetary policy that sharply
increased real interest rates. The immediate result was a severe recession, and the eventual
result was a reduction in inflation, just as the model suggests.
Closing the Circle: From Inflation to Interest Rates
We have now traced the effects of monetary policy from interest rates to spending to real GDP
to inflation. The effects of monetary policy do not stop there. Instead, as inflation adjusts in
response to monetary policy, there is a feedback to interest rates through monetary policy
itself. This is shown in Figure 10.14 “Completing the Circle of Monetary Policy”.
Figure 10.14 Completing the Circle of Monetary Policy
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We close the monetary policy circle by observing that the Fed’s policies depend on the
state of the economy.
Observers of the Fed’s behavior over the past 20 or so years have argued that the Fed
generally follows a rule that makes its choice of a target interest rate somewhat predictable.
The rule that summarizes the behavior of the Fed is sometimes called theTaylor rule; it is
named after John Taylor, an economist who first characterized Fed behavior in this
manner. [2] The Taylor rule stipulates a relationship between the target interest rate and the
state of the economy, typically represented by both the inflation rate and some measure of
economic activity (such as the gap between actual and potential GDP). Usually, we think that
the monetary authority operates with a lag so that the interest rate the monetary authority
sets at a point in time reflects the output gap and inflation from the recent past. According to
the Taylor rule, the Fed will increase real interest rates when
inflation is greater than the target inflation rate,
output is above potential GDP (a negative output gap).
Conversely, the Fed will decrease real interest rates when
inflation is less than the target inflation rate,
output is below potential GDP (a positive output gap).
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The Fed will want to increase interest rates and thus “put the brakes on the economy” when
inflation is high and when they think that real GDP is above its long-run level (potential
output). The Fed will want to decrease interest rates when inflation is relatively low and the
economy is in a recession.
An example of a Taylor rule is shown in Figure 10.15 “The Taylor Rule”. The vertical axis is the
real interest rate target of the Fed, and the horizontal axis is the inflation rate. As the inflation
rate increases, the Fed, according to this rule, then increases the interest rate.
Figure 10.15 The Taylor Rule
The monetary policy rule shows how the Fed adjusts real interest rates in response to
changes in inflation rates. As inflation increases, the monetary authority targets a higher
real interest rate.
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The different pieces of the Taylor rule can be in conflict. For example, the Fed may face a
situation where inflation is relatively high, yet the economy is in recession. The precise
specification of the rule then provides guidance as to how the Fed trades off its inflation and
output goals. The rule is largely descriptive: it summarizes in a succinct manner the actions of
the Fed. In doing so, it allows individuals to predict with some accuracy what actions the Fed
is likely to take in the future.
The Taylor rule describes Fed policy in terms of the real interest rate. We know, however, that
the Fed actually targets a nominal rate. This has a surprising implication when we examine
how the Fed responds to inflation. Suppose the Fed is currently meeting its target inflation
rate—say, 3 percent—and the federal funds rate is currently 5 percent. The real interest rate is
therefore 2 percent (remember the Fisher equation). Now suppose the Fed sees that inflation
has increased from 3 percent to 4 percent. The increase in the inflation rate has the effect of
decreasing the real interest rate—again, this comes directly from the Fisher equation. The real
interest rate is now only 1 percent. Yet the Taylor rule tells us that the Fed wants
to increase the real interest rate. To do so, it must increase nominal interest rates
by more than the increase in the inflation rate. In our example, the inflation rate increased by
one percentage point, so the Fed will have to increase its target for the federal funds rate by
more than one percentage point—perhaps to 6.5 percent.
The Taylor rule completes the circle of monetary policy. As indicated by Figure 10.14
“Completing the Circle of Monetary Policy”, the monetary policy rule links the state of the
economy, represented by the inflation rate and the output gap, to the interest rate. There is
usually a lag in the response of the Fed to the state of the economy. So, for example, the
decision made at the FOMC meeting in February 2005 reflected information on the state of
the economy through the end of 2004, at best.
In Summary: The Three Key Pieces of the Monetary Transmission Mechanism
We now have the three pieces we need to understand the relationship between monetary
policy, inflation, and real GDP:
1. The Taylor rule linking the real interest rate to the inflation rate (Figure 10.15 “The
Taylor Rule”)
2. The inverse relationship between the real interest rate and real GDP (Figure 10.10 “The
Relationship between the Real Interest Rate and Real GDP”)
3. The price adjustment process (Figure 10.12 “Price Adjustment”)
Together, these three pieces paint a complete picture of the monetary policy process. The top
left panel in Figure 10.16 “The Adjustment of Inflation over Time” is taken fromFigure 10.15
“The Taylor Rule” and shows a positive relationship between inflation and the real interest
rate. The top right panel in Figure 10.16 “The Adjustment of Inflation over Time” is taken
from Figure 10.10 “The Relationship between the Real Interest Rate and Real GDP” and
shows the relationship between real GDP and the interest rate. As shown in the figure, the
higher the real interest rate, the lower real GDP is. As a reminder, higher real interest rates
lead to lower aggregate spending. Finally, from the price-setting equation, changes in real
GDP lead to changes in the inflation rate. We showed this previously in Figure 10.12 “Price
Adjustment”, and it appears in the bottom right panel of Figure 10.16 “The Adjustment of
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Inflation over Time”. If real GDP decreases, the output gap increases, and the inflation rate
decreases.
We can use Figure 10.16 “The Adjustment of Inflation over Time” to summarize the conduct of
monetary policy. In this diagram, we see the Taylor rule in action: the Fed sees high inflation
and so increases the real interest rate.
Start at the top right panel with “Last Period’s Interest Rate.” The panel shows us the
level of real GDP that resulted from the interest rate choice. The bottom right panel
then shows the inflation rate that came from the price adjustment equation. Point A
therefore shows the state of the economy last period—that is, it shows last period’s
inflation and last period’s real GDP. This is the information that the Fed uses when
making its decision for this period.
Given last period’s inflation rate, the top left panel shows us the value of the real
interest rate that the Fed wants to choose this period. The Fed therefore sets a new
target for the federal funds rate. This increases real interest rates, both short term and
long term, which in turn leads to a decrease in durable goods spending.
From the top right panel we can see that the Fed has chosen a higher interest rate than
last period, which means that there is a decrease in real GDP.
Decreased real GDP causes the inflation rate to decrease, as we see in the bottom right
panel.
Coming up to its next meeting, the FOMC again looks at the current state of the
economy (point B), and the process begins again.
We have simplified the discussion here in two ways. First, we neglected the fact that the
output gap also enters into the Taylor rule. The basic idea remains the same in that more
complicated case. Second, we did not discuss autonomous inflation. Autonomous inflation,
remember, captures managers’ expectations of future inflation and future demand conditions.
It, too, will tend to change over time. Theories of autonomous inflation are a subject for more
advanced courses in macroeconomics.
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Figure 10.16 The Adjustment of Inflation over Time
Last period the economy was at point A, with high output and high inflation. Because
inflation is too high, the Fed increases the real interest rate (top left). This reduces this
period’s output (top right), which in turn leads to a reduction in the inflation rate (bottom
right). The economy ends up at point B.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The price adjustment equation describes the dependence of price changes (inflation)
on the output gap, given the autonomous inflation rate.
2. Given prices, monetary policy influences the output gap. Over time, prices adjust in
response to the effects of monetary policy on the output gap.
3. The Taylor rule describes the dependence of the interest rate targeted by the Fed on
the inflation rate and the output gap.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Describe why a reduction in the target interest rate will ultimately lead to higher
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inflation.
2. If the economy is in a recession, what should happen to the target interest rate according
to the Taylor rule?
[1] Federal Open Market Committee, “Press Release,” Federal Reserve, February 2, 2005,
accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/press/monetary/2005/20050202/default.ht
m.
[2] Comments on John Taylor’s career and his contributions to monetary economics by Fed
Chairman Ben Bernanke are available at “Opening remarks to the Conference on John
Taylor’s Contributions to Monetary Theory and Policy, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Dallas,
Texas,” Federal Reserve, October 12, 2007, accessed September 20,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20071012a.htm.
10.4 Monetary Policy in the Open Economy
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How does monetary policy operate in an open economy?
2. How does monetary policy in other countries influence the US economy?
Monetary policy has international implications as well. Changes in interest rates lead to
changes in supply and demand in the foreign exchange market. [1] In turn, changes in
exchange rates affect exports and imports and influence the overall demand for goods and
services. Among other things, this means that the monetary policy of other countries will have
an effect on your own country. So if you live in Europe, you are not immune to Federal Open
Market Committee (FOMC) actions. And if you live in the United States, you are not immune
to the actions of the European Central Bank (ECB).
The Monetary Transmission Mechanism in the Open Economy
The key element in the monetary transmission mechanism is the ability of the central bank to
influence the real interest rate. Changes in real interest rates lead to changes in spending on
durable goods, which are a component of aggregate expenditures. But there is also another
channel of influence. If the Fed cuts interest rates, for example, then the demand for dollars to
invest in US asset markets will be reduced. This will reduce the foreign currency price of
dollars. The weaker dollar means that goods produced in the United States are cheaper, so US
exports will increase, and US imports will decrease. Thus changes in interest rates lead to
changes in exchange rates, which in turn lead to changes in net exports. Net exports are
also a component of aggregate expenditures. This is illustrated in Figure 10.17.
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Figure 10.17
There is an additional channel of the monetary transmission mechanism that operates
through the exchange rate. Changes in interest rates lead to changes in exchange rates,
which in turn lead to changes in net exports. This channel reinforces the effect operating
through interest rates.
Even when we include this channel, it is just as easy to understand the monetary transmission
mechanism as it was before. When interest rates are cut, there is an increase both in spending
on durables and net exports. Both channels lead to higher aggregate spending and thus higher
output.
Toolkit: Section 16.10 “Foreign Exchange Market”
You can review the workings of the foreign exchange market and the definition of the
exchange rate in the toolkit.
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Monetary Policy in the Rest of the World
The United States does not exist alone in the world economy. US financial markets are
influenced by events in other countries, such as the actions of the ECB. Likewise, citizens in
Europe are influenced by monetary policy in the United States.
Suppose the ECB cuts interest rates in Europe. As in the United States, the typical mechanism
for this would be a purchase of debt issued by European governments. An increase in the price
of this debt is equivalent to a decrease in interest rates. If nothing else happens, this decrease
in European interest rates gives rise to an arbitrage opportunity. Investors want to move
funds to the United States to take advantage of the higher interest rates. There is an increased
demand for US assets and hence an increased demand for dollars. Interest rates in the United
States decrease, which tends to increase durable goods spending and stimulate the US
economy. Against that, the higher value of the dollar leads to fewer exports from the United
States and more imports into the United States, so US net exports will decrease.
Completely analogously, monetary policy in the United States influences interest rates in
other countries. If the Fed undertakes an open market sale of US government debt, for
example, interest rates will increase in other countries as well as in the United States.
The US Federal Reserve and the ECB are big players in world financial markets. Their actions
move world interest rates and world currency markets. There are other countries that are
relatively small in the world economy. For example, suppose the Central Bank of Iceland
increases interest rates in that country. The mechanisms that we have explained still apply:
investors will find Icelandic assets more attractive, and there will be an increased demand for
the Icelandic krona. However, the flows of capital into Iceland will be negligible in terms of
the world economy. They will not have any noticeable effect on interest rates in Europe or the
United States.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. In an open economy, interest rate changes induced by monetary policy influence
exchange rates and thus net exports.
2. Actions by monetary authorities in other countries influence the net exports of the
United States through exchange rate changes and through the level of aggregate
spending on the United States by households in other countries.
Checking Your Understanding
1. If the Fed increases its target value for the federal funds rate, what happens to the value
of the dollar?
2. If the ECB increases its target interest rate, what happens to US net exports?
[1] Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide” explains this connection.
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10.5 The Tools of the Fed
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What do banks do?
2. What are the tools of the Fed?
We have not yet said very much about exactly how the Fed changes interest rates. The Fed has
three major tools at its disposal: open-market operations, the reserve requirement, and the
discount rate. We discuss these in turn. Monetary policy operates through the Fed’s
interactions with the banking system, so we first must make sure we understand what banks
do in the economy. [1] Throughout this discussion, we use the credit market to think about
how the Fed operates.
Toolkit: Section 16.4 “The Credit (Loan) Market (Macro)”
You can review the workings of the credit market in the toolkit.
What Do Banks Do?
Financial markets (that is, banks and other financial institutions) provide the link between
savings and investment in the economy. A bank is a profit-making entity that takes in deposits
from households and firms and makes loans to firms, households, and the government.
Banks can be fragile institutions. [2] They must ensure that their depositors are not worried
that the bank might go out of business, taking their money with it. Banks do many things to
ensure that their customers have confidence in them. Perhaps the most important is that they
keep a certain amount of their assets in a very liquid form, such as cash. This means that if a
depositor comes in to withdraw his or her money, the bank will be able to meet that demand.
These liquid deposits are called the reserves of the bank.
Most banks in the United States are members of the Federal Reserve System. This
membership comes with a responsibility to hold some fraction of deposits on reserve. This is
called a reserve requirement. [3]
Reserve requirements limit the amount of deposits that
banks are able to loan out to firms and households. Suppose a bank has $1,000 on deposit and
the reserve requirement is 10 percent. Then the bank must hold at least $100 on reserve and
can loan out at most $900. We say “at least $100” since the bank is free to hold more than 10
percent on reserve. In uncertain times, when a bank is unsure how many depositors are likely
to want to withdraw their money, the bank may choose to keep reserves above and beyond the
level required by the Fed.
What does a bank do if it finds itself with insufficient reserves on a given day to meet its
reserve requirements? The answer is that it borrows—either from other banks or from the
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Federal Reserve itself. Because the Federal Reserve can influence the interest rates at which
banks borrow, it can influence the behavior of banks.
Open-Market Operations
In the memo with which we opened the chapter, the Federal Open Market Committee
(FOMC) decided to increase the target federal funds rate to 2.5 percent. But what exactly does
this mean, and how did the Fed accomplish it? The federal funds rate is the interest rate in a
particular market—the market where banks make overnight loans to each other. Overnight
loans, as the name suggests, are assets that have a very short time to maturity (one day). The
interest rate on these loans is therefore one of the “shortest” interest rates in the economy,
which is why it is targeted by the Fed. The interest rate is so named because the loans are
made using the funds that banks have available in their accounts at the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve does not participate directly in this market. It influences the federal
funds rate by buying and selling in a different market—the market for short-term government
debt. These purchases and sales are called open-market operations. [4]Let us examine
how this works. The effect of open-market operations can be seen in the market for
government debt. Part (a) of Figure 10.18 “The Market for Government Bonds”shows the
supply and demand of this asset. The horizontal axis shows the quantity of assets (think of
this as the amount traded on a given day), and the vertical axis shows the price of those assets.
The participants in this market are financial institutions and others who hold, or want to hold,
bonds as part of their portfolio of assets. Current owners will be willing to sell bonds if their
price is sufficiently high. Conversely, if the price of bonds decreases, more people will want to
purchase them. The same institution could be either a supplier or a demander, depending on
the price. It is perfectly possible that a financial institution would want to buy bonds if their
price were low and sell them if their price were high.
Figure 10.18 The Market for Government Bonds
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(a) The price of bonds is determined by supply and demand. (b) These same transactions
are represented in a credit market, which is another way of looking at exactly the same
market.
Part (b) of Figure 10.18 “The Market for Government Bonds” shows the equivalent
representation of this as a credit market. When the Fed buys bonds, it is making a loan. When
the government or private investors sell bonds to the Fed, they are borrowing from the Fed.
The crossing of the supply and demand curves tells us the equilibrium price of government
bonds. It also tells us how many bonds changed hands that day, but our interest here is in
what is happening to prices.
Now suppose the Federal Reserve steps into this market and buys some government bonds.
This increases the demand for bonds, so the price of bonds will increase. This is shown in part
(a) of Figure 10.19 “Intervention by the Federal Reserve”. Part (b) of Figure 10.19
“Intervention by the Federal Reserve” shows the same action viewed through the lens of a
credit market. Conversely, if the Fed decides to sell some of its stock of government bonds, the
supply of bonds will shift out, and the price of bonds will decrease (see Figure 10.20
“Intervention by the Federal Reserve”).
Figure 10.19 Intervention by the Federal Reserve
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When the Federal Reserve conducts an expansionary open-market operation, it purchases
bonds (a) or, equivalently, supplies more credit (b). The price of bonds increases, or,
equivalently, the interest rate decreases.
Figure 10.20 Intervention by the Federal Reserve
When the Federal Reserve conducts a contractionary open-market operation, it sells bonds
(a) or, equivalently, demands more credit (b). The price of bonds decreases, or, equivalently,
the interest rate increases.
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Thus the Federal Reserve, by buying or selling government bonds in this market, has the
ability to influence the price of bonds. This means that it can affect the interest rate on those
bonds.
From this relationship, we know the following:
If the Fed buys bonds, then the price of bonds increases, and interest rates decrease.
If the Fed sells bonds, then the price of bonds decreases, and interest rates increase.
The Fed’s actions in this market have an effect on interest rates in other markets, as banks and
other financial institutions adjust their portfolios in response to the changing interest rate on
government bonds. The Fed calibrates its buying and selling to try to achieve its target interest
rate in the federal funds market.
The Discount Rate
The February 2005 announcement by the FOMC also included an increase in the discount
rate. The discount rate is the interest rate from another market—in this case a market
established by the Fed itself.
We have said that if a bank is short on reserves, it can borrow. One source of loans is the
federal funds market. Another source of loans is the Fed itself. Member banks have the
privilege of borrowing from the Fed, and the rate at which a bank can borrow is called the
discount rate. The Fed directly controls this interest rate. The Federal Reserve’s policies on
such loans are set out in “Regulation A” of the Fed’s Board of Governors: “A Federal Reserve
Bank [that is, a Regional Fed] may extend primary credit on a very short-term basis, usually
overnight, as a backup source of funding to a depository institution that is in generally sound
financial condition in the judgment of the Reserve Bank. Such primary credit ordinarily is
extended with minimal administrative burden on the borrower.” [5] Once a bank has
established the right to borrow at the Fed’s “discount window,” the execution of such a loan is
straightforward. The bank simply makes a toll-free call and provides a few pieces of basic
information.
To see how this tool works, suppose the discount rate were very high, much higher than the
interest the bank can earn by making a loan. Then the bank would find it prohibitively
expensive to borrow from the Fed. If the bank were unsure that it could meet the needs of
depositors, it would respond by holding reserves in excess of the reserve requirement. That is,
with a very high discount rate, the bank would lend out a smaller fraction of its deposits. By
contrast, if the Fed were to set the discount rate very low, the bank would make more loans
and hold fewer reserves, safe in the knowledge that it could always borrow from the Fed if
necessary.
From this reasoning, we can see that as the discount rate is increased, banks hold more excess
reserves and lend less. This shows up in Figure 10.21 “An Increase in the Discount Rate” as a
shift inward in the supply of credit. Thus the Fed can increase interest rates by increasing the
discount rate.
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Figure 10.21 An Increase in the Discount Rate
An increase in the discount rate reduces the supply of credit and therefore increases the real
interest rate.
Reserve Requirements
Reserve requirements are outlined in Section 19 (A) of the Federal Reserve Act:
(A) Each depository institution shall maintain reserves against its transaction accounts
as the Board may prescribe by regulation solely for the purpose of implementing
monetary policy—
1. in the ratio of 3 per centum for that portion of its total transaction accounts of
$25,000,000 or less, subject to subparagraph (C); and
2. in the ratio of 12 per centum, or in such other ratio as the Board may prescribe not
greater than 14 per centum and not less than 8 per centum, for that portion of its
total transaction accounts in excess of $25,000,000, subject to subparagraph (C)
[which stipulate that the reserve requirements could be changed].
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Suppose the Fed were to increase the reserve requirement from 10 percent to 20 percent. In
the previous example, all else being the same, a bank with deposits of $1,000 would be
required to have at least $200 on deposit, rather than the $100 that was required originally.
To fulfill this larger reserve requirement, the bank would be allowed to lend only $800 at
most. Banks therefore respond to an increase in the reserve requirement by holding a larger
fraction of deposits on reserve and lending out a smaller fraction of their deposits. This
reduces the supply of credit in the economy since a smaller fraction of saving is actually being
lent.
As shown in Figure 10.22 “An Increase in Reserve Requirements”, the supply of credit shifts
inward, and the interest rate increases. This picture is exactly the same as Figure 10.21 “An
Increase in the Discount Rate”. When we think about the credit market, the increase in the
discount rate and the increase in the reserve requirement have the same effect. Thus we learn
that the Fed can increase interest rates by increasing the reserve requirement. Often,
increases in the reserve requirement are coupled with other measures, such as open-market
operations, to increase interest rates. A decrease in the reserve requirement works in a
symmetric fashion, though in the opposite direction.
Figure 10.22 An Increase in Reserve Requirements
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real interest rate.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Banks act as intermediaries, taking the deposits of households and making loans to
firms and households who wish to borrow. Banks also borrow from other banks and
from the Fed.
2. The main tools of the Fed are as follows: (a) open-market operations, (b) lending at
the discount rate to member banks, and (c) setting the reserve requirements on
member banks.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Can a bank borrow from the Fed?
2. What are reserve requirements?
3. In an open market sale, does the money supply increase or decrease?
[1] If your find this material interesting, a course on Money and Banking will delve much
further into the details of how banks operate and how they interact with the monetary
authority.
[2] The fragility of banks is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”.
[3] Current reserve requirements are at “Reserve Requirements,” Federal Reserve, accessed
September 20, 2011, http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm#table1.
[4] Section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act describes open-market operations.
[5] “Regulation A (12 C.F.R. 201 as amended effective December 9, 2009),” Federal Reserve,
accessed July 20,
2011, http://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/regulationa.cfm?hdrID=14&dtlID=77.
10.6 The Fed in Action
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What monetary policy did the Fed pursue during the Great Depression?
2. Why is stabilization of the economy through monetary policy so difficult?
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We finish this chapter by going back to the actual actions of the Fed and focusing on two
periods. First, we consider the Great Depression from a monetary perspective. [1] Then we
consider the period leading up to the February 2005 announcement.
The Great Depression Revisited
The Fed was in fact not very active during the Great Depression (some commentators might
even say that this section should be titled “The Fed Inaction”). Yet monetary events were still
critical.
A key short-term interest rate at that time was the so-called commercial paper rate. This rate
decreased from about 6 percent in 1929 to a low of 0.8 percent by 1935. At first glance,
therefore, it seems as if the monetary authority was implementing cuts in interest rates that
could stimulate the economy. On closer examination, however, the picture is not so simple.
During the Great Depression the inflation rate was negative—prices were decreasing on
average. From the Fisher equation, a negative inflation rate means that the nominal interest
rate understates the cost of borrowing. Decreasing prices mean that the nominal interest rate
is smaller than the real interest rate. Even though nominal interest rates were decreasing in
the early 1930s, the inflation rate was decreasing faster. As a result, the real interest rate
increased. It became more expensive for households and firms to borrow, so spending
decreased.
When prices decrease, the obligations of borrowers increase in real terms. People at the time
did not typically anticipate these decreasing prices, so there was unanticipated deflation.
Unanticipated deflation redistributes wealth from borrowers to lenders. Many firms, banks,
and households were left with large (real) debts during the Great Depression. These led to
bankruptcies and contributed to the contraction in economic activity.
Thus along with the high real interest rates came a series of bank failures. In addition, banks
tended to hold more in excess reserves during this period, and thus loans, relative to deposits,
decreased. These banking problems meant that the financial markets became less effective at
connecting the savings of individual households with the investment plans of firms. It is
perhaps not surprising that investment and spending on consumer durable goods decreased
so much during the Great Depression.
In retrospect, the monetary authority could have been much more aggressive in dealing with
the high real interest rates. They could have conducted open-market operations, buying bonds
and decreasing interest rates. At the same time, this would have provided additional funds
(sometimes called liquidity) to the banking system. Yet the Fed did not do so. Many observers
now think that the severity of the Depression can be blamed in large part on these failures of
the Fed. If so, this is good news, for it tells us that we are much more likely to be able to avert
similar economic catastrophes in the future.
Monetary Policy from 1999 to 2005
Here is a brief summary of the target federal funds rate over the period from June 1999 to
May 2005. Remember that these are nominal interest rates.
Starting in June 1999, the target federal funds rate increased from 4.75 percent to 6.5
percent by January 2001.
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Starting in February 2001, the target federal funds rate decreased from 6.5 percent to a
low of 1 percent by July 2004.
In August 2004 the target federal funds rate was increased to 1.25 percent and was
increased steadily to a level of 2.75 percent by May 2005.
We have already examined these targets, together with the actual federal funds rates, inFigure
10.3 “Target and Actual Federal Funds Rate, 1971–2005”.
The time of tighter monetary policy, from June 1999 to January 2001, was a period of
inflation concern. In the first part of 1999, the inflation rate averaged about 2 percent, and the
unemployment rate was decreasing, reaching 4 percent in May 1999. Even though inflation
was low, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statement from June 1999 called for
an increase in the target federal funds rate, pointing to potential inflation as a rationale for
increasing the target rate: “The Committee, nonetheless, recognizes that in the current
dynamic environment it must be especially alert to the emergence, or potential emergence, of
inflationary forces that could undermine economic growth.” [2] The Fed’s tightening had the
effect of reducing durable spending and thus bringing gross domestic product (GDP) down
closer to potential output. As a consequence, there was less pressure on prices.
This policy continued through January 2001. By that point, the United States was very close to
recession. (According to the National Bureau of Economic Research Business Cycle dating
group, a recession began in March 2001.) From December 2000 to January 2001, the
unemployment rate jumped from 3.7 percent to 4.7 percent. The Fed responded by allowing
the federal funds rate to decrease steadily, starting in February 2001. This policy led to a
federal funds rate of 1 percent by July 2003, a level that was maintained for a year.
Historically, this was a very low rate. Over the year, inflation averaged about 2.3 percent, so
the real federal funds rate was actually negative.
A turnaround in Fed policy occurred in August 2004. Inflation had started to increase
somewhat in early 2004, and the unemployment rate had decreased to 5.3 percent in May
2004. So in August 2004, the Fed started a gradual increase of the target federal funds rate.
Look back at Figure 10.4 “Short-Term and Long-Term Interest Rates”. Recall that part of the
monetary transmission mechanism is the link between the nominal federal funds rate, which
is very short term, and much longer-term rates. Figure 10.4 “Short-Term and Long-Term
Interest Rates” shows the federal funds rate along with the 1-year and 10-year Treasury bond
yields. The loosening of monetary policy in February 2001 is evident from the decrease in the
federal funds rate and the 1-year Treasury rate.
But the long-term Treasury rate seems not to follow the short-term rates that closely. In fact,
it seems that the long-term rates started to decrease before the reductions in the federal funds
rate began, and then the long-term rates did not decrease nearly as much over the February
2001–August 2004 period. After that time, although the federal funds rate was increased, the
long-term rate did not respond much at all.
This reminds us of one the biggest challenges of monetary policy. Although the Fed is able to
closely target the federal funds rate, it has much less ability to control longer-term rates.
Someone making a loan for a long period of time will try to anticipate economic events over
the course of the entire loan period. As a consequence, the loan rate may reflect anticipated
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events (such as the Fed’s loosening of monetary policy in February 2001) and may also not
respond as much to rate changes that are seen as temporary.
Why Do Central Bankers Get Paid So Much?
We have made monetary policy look easy. The effects of the actions of the monetary authority
are summarized by Figure 10.2 “The Monetary Transmission Mechanism”. Given a choice of a
target inflation rate and a target level of economic activity, the Fed (and other central banks)
ought to know exactly what to do to reach these goals. So why are central bankers so vital to
the functioning of the macroeconomy?
What Is the State of the Economy?
In Section 10.3.3 “Closing the Circle: From Inflation to Interest Rates”, we described the
Taylor rule as relating the target federal funds rate to the state of the economy, specifically the
inflation rate and the output gap. As a matter of theory, this is straightforward to describe.
The practice is rather harder.
First, it is a significant challenge simply to know the current state of the economy. In the
United States, part of the preparation for FOMC meetings is an attempt to figure out the
current output gap and other variables. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve has a
large staff of professional economists, as do the various regional Federal Reserve banks. These
economists spend much of their time helping the members of the FOMC understand the
current state of the economy.
One particular problem is that the level of real GDP itself is calculated only on a quarterly
basis. Potential GDP, meanwhile, is a theoretical construct that requires some guesses about
“full employment.” It is not directly measured. So if the Fed learns that real GDP is growing
rapidly, it has to judge whether this is because potential GDP is growing rapidly or because
actual GDP is above potential.
Since the Fed does not meet to determine policy each day and the Fed’s policies themselves
take time to work through the economy, it is not even enough to know the current state of the
economy. The FOMC must also forecast the state of the economy for the near future. One
talent of the previous Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, was apparently his use of relatively
unorthodox sources to get a sense of the state of the economy.
What Are the Effects of Monetary Policy?
Even if there were no uncertainty about the current state of the economy—that is, the inflation
rate and the output gap—monetary policy is still difficult for other reasons. First, as we
emphasized earlier, the Fed does not have direct control over the long-term real interest rates
that matter for durable goods spending. The Fed can influence a short-term nominal rate,
which in turn influences the long-term real rates. But the exact link from one interest rate to
the other is not known by the Fed and may change over time. The Fed may fail to achieve the
long-term rate that it is aiming for.
Second, the Fed does not have perfect knowledge of the monetary transmission mechanism.
Consider again the links between real interest rates and output, as shown inFigure 10.10 “The
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Relationship between the Real Interest Rate and Real GDP”. In reality, the Fed does not know
exactly what the relationship between interest rates and output looks like. Reality looks more
like Figure 10.23 “Controlling the Economy”. In this picture the Fed is aiming for a high level
of output. However, it misses its target real interest rate and actually ends up setting a higher
real rate than it wanted. In addition, real GDP is more sensitive to interest rates than it
thought, so the high rate leads to a big reduction in GDP. Thus because the Fed fails to achieve
its target interest rate and also misjudges the monetary transmission mechanism, it ends up
with much lower real GDP than it wanted.
Finally, the Fed has imperfect knowledge of the link between economy activity and price
adjustment. Recall that the price setting equation stipulates that inflation depends on the
output gap and something called autonomous inflation. As we have seen, this last term
captures several factors, including the influence of expectations about the future on current
price-setting behavior. This presents a double challenge to the Fed. First, to evaluate the
effects of its policy on prices, the Fed needs to know the expectations that underlie
autonomous inflation. Second, the Fed must recognize that its actions and statements
influence these expectations. This is why the individuals involved in the making of monetary
policy are so careful both about what they do and about what they say about what they do.
Figure 10.23 Controlling the Economy
The Fed’s ability to control the economy depends on how knowledgeable it is about the state
of the economy and on how accurately it can target interest rates.
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What Should the Fed Do When Its Goals Are in Conflict?
We know that the goals of the Fed include price and output stability. Sometimes these goals
conflict, and when they do, the task of central bankers becomes even more complicated.
The FOMC statement with which we opened this chapter stated that the “Committee perceives
the upside and downside risks to the attainment of both sustainable growth and price stability
for the next few quarters to be roughly equal.” But what if instead it had said the “Committee
perceives the risks of low output growth and high inflation for the next few quarters to be
roughly equal”? What would the appropriate monetary policy be in this case? Should the Fed
use its power to stabilize prices or to promote economic activity?
The tension is evident from the Taylor rule. Here is an example: the target real interest rate
increases when inflation is high and decreases when the output gap is high:
real interest rate = −(1/2) × (output gap) + (1/2) × (inflation rate − 4 percent).
Remember that a positive output gap means that that the economy is in a recession: actual
GDP is below potential. When the economy is in recession and inflation is not very high, the
Taylor rule says that the Fed should reduce the real interest rate. And—from this same rule—
the Fed should increase the real interest rate in the face of high inflation and a negative output
gap. But what should the Fed do when inflation is high and there is a recession? High
inflation argues for increasing real interest rates, but a positive output gap argues for a cut in
rates.
The Fed—and, indeed, monetary authorities throughout the world—faced exactly this conflict
in the mid-1970s when oil prices increased substantially as a result of actions by the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Researchers who have examined data over
the past three decades have found that an increase in oil prices is typically met with an
increase in the federal funds rate. [3] Thus, when faced with conflicting goals stemming from
an oil price increase, the Fed seems to have put more weight on the goal of price stability.
When Things Go Badly Wrong
Everything that we have talked about in this section helps to explain why central bankers
must be skilled and knowledgeable individuals with a good grasp of both economics and the
workings of financial markets. Still, we have essentially been describing the job of a
technocrat. Central bankers really earn their salaries in abnormal rather than normal times.
Starting in 2007 and stretching well into 2008, the United States and other countries began to
experience financial crises that were similar in some ways to those experienced in the Great
Depression. [4] The crisis seemed to begin innocently enough, with a decrease in housing
prices that left some people unable or unwilling to cover their mortgage payments. But
because of the way financial markets work, it became very hard for lenders to work out which
of their assets were “nonperforming”—that is, unlikely to be repaid. As a result, financial
markets froze up.
Part of the Fed’s response was an aggressive use of the tools that we have described in this
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chapter. For example, the Fed reduced the federal funds rate down to 0.25 percent. At that
point, the Fed had just about reached the limit of what was possible with monetary stimulus.
The problem is that nominal interest rates cannot go below zero because cash has a nominal
interest rate of zero. If you keep a dollar bill from this year to next year, it is worth $1 next
year. Therefore it would always be better just to keep cash rather than invest in an asset with a
negative nominal return. The Fed had hit what is known as the zero lower bound.
Even though it was at the zero lower bound, the Fed still had other options. In normal
circumstances, it operates in the economy by buying and selling short-term government debt,
one of the many assets in the economy. But these were highly abnormal circumstances, and it
is possible for the Fed to buy and sell other assets as well. This is what the Fed did. During the
crisis, the Fed started purchasing many other assets, such as commercial paper. In other
words, instead of just lending to banks, the Fed started lending directly to firms in the
economy. Central banks in some other countries, such as the United Kingdom, pursued
similar policies. [5]
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Despite the large reduction in aggregate economy activity and deflation during the
Great Depression, the Fed did not pursue a very aggressive policy. The effectiveness of
the Fed was hampered by the unwillingness of households to deposit funds in banks
and the unwillingness of banks to make loans.
2. The conduct of monetary policy is made difficult by uncertainty over the current state
of the economy and the inexact nature of the effects of interest rates on real GDP and
prices.
Checking Your Understanding
1. In what ways was the Fed not very aggressive during the Great Depression?
2. How could the goals of the Fed be in conflict?
3. Does the Fed know the current state of the economy when it makes decisions?
[1] Chapter 7 “The Great Depression” discusses that period in more detail and pays more
attention to fiscal policy.
[2] Federal Open Market Committee, “Press Release,” Federal Reserve, June 30, 1999,
accessed August 8,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/press/general/1999/19990630/default.htm.
[3] The following discussion elaborates on the Fed’s response to oil price increases: Federal
Reserve Bank of Cleveland, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/inflation/Readingroom/Viewpoint/2005/oil-
prices-economy04-05.cfm. A speech by then Fed Governor Ben Bernanke in 2004 provides
more details: “Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke at the Distinguished Lecture Series,
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Darton College, Albany, Georgia,” Federal Reserve, October 21, 2004, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/boardDocs/speeches/2004/20041021/default.htm.
[4] The financial crisis of 2008 is discussed in Chapter 4 “The Interconnected
Economy” andChapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”.
[5] Explaining what happened in 2008 involves understanding the actions of the Fed, but it
requires many of our other tools as well. For that reason, we take up this crisis in more detail
inChapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”.
10.7 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
A driving analogy is sometimes used to illustrate the problems of the Fed. In the best of all
worlds, we would drive a car in perfect weather along straight, wide, dry roads. We would look
out crystal clear windows with complete knowledge of exactly where we are on the road and
what driving conditions are like up ahead. Then, with complete control over the car, we could
adjust speed and direction to reach our destination.
This is not the right picture for monetary policy. Instead, the windshield is very dirty,
obscuring current conditions and making predictions almost impossible. Although the driver
is well trained, the connection between the tools of the car and its direction and speed is
haphazard.
Suppose the driver sees a steep downhill in the distance that requires some slowing down.
Putting on the brakes will eventually slow the car down, but the delay is hard to predict.
Making matters worse, by the time the car slows, the road may be going uphill again.
More precisely, the first challenge for the Fed is determining the current state of the economy.
The Fed must rely on economic data to determine the current state of the economy. This is not
easy; data often arrive with lags and with measurement error. Furthermore, the data often
provide conflicting signals about the current state of the economy.
The second challenge for the Fed is that the transmission mechanism is not cast in stone.
Reducing real interest rates by, say, one percentage point does not create the same response
in spending at all times. Instead, the links in the monetary transmission mechanism change
over time and depend on numerous other variables in the economy. Understanding these
links remains a key area of research in economics and is also a challenge for those responsible
for the conduct of monetary policy.
Key Links
Board of Governors purposes and
functions:http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/default.htm
Federal Reserve Act:http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/fract/default.htm
Board of Governors, Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), monetary policy
tools: http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomc.htm
European Central Bank: http://www.ecb.int/home/html/index.en.html
History of money
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http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/fract/default.htm
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Public Broadcasting System:http://www.pbs.org/newshour/on2/money/history.html
Federal Reserve Bank of
Minneapolis:http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/history.c
fm
EXERCISES
1. Have you ever noticed that banks are often housed in big imposing buildings?
Why do you think this is the case?
2. Consider a Taylor rule given by
real interest rate = −(1/2) × (output gap) + (1/2) × (inflation rate − 4 percent).
a) Describe this rule in words. What is the target inflation rate in this rule?
b) If the inflation rate is 6 percent and the GDP gap is −2 percent, what should
the real interest rate be? What nominal interest rate should the Fed set?
3. (Advanced) Draw a version of Figure 10.15 “The Taylor Rule” where you show how
to relate the target interest rate to the output gap. Explain in words what it means to
move along the curve. What shifts the curve you have drawn?
4. What would happen if the Fed set the discount rate below the rate of return on
government bonds?
5. Do open-market operations have to be in the form of the Fed buying and selling
government debt? Could an open-market operation occur with the Fed buying the
stock of a company?
6. Explain why an increase in interest rates reduces the demand for durable goods.
7. Suppose the relationship between investment and interest rates is investment =
100 − 4 × real interest rate and suppose the multiplier is 2
8. If the interest rate decreases by one percentage point, what happens to real GDP
(assuming no change in the price level)?
9. Give two reasons why it is difficult to conduct monetary policy.
10. Suppose the central bank in country A is more worried about inflation than the
output gap, but the opposite is true in country B. What differences in the Taylor rule
would you expect to see in the two countries? Must it be the case that country A has a
lower target inflation rate than country B?
11. Explain why a positive output gap does not necessarily lead to decreasing prices.
Economics Detective
1. Find the most recent announcement of the Federal Open Market Committee
(FOMC). How does it differ from the one from February 2, 2005? Who is currently
on the FOMC?
2. Use the site http://www.hsh.com/calc-payment.html to calculate how your
monthly payment would change as you vary the interest rate charged on a car loan
for a $30,000 car. This will give you a sense of how actions of the Fed would affect
your monthly payments on a loan.
3. Find the names of five other central banks in the world economy. Find some
information about their history (when were they established, for example), their
design (are they independent?), and their operating procedures.
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4. Find the web page for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and
read about the tools of monetary policy. Based on your reading, (a) how often does
the FOMC meet, and (b) how is its membership determined?
5. If you live in the United States, find the web page for the regional Fed closest to
you. Try to find its most recent report on local economic conditions. Do you agree
with this assessment of the local economy? What can you learn about the president
of the regional Fed? What about the director of research, who is the staff member
most likely to give advice to the president of the regional Fed about monetary policy?
6. Using your web research skills, find a discussion of Fed policy during times of high
oil prices. How did the Fed resolve the tensions between increasing rates to combat
inflation and decreasing rates to deal with unemployment? Try to find data on (real)
oil prices and the federal funds rate. Did these two economic variables move
together during periods of high oil prices?
7. In March 2008, the Fed opened the discount window to add liquidity into the
financial system. Find the policy statements associated with this action and describe
exactly what the Fed did.
8. Get data on the US economy to see how well the Taylor rule,
real interest rate = −(1/2) × (output gap) + (1/2) × (inflation rate − 4 percent),
fits the facts for the past five years.
9. Find an occasion when the Fed has changed reserve requirements. Did it also
make other policy adjustments at the same time?
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Chapter 11
Inflations Big and Small
Rising Prices
Through the years, people have been willing to wear some absurd slogans on their clothing.
But surely one of the worst was the “WIN” button, introduced by United States President
Gerald Ford in a speech on October 8, 1974. [1] The button, shown in the following figure, was
the symbol of a campaign against a perceived a social evil. And what was this great evil? It was
inflation. “WIN” stood for “whip inflation now.” President Ford asked citizens to wear WIN
buttons as a sign that they were enlisted in the battle against inflation.
Figure 11.1 Button: Whip Inflation Now
Wearing buttons might not have been the first bit of advice economists would have given to a
leader interested in battling inflation. But this episode makes it evident that President Ford
and his advisors viewed inflation as a major social problem. The president even invoked
wartime imagery, concluding his speech by saying the following: [2]
Only two of my predecessors have come in person to call upon Congress for a
declaration of war, and I shall not do that. But I say to you with all sincerity that our
inflation, our public enemy number one, will, unless whipped, destroy our country, our
homes, our liberties, our property, and finally our national pride, as surely as any well-
armed wartime enemy.
I concede there will be no sudden Pearl Harbor to shock us into unity and to sacrifice,
but I think we have had enough early warnings. The time to intercept is right now. The
time to intercept is almost gone.
My friends and former colleagues, will you enlist now? My friends and fellow
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Americans, will you enlist now? Together with discipline and determination, we will
win.
When President Ford initiated this campaign, the US inflation rate was about 12 percent. In
other words, a shirt that cost $10.00 in 1973 cost about $11.20 in 1974. This was the highest
inflation rate that the United States had experienced since World War II. Inflation running at
this rate is, at the very least, a significant inconvenience.
Still, compared to the experience of many countries, this level of inflation is negligible.
Between World War I and World War II, Germany, Hungary, Austria, and Poland experienced
massive rates of inflation. In one month in 1923, the annual inflation rate in Germany was
6,829 percent. This number is very difficult to fathom; it is astronomical compared to the
inflation that President Ford was facing. At this rate of inflation, prices were doubling every
three to four days.
Such rapid price increases forced people to change their behavior in extraordinary ways. The
instant workers received their pay, they would rush out and spend it, for even a delay of a few
hours could mean that your wages would buy fewer goods and services. Even ordering in a
café became a game to beat inflation: “The price increases began to be dizzying. Menus in
cafes could not be revised quickly enough. A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of
coffee at a cafe. The price on the menu was 5,000 Marks. He had two cups. When the bill
came, it was for 14,000 Marks. ‘If you want to save money,” he was told, “and you want two
cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time.’” [3] And these are not just
stories from long ago. In the past 25 years, there have been large inflations in Yugoslavia,
Israel, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe, for example.
What is the cause of inflation?
Road Map
In this chapter, we study the causes and consequences of inflation. Times of rapid inflation are
especially helpful for understanding inflation in general. When inflation is the dominant
feature of an economy, it is very easy to isolate the main forces at work. We will see, moreover,
that the most interesting periods to study are the beginning and end of large inflations, for
such times provide a particular insight into the connection between fiscal policy and monetary
policy.
We first study the relationship between the inflation rate and changes in the amount of money
circulating in an economy and explain that, in the long run, there is a close connection
between the inflation rate and the growth rate of the money supply. We look at some data
both for the United States and for other countries and examine some examples of
hyperinflation. Then we explore the underlying cause of hyperinflations, which turn out to be
connected to the tax and spending choices that governments make, and we conclude by
discussing government policy to control inflation.
[1] President Ford’s speech can be read and heard
here:http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/740121.asp.
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[2] President Ford’s speech can be read and heard
here:http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/740121.asp.
[3] This comes from a PBS page with many excerpts about the German hyperinflation: “The
German Hyperinflation, 1923,” Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy,
PBS, accessed September 20,
2011,http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_germanhyperinfl
ation.html.
11.1 The Quantity Theory of Money
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions.
1. What is the quantity theory of money?
2. What is the classical dichotomy?
3. According to the quantity theory, what determines the inflation rate in the long run?
We begin by presenting a framework to highlight the link between money growth and
inflation over long periods of time. [1] The quantity theory of money is a relationship
among money, output, and prices that is used to study inflation. It is based on an accounting
identity that can be traced back to the circular flow of income. Among other things, the
circular flow tells us that
nominal spending = nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
The “nominal spending” in this expression is carried out using money. While money consists
of many different assets, you can—as a metaphor—think of money as consisting entirely of
dollar bills. Nominal spending in the economy would then take the form of these dollar bills
going from person to person. If there are not very many dollar bills relative to total nominal
spending, then each bill must be involved in a large number of transactions.
The velocity of money is a measure of how rapidly (on average) these dollar bills change
hands in the economy. It is calculated by dividing nominal spending by the money supply,
which is the total stock of money in the economy:
velocity of money =
nominal spending
money supply
=
nominal GDP
money supply
.
If the velocity is high, then for each dollar, the economy produces a large amount of nominal
GDP.
Using the fact that nominal GDP equals real GDP × the price level, we see that
velocity of money =
price level × real GDP
money supply
.
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And if we multiply both sides of this equation by the money supply, we get the
quantity equation, which is one of the most famous expressions in economics:
money supply × velocity of money = price level × real GDP.
Let us see how these equations work by looking at 2005. In that year, nominal GDP was about
$13 trillion in the United States. The amount of money circulating in the economy was about
$6.5 trillion. [2] If this money took the form of 6.5 trillion dollar bills changing hands for each
transaction that we count in GDP, then, on average, each bill must have changed hands twice
during the year (13/6.5 = 2). So the velocity of money was 2 in 2005.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
You can review the circular flow of income in the toolkit.
The Classical Dichotomy
So far, we have just written a definition. There are two steps that take us from this definition
to a theory of inflation. First we use the quantity equation to give us a theory of the price level.
Then we examine the growth rate of the price level, which is the inflation rate.
In macroeconomics we are always careful to distinguish between nominal and real variables:
Nominal variables are defined and measured in terms of money. Examples include
nominal GDP, the nominal wage, the dollar price of a carton of milk, the price level, and so
forth. (Most nominal variables are measured in monetary units, but some are just
numbers. For example, the nominal interest rate tells you how many dollars you will
obtain next year for each dollar you invest in an asset this year. It is thus measured as
“dollars per dollar,” so it is a number.)
All variables not defined or measured in terms of money are real variables. They include
all the variables that we divide by a price index in order to correct for the effects of
inflation, such as real GDP, real consumption, the capital stock, the real wage, and so
forth. For the sake of intuition, you can think of these variables as being measured in
terms of units of (base year) GDP (so when we talk about real consumption, for example,
you can think about the actual consumption of a bundle of goods and services by a
household). Real variables also include the supply of labor (measured in hours) and many
variables that have no specific units but are just numbers, such as the velocity of money or
the capital-to-output ratio of an economy.
Prior to the Great Depression, the dominant view in economics was an economic theory called
the classical dichotomy. Although this term sounds imposing, the idea is not. According to
the classical dichotomy, real variables are determined independently of nominal variables. In
other words, if you take the long list of variables used by macroeconomists and write them in
two columns—real variables on the left and nominal variables on the right—then you can
figure out all the real variables without needing to know any of the nominal variables.
Following the Great Depression, economists turned instead to the
aggregate expenditure model to better understand the fluctuations of the aggregate
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economy. In that framework, the classical dichotomy does not hold. Economists still believe
the classical dichotomy is important, but today economists think that the classical dichotomy
only applies in the long run.
The classical dichotomy can be seen from the following thought experiment. Start with a
situation in which the economy is in equilibrium, meaning that supply and demand are in
balance in all the different markets in the economy. The classical dichotomy tells us that this
equilibrium determines relative prices (the price of one good in terms of another), not
absolute prices. We can understand this result by thinking about the markets for labor, goods,
and credit.
Figure 11.2 “Labor Market Equilibrium” presents the labor market equilibrium. On the
vertical axis is the real wage because households and firms make their labor supply and
demand decisions based on real, not nominal, wages. Households want to know how much
additional consumption they can get by working more, whereas firms want to know the cost of
hiring more labor in terms of output. In both cases, it is the real wage that determines
economic choices.
Figure 11.2 Labor Market Equilibrium
Now think about the markets for goods and services. The demand for any good or service
depends on the real income of households and the real price of the good or service. We can
calculate real prices by correcting for inflation: that is, by dividing each nominal price by
the aggregate price level. Household demand decisions depend on real variables, such as real
income and relative prices. [3] The same is true for the supply decisions of firms. We have
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already argued that labor demand depends on only the real wage. Hence the supply of output
also depends on the real, not the nominal, wage. More generally, if the firm uses other inputs
in the production process, what matters to the firm’s decision is the price of these inputs
relative to the price of its output, or—more generally—relative to the overall price level. [4]
What about credit markets? The supply and demand for credit depends on the real interest
rate. This means that those supplying credit think about the return they receive on making
loans in real terms: although the loan may be stated in terms of money, the supply of credit
actually depends on the real return. The same is true for borrowers: a loan contract may
stipulate a nominal interest rate, but the real interest rate determines the cost of borrowing in
terms of goods. The supply of and demand for credit is illustrated inFigure 11.3 “Credit Market
Equilibrium”.
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Figure 11.3 Credit Market Equilibrium
The credit market equilibrium occurs at a quantity of credit extended (loans) and a real
interest rate where the quantity supplied is equal to the quantity demanded.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market”, Section 16.4 “The Credit (Loan) Market (Macro)”,
and Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
You can review the labor market and the credit market, together with the underlying demand
and supply curves, in the toolkit. You can also review how to correct for inflation.
The classical dichotomy has a key implication that we can study through acomparative
statics exercise. Recall that in a comparative statics exercise we examine how the equilibrium
prices and output change when something else, outside of the market, changes. Here we ask:
what happens to real GDP and the long-run price level when the money supply changes? To
find the answer, we begin with the quantity equation:
money supply × velocity of money = price level × real GDP.
Previously we discussed this equation as an identity—something that must be true by the
definition of the variables. Now we turn it into a theory. To do so, we make
theassumption that the velocity of money is fixed. This means that any increase in the money
supply must increase the left-hand side of the quantity equation. When the left-hand side of
the quantity equation increases, then, for any given level of output, the price level is higher
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(equivalently, for any given value of the price level, the level of real GDP is higher).
What then changes when we change the money supply: output, prices, or both? Based on the
classical dichotomy, we know the answer. Real variables, such as real GDP and the velocity of
money, stay constant. A change in a nominal variable—the money supply—leads to changes in
other nominal variables, but real variables do not change. The fact that changes in the money
supply have no long-run effect on real variables is called the long-
run neutrality of money.
Toolkit: Section 16.8 “Comparative Statics”
You can find more details on how to conduct comparative static exercises in the toolkit.
How does this view of the effects of monetary policy fit with the
monetary transmission mechanism? [5] The monetary transmission mechanism
explains that the monetary authority affects aggregate spending by changing its target interest
rate.
The monetary authority changes interest rates.
Changes in interest rates influence spending on durables by firms and households.
Changes in spending influence aggregate spending through a multiplier effect.
Remember that the monetary authority changes interest rates through open-market
operations. If it wants to boost aggregate spending, it does so by cutting interest rates, and it
cuts interest rates by purchasing government bonds with money. An interest rate cut is
equivalent to an increase in the supply of money, so the monetary transmission mechanism
also teaches us that an increase in the supply of money leads to an increase in aggregate
spending. [6] The monetary transmission mechanism is useful when we want to understand
the short-run effects of monetary policy. When studying the long run, it is easier to work with
the quantity equation and to think about monetary policy in terms of the supply of money
rather than interest rates.
Finally, a reminder: in the short run, the neutrality of money does not hold. This is because in
the short run we assume stickiness of nominal wages and/or prices. In this case, changes in
the nominal money supply will lead to changes in the real money supply. With sticky wages
and/or prices, the classical dichotomy is broken.
Long-Run Inflation
We now use the quantity equation to provide us with a theory of long-run inflation. To do so,
we use the rules of growth rates. One of these rules is as follows: if you have two
variables, x and y, then the growth rate of the product (x × y) is the sum of the growth rate
of x and the growth rate of y. We can apply this to the quantity equation:
money supply × velocity of money = price level × real GDP.
The left side of this equation is the product of two variables, the money supply and the velocity
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of money. The right side is likewise the product of two variables. So we obtain
growth rate of the money supply + growth rate of the velocity of money= inflation rate +
growth rate of output.
We have used the fact that the growth rate of the price level is, by definition, the inflation rate.
Toolkit: Section 16.11 “Growth Rates”
You can review the rules of growth rates in the toolkit.
We continue to assume that the velocity of money is a constant. [7] Saying that the velocity of
money is constant is the same as saying that its growth rate is zero. Using this fact and
rearranging the equation, we discover that the long-run inflation rate depends on the
difference between how rapidly the money supply grows and how rapidly output grows:
inflation rate = growth rate of money supply − growth rate of output.
The long-run growth rate of output does not depend on the growth rate of the money supply
or the inflation rate. We know this because long-run output growth depends on the
accumulation of capital, labor, and technology. From our discussion of labor and credit
markets, equilibrium in these markets is described by real variables. Equilibrium in the labor
market depends on the real wage and not on any nominal variables. Likewise, equilibrium in
the credit market tells us that the level of investment does not depend on nominal variables.
Since the capital stock in any period is just the accumulation of past investment, we know that
the stock of capital is also independent of nominal variables.
Therefore there is a direct link between the money supply growth rate and the inflation rate.
The classical dichotomy teaches us that changes in the money supply do not affect the velocity
of money or the level of output. It follows that any changes in the growth rate of the money
supply will show up one-for-one as changes in the inflation rate. We say more about monetary
policy later, but notice that there are immediate implications for the conduct of monetary
policy:
In a growing economy, there are more transactions taking place, so there is typically a
need for more money to facilitate those transactions. Thus some growth of the money
supply is probably desirable to match the increased income.
If the monetary authorities want a stable price level—zero inflation—in the long run,
then they should try to set the growth rate of the money supply equal to the (long-run)
growth rate of output.
If the monetary authorities want a low level of inflation in the long run, then they
should aim to have the money supply grow just a little bit faster than the growth rate of
output.
Keep in mind that this is just a theory. The quantity equation holds as an identity. But the
assumption of constant velocity and the statement that long-run output growth is
independent of money growth are assertions based on a body of theory. We now look at how
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well this theory fits the facts.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The quantity theory of money states that the supply of money times the velocity of
money equals nominal GDP.
2. According to the classical dichotomy, real variables, such as real GDP, consumption,
investment, the real wage, and the real interest rate, are determined independently of
nominal variables, such as the money supply.
3. Using the quantity equation along with the classical dichotomy, in the long run the
inflation rate equals the rate of money growth minus the growth rate of output.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Is the real wage a nominal variable? What about the money supply?
2. If velocity of money decreases by 2 percent and the money supply does not grow, can you
say what will happen to nominal GDP growth? Can you say what will happen to
inflation?
[1] The framework complements our discussion of inflation in the short run, contained
inChapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”.
[2] In Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”, we discussed the fact that there is no simple single
definition of money. This figure refers to a number called “M2,” which includes currency and
also deposits in banks that are readily accessible for spending.
[3] If you have studied the principles of microeconomics, remember that the budget
constraint of a household depends on income divided by the price of one good and on the
price of one good in terms of another. If there are multiple goods, the budget constraint can be
determined by dividing income by the price level and by dividing all prices by the same price
level.
[4] If you have studied the principles of microeconomics, the condition that price equals
marginal cost is used to characterize the output decision of a firm. What matters then is the
price of the input, relative to the price of output.
[5] See Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”.
[6] There is one difference, unimportant here, which is that the monetary transmission
mechanism does not necessarily suppose that the velocity of money is constant.
[7] In fact, the velocity of money might also grow over time as a result of developments in the
financial sector.
11.2 Facts about Inflation and Money Growth
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What does it mean to say that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary
phenomenon”?
2. What do we know about inflation and money growth in the United States?
3. What happened during past and recent hyperinflations?
According to the quantity equation, the inflation rate and the rate of money growth are closely
linked. As the famous economist Milton Friedman said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a
monetary phenomenon.” [1] By this he meant that inflation could always ultimately be traced
to “excessive” money growth. Keep in mind that we are talking about the long run here. Over
shorter periods of time, changes in the money supply affect the level of real economic activity
and have correspondingly less effect on the inflation rate.
Inflation and Money Growth in the United States
Figure 11.4 “Inflation and Money Growth in the Short Run” and Figure 11.5 “Inflation and
Money Growth in the Long Run” show the relationship between inflation and money growth
for the United States. For this discussion, money growth is measured as M1. The rate of
money growth is on the horizontal axis, and the annual inflation rate is on the vertical axis.
Figure 11.4 Inflation and Money Growth in the Short Run
Figure 11.5 Inflation and Money Growth in the Long Run
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The two figures differ in the time horizon used to compute the growth rates. In Figure 11.4
“Inflation and Money Growth in the Short Run”, month-to-month changes in money and
prices are used to calculate annual growth rates. If you listen to a radio report or read the
newspaper about inflation, typically you will first be told about the monthly Consumer Price
Index (CPI) and then be given an annual inflation rate. The annual growth rate is the amount
by which the variable would increase if the monthly growth rate persisted for a year. The
conversion is simply to take the monthly percentage change and convert it into an annual
percentage change by multiplying by 12. So if the CPI increased from 112 to 118 over the past
month, then the change for the month would be calculated as follows:
118−112
112
=
6
112
= 0.0536 = 5.36 percent.
If prices increased at this rate each month at this same rate, then prices would increase by 12
× 5.36 percent = 64.32 percent over the year. The data for Figure 11.4 “Inflation and Money
Growth in the Short Run” start in January 1959 and end in December 2010. So the first
observation is the annual percentage change between January and February 1959.
Figure 11.5 “Inflation and Money Growth in the Long Run” examines annual growth rates
based on observing the money supply and the price level at five-year intervals. The first
observation is the annual growth rate for the period starting in January 1959 and ending in
January 1964. The annual growth rates for a five-year period are computed for each month
starting in January 1964. Here, instead of multiplying a monthly growth rate by 12 to get an
annual rate, we divide a five-year rate by 5 to get an annual rate. The point of examining
growth rates over longer periods of time goes back to the idea that we are investigating the
relationship between prices and the money supply over long periods of time.
Comparing these two figures, you can see that the relationship between money growth and
inflation is much tighter when we examine five-year periods, as in Figure 11.5 “Inflation and
Money Growth in the Long Run”, rather than the monthly changes inFigure 11.4 “Inflation
and Money Growth in the Short Run”. This is consistent with the view that the relationship
between money growth and inflation is a long-term relationship, not a short-term
relationship.
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In the monthly data, the link between money growth and inflation is relatively weak. The
correlation, a measure of how closely two variables move together, is only 0.20 in the monthly
data. In contrast, for the annual growth rates computed by looking over a five-year period, the
correlation is about 0.65, indicating that money growth and inflation move more closely
together over longer periods of time.
Toolkit: Section 16.13 “Correlation and Causality”
You can review the meaning and measurement of correlation in the toolkit.
Money Growth and Inflation in Other Countries
In the United States, money growth and inflation rates are relatively moderate. Looking back
at Figure 11.5 “Inflation and Money Growth in the Long Run”, we see that the highest inflation
rate in the past half-century was about 15 percent, in 1980. Some other countries have had a
very different experience.
Figure 11.6 “Inflation and Money Growth in Different Countries” shows data on money growth
and inflation from 110 countries. [2] On the vertical axis of the figure is the inflation rate,
measured as the annual rate of change of the CPI. On the horizontal axis is the rate of growth
of the money supply. So a point in the figure represents a single country and shows that
country’s combination of inflation and money growth. The sample period used is 1960–1990,
meaning that each point is an average over a three-decade period.
Figure 11.6 Inflation and Money Growth in Different Countries
Figure 11.6 “Inflation and Money Growth in Different Countries” clearly indicates that
countries with high money growth are the countries that experience high inflation. If you were
to draw a line through the points that came as close as possible to them, that line would have a
positive slope. McCandless and Weber conclude as follows: “In the long run, there is a high
(almost unity) correlation between the rate of growth of the money supply and the inflation
rate. This holds across three definitions of money and across the full sample of countries and
two subsamples.” [3]
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Big Inflations
Most of the countries in Figure 11.6 “Inflation and Money Growth in Different Countries”have
inflation and money growth that are less than 20 percent. There are some outliers, however.
For example, there is one country with inflation and money growth at 80 percent annually
over the sample. This country is Argentina; we return to it later. There have been episodes in
history where the rates of inflation were so large that they are difficult to comprehend.
Germany, 1922–24
Table 11.1 “Prices in Germany” contains data for Germany in the early 1920s. [4] The second
column is a measure of prices for each month, from January 1922 to June 1924. The third
column computes the annual inflation rate by multiplying the monthly inflation rate by 12.
The final column indicates the amount of time in days it would take for prices to double at the
annual inflation rate indicated in the third column. (When the number in the last column is
negative, it tells you how long it would take the price level to halve.)
Table 11.1 Prices in Germany
Month and Year Price Level Annual Growth
Rate (%)
Doubling Time in Days
January 1922 3,670 60.3 419
February 1922 4,100 133.0 190
March 1922 5,430 337.1 75
April 1922 6,350 189.7 133
May 1922 6,460 18.7 1351
June 1922 7,030 101.5 249
July 1922 10,160 441.9 57
August 1922 19,200 763.7 33
September 1922 28,700 482.4 52
October 1922 56,600 814.9 31
November 1922 115,100 851.8 30
December 1922 147,480 297.5 85
January 1923 278,500 762.9 33
February 1923 588,500 897.8 28
March 1923 488,800 -222.7 -113.6
April 1923 521,200 77.0 328
May 1923 817,000 539.4 47
June 1923 1,938,500 1036.8 24
July 1923 7,478,700 1620.2 16
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August 1923 94,404,100 3042.6 8
September 1923 2,394,889,300 2880.2 6
October 1923 709,480,000,000 6829.4 4
November 1923 72,570,000,000,000 5553.3 5
December 1923 126,160,000,000,000 663.6 38
January 1924 117,320,000,000,000 -87.2 -290
February 1924 116,170,000,000,000 -11.8 -2140
March 1924 120,670,000,000,000 45.6 555
April 1924 124,050,000,000,000 33.2 763
May 1924 122,460,000,000,000 -15.5 -1634
June 1924 115,900,000,000,000 -66.1 -383
From the table, you can get a vivid sense of the pace of prices simply by counting the number
of digits used to describe the price level. At the height of the inflation in October 1923, the
annual inflation rate was over 6,800 percent. It is hard to make sense of a number like this,
which is why we include the fourth column: at this inflation rate, prices double every 3 to 4
days. Rapid inflation of this kind is called hyperinflation.
Where does hyperinflation come from? The quantity theory tells us that the rapid price
increases must be related to growth in the money supply, a reduction in output growth, or
rapid growth in the velocity of money. Drawing on the quote from Milton Friedman, it is
natural to first examine the growth rate of the money supply. Figure 11.7 “Money Growth and
Inflation in Germany” shows the money growth and inflation rates for Germany during this
period. The graph clearly shows that as prices were exploding in Germany, so too was the
money supply. In 1922, prices increased 93 percent, and the money stock grew at 52 percent.
In the following year, the average inflation rate was up to 433 percent, and the money supply
grew at almost 300 percent. [5]
In October 1923, when the inflation rate peaked at over 6,800 percent, the money supply grew
at nearly 6,000 percent on an annual basis. According to economist Thomas Sargent, 99
percent of the outstanding bank notes had been put in circulation during the previous month.
At that point, both prices and the money supply were doubling in a matter of days. Thus the
escalating prices were matched by enormous increases in the money supply.
Figure 11.7 Money Growth and Inflation in Germany
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At first glance, the German data seem to confirm the idea that large inflation rates are driven
by large money growth rates. On closer examination, though, we notice that the inflation rates
were greater than the growth rate of the money supply. Yet we said earlier that
inflation rate = growth rate of money supply + growth rate of velocity − growth rate of output.
It follows that the velocity of money must have been increasing or output must have been
decreasing.
It is plausible, indeed likely, that the velocity of money will increase during a period of very
high inflation. If you know that the cash in your pocket will lose its value from one hour to the
next, then you want to get rid of it quickly. During the German hyperinflation, anyone with
cash wanted to exchange it as quickly as possible for goods and services. Thus money changed
hands more and more rapidly: in other words, the velocity of money increased.
Money had ceased to perform one of its key functions. It was no longer a store of value. Even
if people were still using money as a medium of exchange, they could no longer rely on money
to keep its value. A monetary system is a fragile institution: its success depends on everyone
believing in it. [6] People are willing to accept money because they think that others will, in
turn, be willing to accept it from them. During a hyperinflation, this system breaks down.
People are reluctant to accept money because they know that others will not want to accept it
from them.
Rapid inflation is also disruptive to the general functioning of the economy. People have to
devote much more time and energy to managing their cash. People insist on being paid more
frequently and abandon work to shop as soon as they are paid. Furthermore, as discussed
later, inflation acts as a tax on work. So higher inflation means a higher tax and thus a
reduction in employment and output. Overall, output does tend to decrease during
hyperinflation, increasing the inflation rate still further. For Germany, real output decreased
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by 46 percent in 1923 during the height of the hyperinflation. In contrast, 1924 was a good
year for the economy, with real output growing at 35 percent.
So while rapid money growth sets hyperinflation in motion, hyperinflation then becomes self-
fueling, powered by increases in the velocity of money and—to a minor extent—decreases in
the growth rate of output. In the end, the system can collapse completely, with people no
longer being willing to accept money at all. In Germany, this is what eventually happened.
There are many anecdotes surrounding the German hyperinflation: children using piles of
money as building blocks, households using money as wallpaper, and so forth. Figure 11.8
“The Use of Money in a Hyperinflation” shows money being used in a furnace to heat a home.
Figure 11.8 The Use of Money in a Hyperinflation
In December 1923, the hyperinflation came to an end. Look again at Table 11.1 “Prices in
Germany”. Prices in that month had increased to around a billion times greater than they had
been two years previously. But from then the price level stayed roughly steady. In fact, it
decreased for the next two months, then fluctuated somewhat. The price level in June 1924
was lower than it was at the start of the year. There is thus a new mystery to solve: what
happened to bring the inflation to an end? We return to this question shortly.
Zimbabwe
We discussed the example of Germany in some detail because it is one of the most dramatic
hyperinflations ever. But hyperinflations are not simply the stuff of economic history. Indeed,
from around 2003 to 2009, the African country of Zimbabwe was embroiled in severe
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inflation. In 2008, prices were doubling on an almost daily basis. Banknotes were issued in
denominations of 100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars.[7]
Table 11.2 “The Start of the Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe” presents some basic economic facts
about Zimbabwe as it entered the hyperinflation; the data come from an International
Monetary Fund country report
(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2005/cr05359 ). Looking at these numbers,
one is immediately struck by the severity of the decline in economic activity: real gross
domestic product (GDP) decreased every year since 2000, including an 11 percent decline in
2003. At the same time, the country experienced rapid inflation, reaching nearly 600 percent
in 2003. As indicated by the third row of the table, the money supply (measured as M1) grew
rapidly in 2003 and 2004, fueling the inflation.
Table 11.2 The Start of the Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe
Variable 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
real GDP growth (% change,
market prices)
-7.3 -2.7 -4.4 -10.9 -3.5
consumer prices (% change) 55.2 112.1 198.9 598.7 132.7
money supply (billions) 52.6 128.5 348.5 2,059.3 6,867.0
Stories from Zimbabwe resemble the experiences from the 1920s in Germany. The British
Broadcasting Company presented some interviews about life during this period of rampant
inflation.
THE STUDENT When I go to withdraw my money, I have to wait around 30 minutes
because there are so many people waiting.
It’s so difficult.
Maybe you want 10 million but they only give you 2.8, because there is not enough at
the bank.
THE LECTURER Children in Harare play in uncollected rubbish. Hyperinflation has
meant an end to rubbish collections. It’s a very strange environment.
There are a lot of pay rises, but they are meaningless.
They are always eroded the minute they give us the pay rise.
Also, considering we have so much to pay—we have parents in the countryside, and we
have families—it doesn’t work.
People are willing to lend money, but they are not willing to lend it for nothing. It’s
usually at a rate of 90 or 100 percent.
Sometimes these are your relatives or people you work with, taking advantage of this.
People are cannibalizing each other.
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THE MOTHER Because my income hasn’t risen as much as the prices in the shops, we
have had to adjust quite a bit.
The things that we buy—the groceries at home, the things we get for our two children—
we have to buy immediately, as soon as we get the money.
We know that if we wait a bit, the prices are going to go up again. If we wait another
week, we will not be able to afford anything.
People are taking the money out in suitcases or carrier bags. [8]
Zimbabwe’s citizens increasingly turned to other currencies to conduct transactions, even
though the Zimbabwe dollar was officially the only legal tender in the country. The Zimbabwe
hyperinflation eventually ended in January 2009, when the Finance Minister officially
permitted citizens to use other currencies in places of the Zimbabwe dollar. [9]
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The quote by Milton Friedman that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary
phenomenon” points out the connection between money growth and price growth
(inflation). From this perspective, the source of inflation is money growth.
2. Over long periods of time, inflation and money growth are closely linked in the United
States.
3. The hyperinflations in many countries, such as Germany and Zimbabwe, were times
of rapid growth in prices stemming from rapid expansions of the money supply and
subsequently fueled by increases in the velocity of money.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What happens to the velocity of money during a hyperinflation?
2. What is the difference between a monthly inflation rate and an annual inflation rate?
[1] This quote comes from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the
United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).
[2] See George McCandless Jr. and Warren Weber, “Some Monetary Facts,” Federal Reserve
Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 2–11. The article provides a
complete description of the data and the countries.
[3] George McCandless Jr. and Warren Weber, “Some Monetary Facts,” Federal Reserve
Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 2–11.
[4] The data come from Thomas Sargent, “The Ends of Four Big Inflations,” in Inflation:
Causes and Effects, ed. Robert Hall (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research,
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1982). The data in this case show the levels of wholesale prices because reliable consumer
price indices were not available.
[5] These are calculated as January to January growth rates.
[6] See Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide” for more discussion.
[7] “Zimbabwe Hyperinflation ‘Will Set World Record within Six Weeks,’” The
Telegraph,November 13, 2008, accessed August 22,
2011,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zimbabwe/345354
0/Zimbabwe-hyperinflation-will-set-world-record-within-six-weeks.html, accessed August
22, 2011; “A Worthless Currency,” The Economist, July 17, 2008, accessed August 22,
2011,http://www.economist.com/node/11751346?story_id=E1_TTSVTPQG, accessed August
22, 2011.
[8] “Zimbabwe: Living with Hyperinflation,” BBC News, January 31, 2006, accessed July 21,
2011,http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4665854.stm.
[9] “Zimbabwe Abandons Its Currency,” BBC News, January 29, 2009, accessed August 22,
2011,http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7859033.stm.
11.3 The Causes of Inflation
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the inflation tax?
2. How is inflation caused by the central bank’s commitment problem?
3. What happens if there are multiple regions (states or countries) independently
choosing how much money to print?
We have argued so far that inflation is caused by excessive money growth, which in turn leads
to increases in the velocity of money. But we have also documented that rapid inflations are
damaging to the functioning of an economy. There is therefore a deeper question to be asked:
why on earth do monetary authorities pursue policies that lead to such disastrous outcomes?
The Inflation Tax
Suppose your country is at war. Wars are expensive. Not only are there soldiers to be paid and
kept supplied, but your valuable aircraft and tanks are liable to be destroyed by the enemy
while you are in turn throwing costly ammunition and missiles at them. How do governments
pay for all these expenses? One thing that the government can do is to tax the population to
pay these bills. It may not be feasible to collect enough tax revenue in the time of a war,
however. Many governments instead borrow during times of large expenses. This allows the
government to spread the tax burdens over time.
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So far, taxation and borrowing are the only two possibilities that we have considered. But
there is a third possibility: a government can simply print the money it needs. There is a
government budget constraint that says [1]
deficit = change in government debt + change in money supply.
The left side of this equation is the deficit of the government. The deficit is the difference
between government outlays and government receipts. The right side of this equation
describes how the government finances its deficit. This equation says that the government can
finance its deficit by issuing either new government bonds or new money.
Toolkit: Section 16.22 “The Government Budget Constraint”
You can review the details of the government budget constraint in the toolkit.
There is a puzzle here. Money is just a piece of paper with writing on it. The government can
print it at will. Yet the government can take these pieces of paper and exchange them for
goods and services of real value. It can pay soldiers, or nurses, or construction workers who
are building roads. It can print money, hand it over to Airbus or Boeing, and get a new
airplane. So who is really paying in this case?
We already know everything we need to know to figure out the answer. When the government
prints more money, prices will eventually increase. This comes directly from the quantity
equation once we remember that real variables are independent of the money supply in the
long run. In the long run, the extra money will just result in higher prices and no additional
output. And increased prices mean that existing money becomes less valuable. If the price
level increases by 10 percent, existing dollar bills are worth 10 percent less than they were;
they will buy (roughly) 10 percent less in terms of goods and services. Inflation is exactly like a
tax on the money that people currently hold in their wallets and pocketbooks. Indeed, we say
that there is an inflation tax when the government prints money to finance its deficit.
Examine the government budget constraint again. If we write out the deficit in full, the
equation says
government purchases + transfers − tax receipts = change in government debt+ change in
money supply.
Suppose that government purchases increase, say due to a war, by $100 billion. This equation
tells us that, to finance this expense, the government could
increase taxes now by $100 billion,
increase taxes now by less than $100 billion and sell some government debt,
increase taxes now by less than $100 billion and print some money.
In some sense, these are all versions of the same thing: to finance the spending of $100
billion, the government will have to increase taxes. Those taxes may be paid now, they may be
paid later (when the government repays the debt), or they may be paid through the inflation
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tax. The government must decide how to best increase taxes to finance the extra spending,
and the inflation tax is one option available to the government.
Commitment
It is hard to imagine that a government acting in the interests of its citizens would choose to
bring about hyperinflation. Why do governments apply such misguided policies? The leading
explanations all fall under the heading of a “weak” central bank. A weak central bank is unable
to pursue its normal goal of price stability and instead becomes a tool of other interests, such
as the fiscal authorities.
A government entity, such as a central bank or the treasury, suffers from
acommitment problem when it is not able to make credible promises to pursue certain
actions. Suppose a central bank wishes to pursue a strategy of stabilizing prices. If the
economy is in a deep recession, the central bank might instead come under pressure to reduce
interest rates. Reductions in interest rates require the central bank to increase the money
supply and ultimately create inflation, yet if it could commit to a policy, the central bank
might prefer to focus on inflation and ignore the recession. Let us see how these types of
commitment problems work through some examples.
Increasing Output
The level of potential output in an economy is not necessarily the ideal level of output. Even
when the economy is at potential, there is some unemployment and some spare capacity. The
monetary authority therefore might have a target level of output that is above potential
output. Suppose (for simplicity) that its target level of inflation is zero. To understand what
will happen, we use our model of price adjustment:
inflation rate = autonomous inflation − inflation sensitivity × output gap.
Toolkit: Section 16.20 “Price Adjustment”
You can review the details of price adjustment in the toolkit.
To begin with, suppose that everyone in the economy believes that there will be zero inflation,
so autonomous inflation is zero. Were output equal to potential output (so the output gap is
zero), then actual inflation would also be zero. This situation is summarized in Figure 11.9
“The Gains to Inflation”. However, if the Fed follows a Taylor rule, it will react to the fact
that output is below its target by reducing real interest rates with the aim of increasing
spending and output. The price adjustment equation then tells us that there will be positive
inflation. This outcome is also shown in Figure 11.9 “The Gains to Inflation” as the
combination of the target level of output and a positive inflation rate.
Figure 11.9 The Gains to Inflation
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If target inflation = autonomous inflation = 0, but target output is above potential output,
then the Fed will reduce the real interest rate and create more output to meet its target
output. This will create inflation.
This is not the end of the story. Everyone in the economy is predicting zero inflation, yet the
Fed is using its monetary policy to increase output and create positive inflation. Over time,
people will notice that their expectations are wrong and will start to expect positive inflation
instead. This results in an increase in autonomous inflation and a shift in the relationship
between inflation and output.
At that point the Fed will have an incentive to create still more inflation to pursue its goal of
output above potential. But additional inflation is costly to the Fed because it is now moving
away from its target of zero inflation. Eventually inflation will be so high that the Fed no
longer wants to create more inflation to increase output. The economy will end up with a
positive inflation rate, where expectations of inflation are equal to actual inflation and no one
is fooled. In the end, the Fed incurs an inflation rate above its target, yet it does not succeed in
creating output above potential.
The final outcome involves costly inflation, but output remains at potential. Given that it
cannot actually keep output above potential, the Fed would prefer zero inflation, yet it lacks
the ability to commit to a zero-inflation policy. If the inflation rate is zero, the Fed has an
incentive to create positive inflation.
The Politics of Fiscal Policy
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The government budget constraint tells us that are three ways to fund spending: taxes today,
the inflation tax, or debt (which means taxes at some future date). A government that has the
best interests of its citizens at heart will decide on the best mix of these three. Optimists may
believe that this is what governments try to do. Cynics might hold a very different view.
Suppose—just suppose—that the leader of a government is more concerned with reelection
than with sound economic policy and believes that her chances of reelection will be increased
if she pledges not to increase taxes now or in the future. If this promise is credible, then the
government budget constraint tells us that any increases in spending must be financed by
money growth.
The monetary authority again has no power to commit to avoid inflation. The fiscal side of the
government has set the level of spending and decided, based on the wishes of the political
leaders, to have low taxes. Faced with this fiscal package, the monetary authority has no
choice: it must print money to finance the government budget constraint. This story relies on
the belief that individuals in the economy do not understand that the government, by its fiscal
actions, is causing inflation and thus imposing a kind of tax.
A more extreme example arises when the government’s expenditures are so great that it
simply cannot finance them with current taxation. This can occur in poorer economies where
the tax base is low and the mechanisms for collecting taxes are often imperfect. Moreover, a
government can finance its deficit through borrowing only if the public is willing to purchase
government bonds. If a government is in fiscal trouble—if its tax and spending policies appear
to the public to be unsustainable—it will have great difficulty persuading the public and the
international investment community to buy government debt. Investors will demand a very
high interest rate (including a risk premium) to cover the possibility that the government
may default on its debt. Interest rates on debt will increase.
At this point a government may find that the only option available to it is to finance its deficit
through the printing of money. After all, no government wants to be in the position of being
unable to pay its soldiers. The leaders of a country in such a position will decide to run the
printing presses instead. The end result is inflation and, if the process gets completely out of
control, hyperinflation. But from the government’s point of view, at least it buys it some time.
Thus although moderate inflations are caused by poor monetary policy, hyperinflations are
almost always originally caused by unsustainable fiscal policies.
Regional Monetary Policy
Figure 11.10 “The Price Level in Argentina” shows the price level in Argentina from 1988 to
2005. Argentina experienced hyperinflation in the early 1990s. Prices were then stable for
about a decade and then increased again in the early years of the 21st century. In Argentina,
different regional governments have significant power over the decisions of the central
government. (It is as if a state government in the United States could appeal for funds directly
from Washington.) These transfers from the central government in turn must be funded
either from tax revenues or by printing money. If a region is sufficiently powerful relative to
the central government, then it is as if the regional government has the power to print
currency.
Figure 11.10 The Price Level in Argentina
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Source: International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook database
(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/index.htm).
A battle between regional governments can give rise to hyperinflation. [2] To simplify the
issue, suppose that each region in Argentina has its own printing press. Each region can then
independently undertake monetary policy by printing Argentine pesos and using those pesos
to fund projects within their regions. The inflation tax is very tempting in these
circumstances: a regional government can in effect tax people in other regions to help pay for
its own projects. Why? Because printing money results in an inflation tax on everyone who
has pesos. If money is printed in one region, some of the inflation tax will be paid by people in
other regions who have pesos.
To be concrete, imagine you are a politician in Buenos Aires who wants to raise 100 million
pesos for a project in that city. You could levy an income tax on citizens of your area.
Alternatively, you could print 100 million pesos. If you impose the income tax, your own
citizens must pay it all. If you impose the inflation tax, people living in other regions of
Argentina pay some of the tax. Your constituents get the benefit, but others bear a large part
of the costs. Acting in the interests of your constituents, you print the pesos. Of course, this
story is true not only for you but also for the leaders in all regions. In the end, there is
excessive money growth in the economy as a whole and high inflation. The monetary
authorities are weak because no single authority controls the overall money supply.
The situation we have described is sometimes called a prisoners’ dilemma. In a prisoners’
dilemma, the actions of one person imposes costs on others, and the behavior that is best for
each individual decision maker (in this case, all the regional monetary authorities) is not best
for the country as a whole.
Toolkit: Section 16.9 “Nash Equilibrium”
If you are interested in more detail on the prisoners’ dilemma game, you can review it in the
toolkit.
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Reducing Distortions from Taxes
Suppose a government faces a large expense today and can tax labor income to pay for it. One
option is to increase income taxes today by a lot to finance this expense. This would cause a
reduction in labor supply and thus in employment and real gross domestic product (GDP).
This distortion in labor supply is an economic cost of the tax. Alternatively, the government
could increase taxes a little bit today and a little bit in future years. This spreads out the tax
over many years and leads to less distortion. The government budget constraint tells us that
the government can spread out taxes by borrowing new and levying taxes later to pay off the
debt.
If the government had access to a nondistortionary tax instead of income taxes, it would be
better to use that tax instead. For a tax not to be distortionary, it must be the case that
economic decisions (how much to buy and sell, how much labor to supply, etc.) do not change
when the tax changes. At first glance, it seems that the inflation tax might fit the bill.
Remember the inflation tax makes people’s existing stocks of money worth less in real terms.
People have already decided how much money to hold. So if the government levies an
inflation tax, it is not distortionary; people have already made their decisions on how much
money they want to own.
But there is a danger here. Our argument rests on the idea that the decisions about which
assets to hold have already been made by households. The inflation tax might be
nondistortionary the first time that the government tried it. But people would rapidly come to
anticipate that the government would be likely to use it again. At that point they would start
changing their decisions about how much money to hold, and the tax would be distortionary
after all.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. A government that prints money to finance its deficit is using an inflation tax.
Individuals who hold nominal assets such as currency pay the tax.
2. One source of inflation is a commitment problem of a central bank wishing to use
inflation to boost output.
3. When there are multiple regions (states or countries) each with the power to print
money, then inflation will tend to be higher than it would be if only a single central
bank controlled the money supply.
Checking Your Understanding
1. When you pay the inflation tax, do you have to fill out a form? If not, then how is the
inflation tax collected?
2. If a government has a deficit of $400 billion and sells $200 billion in debt, how much
must it increase the money supply so that the government budget constraint holds?
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[1] The government budget constraint is discussed in Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”.
[2] Russell Cooper and Hubert Kempf, “Dollarization and the Conquest of Hyperinflation in
Divided Societies,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review, Summer 2001,
accessed July 21, 2011, http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/QR/QR2531 .
11.4 The Costs of Inflation
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the costs of an excessive inflation tax?
2. When does inflation cause a redistribution?
At the beginning of this chapter, we highlighted President Ford’s campaign to “Whip Inflation
Now.” It is clear from that episode that even relatively moderate inflation is perceived as a bad
thing. It is even more self-evident that massive inflations, such as those in Germany or
Zimbabwe, are highly disruptive. It is hardly surprising that the stated primary objective of
most central banks is price stability. All that said, we have not yet really explained exactly why
inflation is costly.
An Excessive Inflation Tax
Inflation, used as one tax among many, may be an efficient way of raising some of a
government’s revenues. The effects of the inflation tax are like the effects of any tax: people
respond by substituting away from the activity being taxed. When the government taxes
cigarettes, people smoke less. When the government taxes income, people work less. When
the government taxes the money people hold, people hold less money. These changes in
behavior are the distortions caused by taxation. People substitute away from holding money
in two ways: (1) during moderate inflations, people allocate more of their time to transactions;
and (2) during high inflations, people may cease using money altogether.
During high inflations, the real value of money decreases quickly. So if you work and get paid
in money, you had better go shopping quickly to make purchases. During hyperinflations,
people may literally spend more time trying to get rid of their money than they do earning it
in the first place. The same distortion applies, although less dramatically, in times of low to
moderate inflation. People respond to inflation by carrying less cash, on average. To do so,
they must spend more time standing in line in the bank and at automatic teller machines.
Imagine that ice cream were to be used as money. In a very cold climate, ice cream is just fine
as a store of value. In a very hot climate, by contrast, ice cream is a bad store of value. You
would probably want to get paid every day, and as soon as you received your ice cream, you
would run to the store to buy other goods and services before your money melted. You and
everyone else would spend much more time shopping and less time working. Melting ice
cream, in this world, is like inflation.
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There is a good reason why we do not use ice cream as a medium of exchange. Because it is
such a bad store of value, people would quickly abandon it in terms of some other way of
trading. During hyperinflations, this is exactly what we see: people substitute away from
money completely and instead resort to barter trades. Often, some other commodity, such as
cigarettes, starts being generally accepted as an alternative to money. But substitution away
from money is costly to the economy. Money facilitates trade. It is generally easier to trade
when everyone uses money rather than goods in exchange. When people respond to high
inflation by eliminating money from trades, we are observing a distortion from the inflation
tax.
Uncertainty and Real Interest Rates
It is the real interest rate that ultimately matters for saving and investment decisions. Yet
loans are almost invariably quoted in nominal terms: a loan contract gives the borrower some
money with a requirement to pay back that money plus interest in the future. The real and the
nominal interest rates are linked by the Fisher equation:
real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − inflation rate.
To calculate the real interest rate you subtract the inflation rate from the nominal interest
rate. So, for example, if the annual interest rate on a car loan is 12 percent and the current
inflation rate is 4 percent, then the real interest rate on the car loan is 8 percent.
Toolkit: Section 16.14 “The Fisher Equation: Nominal and Real Interest Rates”
You can review the derivation and uses of the Fisher equation in the toolkit.
The Fisher equation glosses over an important point, however. Suppose you are thinking of
taking out a loan this year, allowing you to borrow money now for repayment next year. The
inflation rate that matters for this loan is the inflation between this year and next. At the time
you sign the contract, you do not know what the inflation rate will be.You must make your
decision about the loan without knowing for sure what the real interest rate will be. You have
to make a guess:
expected real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − expected inflation rate.
Thus when a loan contract is signed, it is based on expectations of what will happen to prices
in the future. If a borrower and lender would like to agree on a loan at a 4 percent real interest
rate, but both expect 2 percent inflation, then they will agree on a 6 percent nominal interest
rate.
What happens if the inflation rate turns out to be different from what the borrower and lender
expected? Suppose the actual inflation rate turns out to be 4 percent. This means that the
actual real interest rate, from the Fisher equation, is only 2 percent. This is good news for the
borrower: he gets a loan at a lower rate than he expected. But it is bad news for the lender: she
is repaid at a lower rate than she expected. The opposite is true if the inflation rate is lower
than expected. Suppose the actual inflation rate is only 1 percent. Then the real interest rate is
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higher than anticipated—5 percent instead of 4 percent—which benefits the lender but is
costly to the borrower.
Any divergence between actual and expected inflation therefore leads to a redistribution,
either from the borrower to the lender or from the lender to the borrower. When inflation is
higher than expected, the borrower is better off, and the lender is worse off. The opposite
effects occur if inflation is lower than expected: the borrower loses, and the lender wins.
The possibility that the inflation rate will turn out to be unexpectedly high or unexpectedly
low means that there is uncertainty whenever people sign loan contracts. A fixed nominal
interest rate on a loan exposes both the borrower and the lender to the risk of inflation
uncertainty. Uncertainty can prevent beneficial trades from taking place. Imagine that you
were thinking of buying a used car, but you had to decide to buy without knowing whether the
price was going to be $1,500 or $2,000. You might well decide not to buy in the face of this
uncertainty. Similarly, people might sometimes decide not to sign loan contracts that would
actually be beneficial to them.
The borrower and the lender could always change the form of their contract. Contracts do
not have to specify nominal interest rates, and not all of them do. Some loans have interest
rates that change with the actual inflation rate. In this way, borrowers and lenders can protect
themselves from unexpected inflation. However, such contracts are unusual in practice and
are most often seen in countries experiencing high and uncertain inflation. What should we
conclude from the fact that loan contracts are rarely protected against inflation? Presumably
one of two things is true: either such contracts are expensive to write or the benefit of these
contracts is actually small.
Unexpected inflation can also have redistributive effects with other types of contracts. Labor
contracts are an example. Although the worker and the firm ultimately care about real wages,
most labor contracts are written in terms of nominal wages. That is, most labor arrangements
are not indexed and thus leave the parties open to the effects of unanticipated inflation. So, for
example, if inflation is higher than anticipated, then the real wage earned by the worker is
lower than expected, which is a benefit to the firm.
Economies do respond to inflation, partly through the way in which people write contracts. In
countries with high and volatile inflation, labor and other contracts generally provide some
form of protection against inflation through indexation. For example, if you agree to a job that
pays you $10 an hour this year, the nominal wage rate next year will change depending on
inflation. If, for example, inflation was 20 percent this year, then under an indexed contract
your nominal wage would automatically increase by 20 percent to $12. Under full indexation,
the real wage you are paid is constant.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Inflation can distort choices, such as the holding of money. A small amount of
inflation, so that it is one tax among many, makes economic sense, but high inflation
leads to significant distortion in the economy.
2. Expected inflation is reflected in the terms of loan agreements. Unexpected inflation
leads to a lower real interest rate and thus a redistribution from the lender to the
borrower.
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Checking Your Understanding
1. If the inflation rate is lower than expected, who gains and who losses?
2. What costs of inflation are highlighted in our discussion of Zimbabwe inSection 11
“Zimbabwe”?
11.5 Policy Remedies
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What actions can governments take to prevent excessive inflation?
2. How can hyperinflations be ended?
3. How do governments overcome the commitment problem?
We have already explained that money is a fragile social institution: money has value only
because people believe it has value. Hyperinflations illustrate this fragility. Large inflations
are impressive but, fortunately, are also relatively rare. In other words, most of the time
monetary authorities are somehow able to maintain confidence in the system. To understand
how they do so, we begin by looking at how hyperinflations come to an end.
Ending Big Inflations
As noted in Section 11.3.1 “The Inflation Tax”, the rapid inflation in Germany ended abruptly.
Although October 1923 was the month with the highest inflation rate, prices actually
decreased in early 1924.
How did the hyperinflation end? The answer has to do with the conduct of fiscal policy. On
October 15, 1923, a decree created a new currency from the old one. A key element of the
decree was limits imposed on the money creation process by the central bank, particularly the
provision of credit to the government. According to economist Thomas Sargent, who has
studied how hyperinflations end, “This limitation on the amount of credit that could be
extended to the government was announced at a time when the government was financing
virtually 100 percent of its expenditures by means of note issue.” [1] Prior to October 1923,
government spending was financed by printing money. After the decree, the printing presses
were effectively turned off. As a consequence, the government’s budget went into surplus
starting in January 1924. The hyperinflation was over once the printing presses were quiet.
Other countries that experienced hyperinflation around this time had similar stories: there
was an abrupt end to hyperinflation after a regime change in which fiscal imbalances were
restored. In Austria, for example, the inflation ended when the government established an
independent central bank and adopted a fiscal policy that did not require financing by the
central bank. The reforms in these countries had two effects: (1) the fiscal reforms limited the
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budget deficits, and (2) the monetary restrictions implied that deficits would not be financed
by the printing of money.
A natural question is: what took them so long? Given the damage caused by these periods of
hyperinflation, why did the countries not adopt these policies earlier? Part of the explanation
may lie in political affiliations of the governments in these countries. Or, perhaps, these
governments simply did not appreciate the rather complex links between fiscal and monetary
policy.
Delegating Monetary Power to Another Country
Sometimes countries take even more drastic measures to shield monetary policy from political
pressures. One is to effectively eliminate the monetary authority and delegate monetary policy
to another country. Some small countries do this by simply using another country’s currency.
Panama, El Salvador, and Ecuador, for example, have used the US dollar as their currency.
Zimbabwe effectively did the same in 2009.
Argentina in the 1990s is an interesting example of a country that went almost—but not
quite—that far. Figure 11.10 “The Price Level in Argentina” shows the price level in Argentina
from 1988 to 2005. There are evidently three distinct periods: very high inflation, zero
inflation, and then moderate inflation. From 1988 to 1993, there was substantial inflation. The
annual inflation rate was about 343 percent in 1988 and was over 2,300 percent in 1990. But
by 1993 it was only 10 percent, and from 1994 to 2001 it was effectively zero. Then, starting in
2002, there was a resurgence of inflation. What happened?
As we explained earlier, Argentina suffered from hyperinflation in the late 1980s as a
consequence of a weak monetary authority. In 1991, Argentina adopted a novel monetary
system called a currency board. Every single peso in circulation was “backed” by a US
dollar held by the Central Bank of Argentina. If desired, people had the right to take their
pesos to the Central Bank of Argentina and swap them for dollars. Thus Argentina both
adopted a fixed exchange rate between the peso and the dollar (1 peso equals $1) and also
made that exchange rate credible by always having enough dollars on hand to exchange for
the pesos in circulation. For all intents and purposes, Argentina had switched to using US
dollars.
Argentina therefore avoided inflation by ceding control of monetary policy to the United
States. Since the central bank in the United States controls the quantity of dollars and
Argentina linked pesos to dollars, then, everything else the same, the Fed could change the
amount of pesos in Argentina, whereas the Central Bank of Argentina could not. The Central
Bank of Argentina could resist pressures to inflate by arguing that it did not control the money
supply.
Many observers thought at the time that Argentina’s currency board would ensure price
stability in Argentina. They thought that there would no longer be pressure on the monetary
authority from the fiscal side of the economy. This proved to be incorrect. Taking advantage of
its healthy economy in the early 1990s, Argentina adopted expansionary fiscal policies. A
combination of factors then triggered recession in the country. Unemployment increased to 18
percent. It was not possible to expand fiscal policy much further, and Argentina had given up
its control over monetary problem. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the recession became so
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severe that the political pressure on the monetary authority was insurmountable. Argentina
abandoned its currency board. One result was a resurgence of inflation.
Another variation on the delegation of monetary policy is that adopted by many countries in
Europe. They decided to abandon their currencies and their monetary autonomy in favor of a
new currency called the euro. Monetary policy is run by the European Central Bank, which is
highly independent. Independent central banks are better able to resist political pressure, so
countries that had previously had weak central banks saw a significant advantage in adopting
the euro.
Abandoning one’s currency in favor of a new currency, as occurred throughout Europe, seems
like a particularly powerful way for a country to commit to a new monetary regime. It is worth
remembering, though, that no monetary system is cast is stone. Just as Argentina’s currency
board collapsed despite its apparent credibility, so too could a country decide to abandon the
euro and reestablish its own currency. Indeed, following fiscal problems in several countries
in Europe (most notably Greece, Portugal, and Ireland), there has been some speculation that
some countries might eventually choose to do just that.
Independent Monetary Authorities
Hyperinflations arise when the central bank is weak and unable to resist the pressures put on
it by others—notably politicians—to use monetary policy for other purposes. Monetary
authorities must be able to “just say no.” This suggests that monetary authorities will be able
to do a better job if they are independent of other branches of government.
Economists have studied the relationship between measures of the independence of a
country’s central bank and the inflation rate in that country. Economists Alberto Alesina and
Lawrence Summers examined both political and economic independence of the monetary
authority. By political independence, they meant the process of appointing the leadership of
the central bank and the role of government officials in the conduct of monetary policy. By
economic independence, they meant the extent to which the monetary authority is under
pressure to finance the government’s budget deficit.
Figure 11.11 “Central Bank Independence and Inflation” displays data from their research. The
horizontal axis shows annual inflation, and the vertical axis is their index of central bank
independence, with higher numbers indicating a more independent central bank. The data are
averaged over the period 1955–1988. Each point in the figure refers to a particular country.
Switzerland and Germany both receive very “high” central bank independence ratings of 4 and
have relatively low average inflation. Spain, in contrast, has the second lowest measure of
central bank independence and has the highest inflation rate in the study.
Figure 11.11 Central Bank Independence and Inflation
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Since the work of Alesina and Summers (and other economists), more and more countries
have become convinced of the virtues of having an independent central bank. For example,
when the Labour Party came to power in Britain during the 1990s, one of their first acts was to
make the Bank of England more independent. This was particularly striking because the
Labour Party is a center-left political party, yet independent central banks tend to be
conservative, focusing primarily on inflation and not worrying so much about employment
and output.
Events in Argentina also attest to the value of an independent central bank. In 2003, the
Congress in Argentina passed an act stating,
The Argentine Central Bank is a National State self-governed institution, whose
primary and fundamental mission is to preserve the value of the Argentine currency.
When formulating and implementing the monetary and financial policy, it is not subject
to the orders, guidelines or instructions of the National Executive branch of
government. [2]
There are two key elements in this act. First, the stated goal of the Central Bank of Argentina
is to preserve the value of the currency. There is no mention of pursuing full employment, just
a version of price stability. Second, the central bank is to be independent of the executive
branch of the government.
Inflation Targeting
Under a policy regime called inflation targeting, some central banks use their tools to set
the inflation rate as close as possible to a target. Just as we know that a monetary authority
cannot literally control interest rates, we know it cannot literally set the inflation rate either.
Rather, it can use the policy tools at its disposal to influence the economy in an attempt to
reach the target inflation rate.
In its simplest form, the target is some publically announced inflation rate—say, 3 percent. If
the monetary authority thinks the inflation rate is likely to be higher than 3 percent for the
year, it adopts contractionary monetary policy to reduce the inflation rate. If it thinks that the
inflation rate is likely to be lower than the target, it adopts an expansionary policy. Inflation in
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this world is relatively predictable.
What should the target be? If, as one might believe from all the discussion in the press and
elsewhere, inflation is a pernicious problem, then perhaps the inflation target should be zero.
Yet most central banks following this policy adopt targets with positive inflation rates, based
on the belief that a little bit of inflation may be useful in the economy. One argument often
heard is that deflation (negative inflation) is problematic. From a historical perspective, a
prolonged period of deflation in the Unites States occurred during the Great Depression and
coincided with a negative output growth. More recently, Japan experienced both slow real
gross domestic product (real GDP) growth and some periods of deflation during the 1990s.
Many policymakers have apparently concluded that deflation is to be avoided because it could
underlie a depression. An alternative possibility is that deflation is correlated with periods of
low economic activity, but it is unclear whether it is the cause or the consequence of a sluggish
economy. Whatever the connection between deflation and depression, the prevailing wisdom
of the Fed (and other central banks) is to avoid deflation. Given that the central banks cannot
always hit their targets precisely, aiming for zero inflation makes deflation more likely than
when central banks adopt a target with positive inflation.
In addition, a little inflation may make it easier for relative prices and wages to adjust in an
economy. If the demand for beef decreases and the demand for pork increases, then the price
of beef should decrease, and the price of pork should increase. Such adjustment is
straightforward. Similar logic says that if the demand for accountants decreases and the
demand for systems analysts increases, then the wages of accountants should decrease, and
the wages of systems analysts should increase. This may be more problematic. People typically
respond very negatively if there is an attempt to cut their wages. It may be easier for
employers to let inflation do the job of reducing the real wage instead. (This is an argument
that makes some economists uncomfortable since it implies irrationality on the part of
workers. Still, the psychological resistance to nominal wage cuts appears to be strong.)
A second issue is whether the inflation target should be allowed to vary. Instead of
announcing a 3 percent target for all times, the monetary authority might decide that the
target rate should depend on the state of the economy. For example, they could have a higher
target rate in recession and a lower target rate in booms. This way monetary policy could still
be used to help keep the economy at potential output.
Finally, there is the question of “punishment” for missing a target. If the purpose of inflation
targeting is to support a particular (moderate) inflation rate, then a central banker missing the
target ought to be fined or even terminated, just like a manager of a store who persistently
misses sales targets. Presumably, if a central bank has goals to achieve, it should also have
incentives to meet those goals. Central bankers are often called to testify in front of bodies,
such as the US Congress, who monitor the progress of the economy relative to particular
targets.
Australia is an example of a country that follows an inflation target rule. According to the
charter of the Reserve Bank of Australia (http://www.rba.gov.au/monetary-
policy/about.html), the goal of Australian monetary policy is to maintain inflation between 2
and 3 percent annually, on average. The central bank does also recognize of the role of
monetary policy for stabilization purposes. Thus even though it has a target range for
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inflation, it also examines the state of the economy when setting monetary policy. Moreover,
the phrase on average means that the central bank has some leeway in the conduct of policy:
they can allow inflation to increase above 3 percent for a short while, provided that they
eventually take actions to bring the inflation rate back down.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Governments can take a variety of actions to prevent excessive inflation. These
include the delegation of monetary policy to another central bank, the creation of an
independent monetary authority, and constraining monetary policy to focus solely on
inflation.
2. Historically hyperinflations ended when the government restored fiscal balance by
eliminating deficit spending.
3. A government can overcome a commitment problem by delegating the conduct of
monetary policy to a more conservative central bank. This can be achieved through a
currency board or through joining a monetary union.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What is the difference between a fixed exchange rate and a currency board?
2. What is an independent central bank?
[1] Thomas Sargent, “The Ends of Four Big Inflations,” in Inflation: Causes and Effects, ed.
Robert Hall (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1982), 83.
[2] “BCRA Law,” Banco Central de la República Argentina, accessed September 20,
2011,http://www.bcra.gov.ar/institucional/in010000_i.asp.
11.6 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
We have studied some severe and extreme cases of inflation to reveal the sources of rapid
price increases. The quantity equation and the data both clearly indicate that inflation is
linked to money supply growth. During periods of rapid inflation, the money supply is
growing as well. The velocity of money also increases in times of rapid inflation, reflecting the
collapse of confidence in the monetary system.
Money supply growth, in turn, comes about because money creation can help finance
government budget deficits. Instead of using taxes to finance government spending,
governments just print money. This increases prices and thus acts like a tax on those holding
money and other nominal assets. Like all taxes, the inflation tax is distortionary. Used in
moderation, there is an argument for using this tax along with others. But for some countries
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in some time periods, the use of the inflation tax has been excessive and there have been very
costly hyperinflations.
The way to avoid excessive inflation is to create fiscal balance and monetary discipline. The
big inflations between World War I and World War II ended when fiscal balance was restored.
Monetary discipline comes in many forms. It requires an independent central bank, immune
from political pressures. It may also require a central bank focused on an inflation target,
paying less attention to other macroeconomic issues.
Key Links
PBS history of German
hyperinflation:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_g
ermanhyperinflation.html
Federal Reserve releases on the measures of the money
stock:http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6
International Monetary Fund country report on
Zimbabwe:http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2011/cr11135
Australia Monetary Policy: http://www.rba.gov.au/monetary-policy/about.html
Jim Bullard, Federal Reserve Bank president, Seven Faces of “the
Peril”:http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/10/09/Bullard
Gary Stern, Federal Reserve Bank president, on
deflation:http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/pub_display.cfm?id=3354
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis publication on
deflation:http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3
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EXERCISES
1. What is the difference between the quantity equation and the quantity theory of
money?
2. According to the classical dichotomy, what happens to the real money supply if the
nominal money supply grows at 10 percent?
3. If you were to draw a line through the points in Figure 11.6 “Inflation and Money
Growth in Different Countries”, it would not pass through the origin. Can you
explain why? (Hint: examine the equation for the quantity equation, expressed in
growth rates.)
4. Looking at Figure 11.10 “The Price Level in Argentina”, you might be fooled into
thinking that the inflation between 2002 and 2003 was almost as bad as that
between 1990 and 1991. Why would this reasoning be a mistake?
5. The chapter contains two perspectives on Germany. The first is the hyperinflation
in Germany during the 1920s, and the second is current Germany with low inflation
and an independent central bank. How would you describe the differences in
economic achievement (inflation, output growth, and unemployment) between
these two versions of Germany? What were the institutional differences between
these two versions of Germany?
6. Looking at Table 11.2 “The Start of the Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe”, what
happened to the velocity of money in Zimbabwe during the hyperinflation?
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_germanhyperinflation.html
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2011/cr11135
http://www.rba.gov.au/monetary-policy/about.html
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/10/09/Bullard
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/pub_display.cfm?id=3354
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3350
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3350
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7. If the central bank takes the view that producing at potential GDP is efficient, then
does it face a commitment problem?
8. In 2010, the state of California faced severe budgetary problems. If the state could
print dollars, how would that relieve its budget problems? Who would pay the
inflation tax?
Economics Detective
1. In the United States, how many central banks are there?
2. In note 5, we mention a measure of the money supply called “M2.” There are other
measures of the money supply. For example, “M1” refers to currency and other
assets that are immediately available for spending purposes. Find the most recent
measure of the stocks of M1 and M2 for the United States.
3. Calculate the velocity of money for a country other than the United States.
4. The chapter did not present data on other recent periods of high inflation in countries
such as Argentina, Brazil, Israel, and others. Search the Internet to find data on the
inflation experiences of these countries. Create a graph of the growth rates of
inflation and money in one of these countries.
5. It might be that countries have high money growth and thus high inflation because
these are the goals of their monetary authority. See whether you can find a monetary
authority with a stated goal of high inflation. If not, then think about why countries
experience inflation if that is not the objective of the monetary authority?
6. What countries are dollarized in the world economy? Try to find out how dollarization
influenced the inflation rate in that country.
7. Try to find a statement of the objectives of the Central Bank of Argentina. Part of
independence is the way in which the decision makers at the central bank are
appointed. How are these appointments made in Argentina?
8. Go to the web page for the Bank of Australia to learn about inflation targeting. What
is their inflation target? How is it determined? What happens if they miss the target?
Compare this to the objective and policy decisions of the Fed in the United States.
What other central banks follow an inflation-targeting rule?
9. Is monetary policy in the United States guided by an inflation target? Does the
European Central Bank use an inflation target?
Spreadsheet Exercise
1. Create a version of Table 11.1 “Prices in Germany” using a spreadsheet. Examine
quarterly data for the United States or another country for the years 2007 to 2009.
For prices, use the GDP implicit price deflator. Use the spreadsheet to calculate the
inflation rate. Then put in a measure of the money supply and real GDP. Use the
spreadsheet to calculate the velocity of money. Is the velocity of money
approximately constant?
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Chapter 12
Income Taxes
Tax Day
Every year, in the middle of April, US citizens and residents are required to file an income tax
form. The following figure shows the 1040EZ tax form, which is the simplest of all these tax
forms. For the majority of us, this is one of the most direct pieces of contact that we have with
the government. Based on the declarations we file, we are required to pay taxes on the income
we have earned over the year. These tax revenues are used to finance a wide variety of
government purchases of goods and services and transfers to households and firms. Of course,
income taxes are not unique to the United States; most other countries require their residents
to complete a similar kind of form.
Figure 12.1 Easy Tax Form
From the perspective of a household or a firm, the tax form is a statement of financial
responsibility. From the viewpoint of the government, the 1040 tax form is an instrument of
fiscal policy. The 1040 form is based on the US tax code, and changes in that code can have
profound effects on the economy—both in the short run and in the long run.
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In this chapter, we study the various ways in which income taxes affect the economy. An
understanding of taxes is critical for policymakers who devise tax policies and for voters who
elect them. Tax policies are often controversial, in large part because they affect the economy
in several different ways. For example, in the 2004 and 2008 US presidential campaigns, one
of the most contentious economic policy issues was an income tax cut that President George
W. Bush had initiated in his first term and that the Republican Party wished to make
permanent. That issue returned to the forefront of political discussion in 2010, when these tax
cuts were renewed.
Politicians have argued about such matters since the country was founded. Should the
government ensure it has enough tax revenue to balance its budget? How should we raise the
revenues to pay for our government programs? What is the appropriate tax on the income
received by individuals and corporations? Fiscal policy questions like these are debated in the
United States and other countries throughout the world. They are tough questions for
politicians and economists alike.
Politicians focus largely on who wins and loses—which groups will bear the burden of taxes
and receive the benefits of government spending and transfers? They do so for political
reasons and because one goal of a tax system is to redistribute income. Economists emphasize
something rather different. Economists know that taxes are necessary to finance government
expenditures. At the same time, they know that taxes can have the negative effect of distorting
people’s decisions and lead to inefficiency. Hence economists focus on designing a tax system
that achieves its goals of raising revenue and redistributing income, without distorting the
decisions of individuals and firms too much.
In addition, macroeconomists have observed that taxes significantly affect overall economic
performance, as measured by variables such as real gross domestic product (real GDP) growth
or the unemployment rate. The government can use changes in taxes as a means of
influencing aggregate spending in the economy. In the United States, the federal government
has often changed income taxes to affect overall economic performance. In this chapter, we
examine two examples: the tax policies of the Kennedy administration of 1960–63 and the
Reagan administration of 1980–88.
Our discussion of the Kennedy tax cut experience highlights the way in which variations in
income taxes are used to help stabilize the macroeconomy. We use the Reagan tax cuts of the
early 1980s to explore the growth implications of income taxes, which are often called
“supply-side effects.”
Road Map
Our approach to understanding the effects of income taxes on the economy is summarized
in Figure 12.2 “Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Policy”:
Taxes affect consumption and hence aggregate expenditure and output.
Taxes affect saving and hence the capital stock and output.
Taxes affect labor supply and hence output.
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Figure 12.2Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Policy
Any change in the income tax regime affects both the spending and the supply sides of the
economy. Our reason for thinking separately about the Kennedy and Reagan tax experiments
is to isolate the spending effects and the supply effects. Once you understand these different
channels, you will be equipped to evaluate other tax policies, such as those adopted later by
President George W. Bush. Finally, the figure reveals that the choice between consumption
and saving and the choice between work and leisure are at the heart of our analysis.
12.1 Basic Concepts of Taxation
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the difference between a marginal and an average tax rate?
2. How does the tax system redistribute income?
Before delving into the details of President Kennedy’s tax policy, we review the basics of
personal income taxation. This review is not only helpful for your study of economics but also
may be useful when you have to fill out your own income tax form. Even a quick glance at the
1040EZ form in Figure 12.1 “Easy Tax Form” suggests that taxes are a very complex topic.
Indeed, the US federal tax code governing income taxes alone runs to thousands of pages. The
taxes that you pay depend on your adjusted gross income (line 4), which is the income you
receive from a variety of sources (the main components noted on the return are wages,
interest income, and unemployment compensation). But there is also a “standard deduction”
and an “exemption” (line 5)—for a single person in 2010, these totaled $9,350. For the EZ
form, your taxable income is given as the following:
taxable income = adjusted gross income − (deduction + exemption).
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If your financial situation is very simple, you can file this EZ form. However, if you receive
income from other sources (such as dividends on stocks), or if you wish to “itemize” your
deductions (for payments of interest on home mortgages, dependent children, property taxes,
and so forth), you have to file a more complicated form, often with several other forms
containing supplementary information. Thus the calculation of adjusted gross income and
deductions can be quite complex. For all individuals, however, the basic relationship still
holds:
taxable income = adjusted gross income − (deductions and exemptions).
Once you know your taxable income, there are then different tax rates for different income
levels. [1]
Marginal and Average Tax Rates
From the perspective of macroeconomics, this complexity is daunting, particularly when we
remember that the details of the tax system vary from country to country and year to year. The
income tax is evidently not a simple thing that can be incorporated in a straightforward way
into our frameworks. We cannot hope to incorporate all these features of the tax code into our
theory without getting completely bogged down in the details. If we are going to make sense of
how taxes affect consumption behavior, we must leave out most of these complicating
elements. The challenge for economists is to decide which features of the tax system are
critical for our analysis and which are peripheral and can be safely ignored.
One noteworthy feature of the income tax system is that not everyone pays the same amount
of tax. Table 12.1 “Revised 2010 Tax Rate Schedules” shows the income tax schedule for the
year 2010 for a single taxpayer. [2]
It indicates how much tax a must be paid for a given level
of taxable income.
Table 12.1 Revised 2010 Tax Rate Schedules
If Taxable Income The Tax Is Then
Is Over (in US$) But Not Over (in
US$)
This Amount (in
US$)
Plus This (%) Of the Excess
Over (in US$)
0 8,375 0 10 0
8,375 34,000 837.50 15 8,375
34,000 82.400 4,681.25 25 34,000
82.400 171,850 16,781.25 28 82.400
171,850 373,650 41,827.25 33 171,850
373,650 — 108,421.25 35 373,650
To use this table, you must first find your taxable income. Suppose it is $20,000. Your tax is
then determined from the second row of the table. You would owe 837.50 + 0.15 × (20,000 −
8,375), which is $2,581.25.
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Figure 12.3 shows the relationship between taxes and income implicit in the tax schedule
summarized in Table 12.1 “Revised 2010 Tax Rate Schedules”. This figure shows the amount
of tax you must pay given your adjusted gross income (upper panel) and your taxable income
(lower panel). We see two key facts:
1. As an individual’s income increases, he or she pays more in tax (the line slopes upward).
2. As an individual’s income increases, he or she pays a larger fraction of additionalincome
in tax (the line becomes steeper at higher levels of income).
This leads us to two ways to think about the tax schedule a household faces.
Figure 12.3
The figure shows the amount of tax owed by a single individual in the United States who
takes the “standard deduction.” The upper panel has adjusted gross income on the horizontal
axis, whereas the lower panel has taxable income on the horizontal axis.
As shown in Table 12.1 “Revised 2010 Tax Rate Schedules”, there were six different tax rates
in effect in 2010, ranging from 10 percent for low-income individuals to 35 percent for high-
income individuals. The tax rates in the fourth column are the marginal tax rates since they
represent the tax rate paid on marginal (that is, additional) income. Thus higher income
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households pay higher marginal tax rates. The marginal tax rate can be seen graphically as the
slope of the line in Figure 12.3.
We are often interested in knowing what fraction of an individual’s income goes to taxes. This
is called the average tax rate. Returning to the example we calculated earlier, if you have an
income of $20,000 and thus pay taxes of $2,581.25, your average tax rate is equal to
2,581.25
20,000
= 0.129 ,
or 12.9 percent. The marginal tax rate of 15 percent is greater than the average tax rate of 12.9
percent. There is a difference between the tax you pay on average and the tax rate charged on
the last dollar of income. [3]
Leaving aside the details of exemptions and deductions, the essence of the income tax code is
captured in the table and figures we have just presented. Even these, however, are quite
complicated. We want to build income taxes into our framework of the economy, so it would
be nice if we could decide on a simpler way to represent the tax code. The art of economics lies
in deciding how to take something complicated, like the US income tax code, and represent it
in as simple a way as possible while still retaining the features that matter to the problem
under discussion.
Looking at Figure 12.3, we can see that the relationship between taxes paid and taxable
income looks approximately like a straight line. It is not exactly a straight line because it
becomes steeper as marginal tax rates increase. For our purposes in this chapter, however, it
is a reasonable simplification to represent this relationship as a line—that is, to suppose that
the marginal tax rate is constant.
In addition, we ignore the standard deduction and exemption. That is, we suppose that people
start paying taxes on their very first dollar of income. Thus we suppose that
taxes paid = tax rate × income.
Representing the tax schedule this way is fine if we want to examine the economy as a whole
and are not particularly concerned with the way in which taxes affect different households.
We use this simplified model of the tax system at various times in this chapter.
Effects of Changes in Tax Rates
We can use this simple model of the tax system to see how a change in the income tax rate
affects both individuals and the economy as a whole. Suppose there is a cut in the tax rate.
Since taxes paid = tax rate × income, the immediate impact is to reduce the amount of taxes
households pay: for a given income, a reduction in the tax rate reduces taxes paid. This means
that disposable income, which is the income left over after paying taxes and receiving
transfers, increases.
What do households do with the increase in disposable income? A likely answer is that a
typical household spends some of this extra income and saves the remainder. If all households
follow this pattern, then the increased spending by each household translates into larger
consumption in the aggregate economy. At this point, the power of the circular flow of
income will take over, and the level of income and output in the economy will increase even
further.
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Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
You can review the circular flow of income in the toolkit.
As the economy expands, the amount of taxes paid starts to increase. In other words, one
consequence of a tax cut is that the tax base (income) expands. The ultimate effect of a tax cut
on the overall amount of taxes paid depends on both this expansion of the tax base (income)
and the reduction of the tax rate.
Taxes and Income Distribution
The effects of a tax cut are not the same for everyone. Changes in the tax code affect the
distribution of income. If we want to understand such effects, however, it is a mistake to use
our simple model of the tax system. We must instead examine how marginal tax rates are
different at different levels of income. Suppose that marginal tax rates increase with income,
which means that average tax rates increase with income. Higher income households then pay
a larger fraction of their income as taxes to the government. As a result, the distribution of
income after taxes is more equal than the distribution of income before taxes.
Imagine that we take two individuals with different levels of income and calculate their tax
payments and after-tax income. Suppose that the first individual earns $20,000 per year and
the other earns $200,000. Table 12.2 “The Redistributive Effects of Taxation (in US$)” shows
the amount of tax each pays and their income after taxes, based on the tax schedule
from Table 12.1 “Revised 2010 Tax Rate Schedules”. Notice from the table that the marginal
tax of the high-income household is 33 percent, compared with the 15 percent marginal tax of
the low-income household. The total tax paid by the high-income individual is $51,116.75,
which is almost 20 times the tax paid by the low-income household. Whereas the pre-tax
income of the richer household was 10 times greater than that of the poorer household, its
after-tax income is 8.5 times greater.
Table 12.2 The Redistributive Effects of Taxation (in US$)
Income Tax
Paid
Income after
Taxes
20,000 2,581.25 17,418.75
200,000 51,116.75 148,883.25
This example shows that the tax code redistributes income from high-income to low-income
households. What is more, the redistribution does not necessarily stop here. We have not said
anything about what the government does with the tax revenues it receives. If the government
transfers all those revenues to low-income households, then the combined redistributive
effect of taxes and transfers is even stronger.
When we talk about the effects of taxes on labor supply and disposable income, keep in mind
that the size of these effects is different for households at different levels of income. These
varying effects matter for the politics of tax cuts because lawmakers pay close attention to
which income groups are affected by tax policy.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The marginal tax rate is the rate paid on an additional dollar of income, and the
average tax rate is the ratio of taxes paid to income.
2. When the marginal tax rate is increasing in income, then the tax system redistributes
from richer households to poorer households. In this case, after-tax income is more
equal than income before taxes are paid.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Use Table 12.1 “Revised 2010 Tax Rate Schedules” to calculate the tax you would pay if
your income were $30,000.
2. If taxes paid equal the tax rate times income, what happens to the average tax rate when
the marginal tax rate changes?
[1] Even this is not quite the whole story. There are various tax credits for which some
individuals are eligible, and there is also something called the alternative minimum tax, which
must be calculated.
[2] There are other schedules for members of a household filing jointly. These and related
tables are available from “Forms and Publications,” Internal Revenue Service, accessed
September 20, 2011, http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/index.html.
[3] The average tax rate can also be given a graphical interpretation. It is the slope of a line
from the origin to the point on the graph.
12.2 The Kennedy Tax Cut of 1964
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What was the state of the economy prior to the Kennedy tax cut of 1964?
2. What framework did economists at that time use to predict the effects of this tax cut?
3. What was the response of the economy to this tax cut?
Now that we have some basic idea of how income taxes work, we turn to the Kennedy tax cut
of 1964. We begin with some background information; we then develop the economic tools
needed to analyze the effects of the tax policy on household consumption and thus on real
gross domestic product (real GDP).
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The Scenario
In his inaugural presidential address, President Kennedy famously said, “My fellow
Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
The Kennedy administration recruited top individuals in all fields (“the best and the
brightest”) to come to Washington in this new spirit of commitment to public service.[1]
Every president has a group of economists, known as the Council of Economic Advisors
(CEA; http://www.whitehouse.gov/cea), that provides advice on economics and economic
policy. The list of members and staff of the 1961 CEA reads today like a “who’s who” of
economics. James Tobin and Robert Solow were prominent members of the economics team;
both went on to win Nobel Prizes in Economics. The chairman of the CEA was Walter Heller,
an economist known for a wide variety of contributions on the conduct of macroeconomic
policy.
The economists in the Kennedy administration observed that there had been three recessions
in the two Eisenhower administrations (1952–1960): one from 1953 to 1954 after the Korean
War, one from 1957 to 1958, and one in 1960. You can see these inFigure 12.4 “Real GDP in
the 1950s”. The CEA members and staff thought that more aggressive fiscal and monetary
policies could be used to keep the economy more stable and prevent such recessions. Their
goal of moderating fluctuations in the economy was based on the framework of the
basic aggregate expenditure model, which had been developed in the aftermath of the
Great Depression, augmented by some developments in economic thinking from the 1940s
and 1950s. Based on that analysis, they believed that fiscal and monetary policies could be
used to control aggregate spending and hence real GDP.
Toolkit: Section 16.19 “The Aggregate Expenditure Model”
You can review the aggregate expenditure model in the toolkit.
Figure 12.4 Real GDP in the 1950s
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The chart shows real GDP in the United States between 1952 and 1960, measured in billions
of year 2000 dollars.
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.
This group of economists had, on one hand, a clearly defined goal of stabilizing the
macroeconomy and, on the other hand, a set of policy instruments—economic variables such
as taxes, government spending, and interest rates—that were under the control of
policymakers. They also had a framework of analysis (the aggregate expenditure model) that
explained how these instruments could be used to achieve their goals. Finally, they had a
president who was willing to listen and take their advice. Never before had economists had
such tools and wielded such influence.
The opportunity to test their ideas arose toward the middle of the Kennedy presidency. In the
middle of 1962, it was apparent to the Kennedy administration economists that the economy
was beginning to sputter. The growth rate of real GDP was 7.1 percent in 1959 but decreased
to 2.5 percent and 2.3 percent in 1960 and 1961, respectively. [2] Their response was to
initiate a tax cut.
As is usually the case when a major fiscal policy action is under consideration, there was a
lengthy time lag between the initiation of the policy and its implementation. Even though the
tax cut was proposed in 1962, President Kennedy never saw it put into effect. He was
assassinated in November 1963; the tax cut for individual households and corporations was
not enacted until early 1964. For households, tax withholding rates decreased from 18 percent
to 14 percent, leading to an estimated tax reduction of about $6.7 billion. Taxes on
corporations were also decreased; the reduction in taxes for 1964 was expected to be about
$1.7 billion. By 1965, the economists expected that taxes would be lower by $11 billion. In
1965, nominal GDP was about $719 billion, so these changes were about 1.5 percent of
nominal GDP.
For many observers of the macroeconomy, this was a watershed event. The Economic Report
of the President proclaimed 1965 the “Year of the Tax Cut.” In retrospect, these years were the
heyday of Keynesian macroeconomics: for the first time, the government was using tax policy
in an attempt to fine-tune the economy.
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Figure 12.5 “Tax Policy during the Kennedy Administration” shows what happened to average
and marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates were very high at the time—much greater than in
the present day. At high levels of income, more than 90 cents of every additional dollar had to
be paid to the government in taxes. Consequently, average tax rates were also high: an
individual with taxable income of $100,000 (a very high level of income back then) had to pay
about two thirds of that amount to the government. The Kennedy tax cuts reduced these tax
rates. Even after the tax cut, the marginal and average tax rates both increased with income.
In other words, the tax system still redistributed income across households. But when we
compare 1963 and 1964, we see that the marginal tax rate did not increase as rapidly under
the new tax policy. Therefore, this channel of redistribution was weaker under the new tax
policy.
Figure 12.5 Tax Policy during the Kennedy Administration
The charts show the impact of the Kennedy tax cut. Part (a) highlights how the marginal tax
rates for households changed from 1963 to 1964, and part (b) shows the impact on average
tax rates.
Source: Department of the Treasury, IRS 1987, “Tax Rates and Tables for Prior Years” Rev
9-87
For their policy to be successful, Kennedy’s advisors had to ask and then answer a series of
questions. How big a tax cut should they recommend? How long should it last? What would
be the effect on government revenues? What would be the effect on real GDP and
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consumption? Economists working in government today confront exactly the same questions
when contemplating changes in tax policy. Questions such as these epitomize economics and
economists at work.
Looking back at this experiment with almost half a century of hindsight, we can ask additional
questions. How well did these policies work in terms of achieving their goal of economic
stabilization? What actually happened to consumption and output? Was the tax policy
successful?
The Kennedy economists needed a quantitative model of economic behavior: a formalization
of the links between their policy tools (tax rates) and the outcomes that they cared about, such
as consumption and output. Using the aggregate expenditure model, they wanted to know
how big a change in real GDP they could expect from a given change in the tax rate. To use the
model to study income taxes, we need to add some theory about how spending responds to
changes in taxes. Accordingly, we study the effects of income taxes on household consumption
and then discuss how changes in consumption lead to changes in output.
Although we are using a historical episode to help us understand the effect of taxes on the
economy, this chapter is not intended as a lesson in economic history. Variations of this same
model are still used today to analyze current economic policies. Indeed, in response to the
economic crisis of 2008, many countries around the world cut taxes in an attempt to stimulate
their economies. By studying the experience of the early 1960s, we gain insight into a critical
part of macroeconomics: the linkage between consumption and output.
Having said that, economics has advanced significantly since the 1960s, and the state-of-the-
art analysis for that time seems oversimplified today. Modern economists think that the policy
advisers in the 1960s neglected some key aspects of the economy. Their insights were not
wrong, but they were incomplete. Our understanding of the economy has evolved since Tobin,
Solow, and Heller designed the nation’s tax policy.
Household Consumption
We begin by studying the relationship between consumption and income. We first develop
some ideas about how households make consumption decisions, and, on the basis of those
ideas, we make some predictions about what we expect to happen when there is a cut in taxes.
We then examine the evidence from the Kennedy tax cut.
Income, Consumption, and Saving
In microeconomics, we study how a consumer allocates incomes across a wide variety of
products. Microeconomists interested in studying, say, the market for ice cream examine how
households choose between ice cream and other products that are close substitutes, such as
frozen yogurt, and between ice cream and other products that are complements, such as hot
fudge sauce. When studying microeconomics, however, we focus on choices for goods made at
a particular point in time.
Macroeconomics has a different emphasis. It emphasizes the choice between consumption
and saving. Instead of thinking about the consumption of ice cream today versus frozen
yogurt today, we study the choice between consumption today and consumption in the future.
To highlight this decision, macroeconomists downplay the choices among different goods and
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services. Of course, in reality, households decide both how much to spend and how much to
save, and what products to purchase. But it is convenient to treat these decisions separately.
The same basic ideas of household decision making apply in either case. Households
distribute their income across goods to ensure that no redistribution of that spending would
make them better off. This is true whether we are talking about ice cream and frozen yogurt,
or about consumption and saving. Households allocate their income between consumption
and savings in a way that makes them as well off as possible. They do not spend all their
income this year because they want to save some for consumption in the future.
Suppose a household in the United States had taxable income of $20,000 in 2010. Some of
this income goes to the payment of taxes to federal and state governments. (From our earlier
discussion, the average federal tax rate is 13.25 percent.) The rest is either spent on goods and
services or saved. The income that is spent on goods and services today is spread over the
many products that a household buys. The income that is saved will likewise be used in the
future to purchase different goods and services.
Personal Income and Disposable Income
The most basic measure of aggregate economic activity is real GDP, which is the total amount
of final goods and services produced in our economy over a period of time, such as a year. The
rules of national income accounting mean that real GDP measures three different things at
once: the production or output of the economy, the spending in the economy; and the income
generated in the economy. We use real GDP as our most general measure of income.
We work in this chapter with two further concepts of income from the national
accounts:personal income and disposable income. Some of the income generated in the
economy is retained by firms to finance new investment, so it does not go to households.
Personal income refers to that portion of GDP that finds its way directly into the hands of
households. (At the level of an individual household, it corresponds closely to adjusted gross
income on the tax form.) Disposable income is what remains after we subtract from personal
income the taxes paid by households to the government and add to personal income the
transfers (such as welfare payments) received by households from the government. For a
household, disposable income measures its available resources after taxes have been paid and
transfers received.
Consumption Smoothing
Our starting point for understanding consumption choices is the household budget constraint
for a typical household. The household receives income from working and other sources and
pays taxes to the government. The remainder is the household’s disposable income. The
household budget constraint reminds us that, ultimately, you must either spend the income
you receive or save it; there are no other choices. That is,
disposable income = consumption + saving.
A theory of consumption is a theory of how households decide to divide their income between
consumption and saving. Saving is a way to convert current income into future consumption.
A theory of consumption is equivalently a theory of saving. A fundamental idea about
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household behavior is that people do not wish their consumption to vary a lot from month to
month or year to year. This principle is so important that economists give it a special
name: consumption smoothing. Households use saving and borrowing to smooth out
fluctuations in their income and keep their consumption relatively smooth. People will tend to
save when their income is high and will dissave when their income is low. (Dissave is the word
economists use to mean either running down one’s existing wealth or borrowing against
future earnings.)
Toolkit: Section 16.21 “Consumption and Saving”
You can review the consumption-saving decision in the toolkit.
Perfect consumption smoothing means that the household consumes exactly the same
amount in each period of time (for example, a month or a year). If a construction worker
earns $10,000 per month working from May to October but nothing for the rest of the year,
we do not expect that he will spend $10,000 per month in the summer and then starve in the
winter. It is much more likely that he will save half of his income in the summer and spend
those savings in the winter, so that he spends about $5,000 per month throughout the year.
The logic of consumption smoothing is the same as the argument for why households buy
many different goods rather than one single good. Households typically take their income and
spend it on a wide variety of products. Furthermore, when income increases, the household
will spread this extra income across the spectrum of goods it consumes; not all of it is spent on
one good. If you obtain more income, you do not spend all this extra income on ice cream, for
example. You buy more of many different goods.
The Consumption Function
One way to represent consumption smoothing is by means of a consumption function.
This is an equation that relates current consumption to current disposable income. It allows
us to go from an abstract idea about consumption behavior—consumption smoothing—to a
specific formulation of consumption that we can use in a model of the aggregate economy.
We suppose the consumption function can be represented by the following equation:
consumption = autonomous consumption + marginal propensity to consume × disposable
income.
We make three assumptions:
1. Autonomous consumption is positive. Households consume something even if their
income is zero. If the household has accumulated a lot of wealth in the past or if the
household expects its future income to be larger, autonomous consumption will be
larger. It captures both the past and the future.
2. We assume that the marginal propensity to consume is positive. The marginal
propensity to consume captures the present; it tells us how changes in current
income lead to changes in current consumption. Consumption increases as current
income increases; the larger the marginal propensity to consume, the more sensitive
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current spending is to current disposable income. By contrast, the smaller the
marginal propensity to consume, the stronger is the consumption-smoothing effect.
3. We also assume that the marginal propensity to consume is less than one. This says
that not all additional income is consumed. When the household receives more
income, it consumes some and saves some. The marginal propensity to save is the
amount of additional income that is saved; it equals (1 – marginal propensity to
consume).
Table 12.3 “Consumption, Income, and Saving” contains an example of a consumption
function where autonomous consumption equals 10,000 and the
marginal propensity to consume equals 0.8. If the household earns no income at all
(disposable income = $0), it still spends $10,000 on consumption. In this case, savings equal
−$10,000. This means the household is either drawing on existing wealth (accumulated
savings from the past) or borrowing against income expected in the future. The marginal
propensity to consume tells us how the household divides additional income between
consumption and saving. In our example, the household spends 80 percent of any additional
income and saves 20 percent.
Table 12.3 Consumption, Income, and Saving
Disposable
Income ($)
Consumption
($)
Saving ($)
0 10,000 -10,000
10,000 18,000 -8,000
20,000 26,000 -6,000
30,000 34,000 -4,000
40,000 42,000 -2,000
50,000 50,000 0
60,000 58,000 2,000
70,000 66,000 4,000
80,000 74,000 6,000
90,000 82,000 8,000
100,000 90,000 10,000
For example, when income is equal to $20,000, consumption can be calculated as follows:
consumption = $10,000 + 0.8 × $20,000
= $10,000 + 0.8 × $20,000
= $26,000.
The household is still dissaving but now only by $6,000. Table 12.3 “Consumption, Income,
and Saving” also shows that when income equals $50,000, consumption and income are
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equal, so savings are exactly zero. At income levels above $50,000, the household has positive
savings.
Figure 12.6 “Consumption, Saving, and Income” shows the relationship between consumption
and income graphically. We also graph the savings function in Figure 12.6 “Consumption,
Saving, and Income”. The savings function has a negative intercept because when income is
zero, the household will dissave. The savings function has a positive slope because
the marginal propensity to save is positive.
Figure 12.6 Consumption, Saving, and Income
The graph shows the relationship between consumption and disposable income, where
autonomous consumption is $10,000 and the marginal propensity to consume is 0.8. When
disposable income is below $50,000, savings are negative, whereas at income levels above
$50,000, savings are positive.
As well as the marginal propensity to consume and the marginal propensity to save, we can
examine the average propensity to consume, which measures how much income goes to
consumption on average. It is calculated as follows:
average propensity to consume =
consumption
disposable income
.
When disposable income increases, consumption increases but by a smaller amount. This
means that when disposable income increases, people consume a smaller fraction of their
income: the average propensity to consume decreases. [3] Meanwhile, the ratio of saving to
disposable income is called the savings rate. For example,
savings rate =
savings
disposable income
.
The savings rate and the average propensity to consume together sum to 1. In other words, a
decline in the average propensity to consume equivalently means that households are saving a
larger fraction of their income.
Because the consumption and savings relationships are two sides of the same coin,
economists wishing to find the actual values of autonomous consumption and the marginal
propensity to consume can examine data on consumption, savings, or both. If the data were
perfect, we would get the same answer either way. For the United States, both consumption
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and savings data are readily available, but in some countries the data on savings may be of
higher quality than the consumption data, in which case economists use savings data to
understand consumption behavior.
Some Warnings about the Consumption Function
The consumption function is useful because it captures two fundamental insights: households
seek to smooth their consumption, but consumption nonetheless responds to current income.
But the consumption function is really too simple. [4]
First, it ignores the role of accumulated wealth. If you consider two households with the same
level of current income but different amounts of accumulated wealth, the one with higher
wealth will probably consume more. Second, the consumption function does not explicitly
include the role of expectations. A household’s consumption reflects not only income today
and the accumulation of income in the form of wealth but also anticipated income. So, for
example, if a government announces that it will increase income tax rates in two years, we
expect that households will respond immediately to smooth out the effects of these future
taxes. The only way the consumption function allows us to capture wealth or expectations of
future income is through autonomous consumption. This is fine as far as it goes, but it means
that we are taking too many aspects of consumption as given, rather than explaining them
with our theory.
Another complication is that changes in income today are often correlated with changes in
income in the future. If your income increases today, is this an indication that your income
will also be higher in the future? To see why this matters, consider two extreme examples.
First, suppose that you receive a one-time inheritance of $10 million. What will you do with
this income? According to the consumption smoothing argument, you will save some of this
income to increase your consumption in the future. Roughly speaking, if you thought you had
10 years left to live, you might increase your consumption by about $1 million per year. In this
case your marginal propensity to consume would be only 0.1.
Now suppose that instead of a $10 million windfall, you learn you will receive $1 million each
year for the next 10 years. In this case, your income is already spread out over your lifetime.
So, in this second case, you will again want to smooth your consumption. But since the
increase in income will be maintained for your lifetime, you can increase your consumption by
an amount equal to the increase in your income. Your marginal propensity to consume will be
1.0.
The difference between these two situations is that in the first case the income increase is
temporary, and in the second it is permanent. The logic of consumption smoothing implies
that the marginal propensity to consume is near 1 for permanent changes in income but much
smaller for temporary changes in income.
The Effects of a Change in Income Taxes
We can now figure out the effects of a cut in taxes on consumption and saving. A reduction in
taxes will increase disposable income. From the consumption function, this results in an
increase in consumption equal to the marginal propensity to consume times the increase in
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disposable income. The average propensity to consume decreases. To summarize, if taxes are
cut in the economy, we expect to see the following:
An increase in disposable income
An increase in consumption that is smaller than the increase in disposable income
(that is, a marginal propensity to consume less than 1)
A decline in the average propensity to consume
When natural scientists such as molecular biologists or particle physicists want to see how
good their theories are, they conduct experiments. Economists and other social scientists have
much less ability to carry out experiments—certainly at the level of the macroeconomy. The
Kennedy tax cut, however, is like a “natural” experiment in that there was a major policy
change that we can think of as a change in an exogenous variable. It is not, in truth,
completely exogenous. We already explained that the tax cut was enacted in response to the
poor performance of the economy. We are not badly misled by thinking of it as an exogenous
event, however. We can therefore use it to see how well our theory performs. Specifically, we
can look to see whether disposable income and consumption do behave as we have predicted.
Empirical Evidence on Consumption
Before we turn to those specific questions, let us examine some data on consumption.Figure
12.7 “Consumption and Income” shows the behavior of consumption and disposable income
from 1962 to 2010. The measures of both income and consumption are in year 2005 dollars.
This means that the nominal (money) levels of income and consumption for each of the years
have been corrected for inflation, so that we can see how the real level of consumption relates
to the real level of income.
Figure 12.7 Consumption and Income
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The charts show consumption and personal disposable income (in billions of year 2005
dollars) from 1962 to 2010. Consumption and disposable income grew substantially over
this time (a) and there is a close relationship between consumption and income (b).
Source: Economic Report of the President (Washington, DC: GPO, 2011), table B-31,
accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/tables11.html.
Toolkit: Section 16.5 “Correcting for Inflation”
You can review how to correct for inflation in the toolkit.
The first thing we see in Figure 12.7 “Consumption and Income” is that both consumption and
disposable income grew substantially over the 1962–2010 period. This should come as no
surprise. We know that the US economy grew over this period, so we would expect that
disposable income and consumption would also grow. Figure 12.7 “Consumption and
Income” reveals that, as a consequence, there is a close relationship between consumption
and income, and consumption expenditures are, on average, about 91 percent of disposable
income. Although Figure 12.7 “Consumption and Income” looks something like a
consumption function, we should not take this relationship as strong evidence for our theory
because it is primarily caused by the fact that both variables grew over time.
Consumption Response to the Kennedy Tax Cut
Now we return to the Kennedy tax cut. How well does our model perform in predicting the
effects of the tax changes on consumption? Superficially, this seems like an easy question. We
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can examine the changes in consumption and income that arose after the tax changes and see
whether these changes are consistent with the model.
There is a critical difference between our theory and reality, however. When we discussed the
effects of a tax cut using our theory, we implicitly held everything else constant. We presumed
that there was a change in taxes and no change in any other variable. For example, we
assumed that government spending, investment spending, and net exports all did not change.
In fact, other economic variables were changing at the same time that the new tax policy went
into effect; these changes could also have affected consumption and disposable income.
Looking at particular tax experiments is a messy business.
Taxes were cut in February 1964, and (real) disposable income increased by $430 billion, a
much larger increase than in previous time periods. Consumption expenditures increased
considerably during this period. Table 12.4 “Consumption and Income in the 1960s
(Seasonally Adjusted, Annual Rates)” summarizes the behavior of GDP, disposable income,
consumption, and the average propensity to consume over the 1960–68 period. Remember
that these are real variables, measured in year 2000 dollars. The average propensity to
consume is calculated as consumption divided by disposable income, and the marginal
propensity to consume is calculated as the change in consumption divided by the change in
disposable income.
Table 12.4 Consumption and Income in the 1960s (Seasonally Adjusted, Annual Rates)
Year Real GDP
($)
Disposable
Income ($)
Consumption
($)
APC MPC
1960 2,501.8 1,759.7 1,597.4 0.91 —
1961 2,560.0 1,819.2 1,630.3 0.90 0.55
1962 2,715.2 1,908.2 1,711.1 0.90 0.91
1963 2,834.0 1,979.1 1,781.6 0.90 0.99
1964 2,998.6 2,122.8 1,888.4 0.89 0.74
1965 3,191.1 2,253.3 2,007.7 0.89 0.96
1966 2,399.1 2,371.9 2,121.8 0.89 0.96
1967 3,484.6 2,475.9 2,185.0 0.88 0.61
1968 3,652.7 2,588.0 2,310.5 0.89 1.11
APC, average propensity to consume; MPC, marginal
propensity to consume.
Source: Economic Report of the President (Washington, DC: GPO 2004), accessed September
20, 2011, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop.
Disposable income increased as did consumption, in accordance with the predictions of our
theory. As the theory predicts, the average propensity to consume decreased for most of this
period. Likewise, in line with the theory, the marginal propensity to consume was less than 1
(in all years except 1968). Thus the evidence from this period is broadly consistent with the
predictions that we made on the basis of our model.
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Aggregate Income, Aggregate Consumption, and Aggregate Saving
The 1964 tax cut was not designed to influence consumption in isolation but rather to have an
impact on the overall economy via its effect on consumption. So far, we have argued that a
change in taxes leads to a change in disposable income and hence a change in consumption.
Now we complete the story, noting that a change in consumption will itself affect the level of
real GDP and hence have further effects on the level of disposable income.
In the case of the Kennedy tax cut of 1964, the economists advising the administration at that
time had a fairly specific idea of how changes in consumption would affect the overall
economy. They argued that the $10 billion tax cut would lead to an increase in GDP of about
$20 billion each year. How did they create this estimate? To answer this question, we need to
embed our theory of consumption in the aggregate expenditure model.
We motivated our consumption function by thinking about the behavior of an individual
household. We now presume that our household is in some sense average, or representative of
the entire economy, so the consumption relationship holds at an economy-wide level.
Different households might actually have different consumption functions, but when we add
them together, we still expect to find an aggregate relationship similar to the one we have
described.
The economists of the time used a framework that was closely based on the aggregate
expenditure model. When prices are sticky, the level of GDP is determined in that model by
the condition that planned spending and actual spending are equal. The model tells us that
the level of real GDP depends on the level of autonomous spending and the multiplier,
real GDP = multiplier × autonomous spending,
where the multiplier is calculated as (
1
1 − marginal propensity to spend
). Given the level of autonomous spending
in the economy and given a value for the marginal propensity to spend, we can calculate the
equilibrium level of real GDP.
The marginal propensity to spend is not the same thing as the marginal propensity to
consume, although they are connected. The marginal propensity to spend tells us how
much total spending changes when GDP changes. Total spending includes not only
consumption but also investment, government purchases, and net exports, so if any of these
are responsive to changes in GDP, then the marginal propensity to spend is affected. Likewise,
autonomous spending is not the same as autonomous consumption. Autonomous spending is
the sum of autonomous consumption, autonomous investment, autonomous government
purchases, and autonomous net exports. Finally, the marginal propensity to consume
measures how consumption responds to changes in disposable income, not GDP.
Toolkit: Section 16.19 “The Aggregate Expenditure Model”
You can review the aggregate expenditure model and the multiplier in the toolkit.
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In our analysis here, we continue to focus on consumption and suppose that the other
components of spending—government spending, investment, and net exports—are exogenous.
That is, these variables are all unaffected by changes in income and so are all included in
autonomous spending. In addition, we presume that the amount that the government spends
is not affected by the amount that it receives in tax revenue.
To find out the effects on the economy of a change in income taxes, we take the equation for
real GDP and write it in terms of changes:
change in real GDP = multiplier × change in autonomous spending.
This equation tells us we need two pieces of information to work out the effect of a tax change:
1. The marginal propensity to spend because this allows us to calculate the multiplier
2. The effect of a tax change on autonomous spending
Let us think about the marginal propensity to spend first. We want to know the answer to the
following question: if GDP changes by some amount (say, $100), what will happen to
spending? There are three pieces to the answer.
1. A change in GDP leads to a change in personal income. Remember from the circular
flow of income that GDP measures production, income, and expenditure in the
economy. Firms receive income when they sell their products. Most of that income
finds its way into the hands of households in the form of wage and salary payments or
dividend payments. Firms hold onto some of the income that they generate, however,
to replace worn-out capital goods and finance new investments. In the early 1960s,
personal income was about 78 percent of GDP. So if GDP increased by $100, we would
expect personal income to increase by about $78.
2. A change in personal income leads in turn to a change in disposable income. As we
explained at length, personal income is taxed, so disposable income is less than
personal income. Since we are considering the effects of a change in taxes, we need an
estimate of the marginal tax rate facing consumers. We know from Figure 12.3that this
varied across individuals, but researchers have estimated that, for the economy as a
whole, the marginal tax rate in 1964 was about 22 percent. [5] To put it another way,
households would keep about 78 percent (= 100 percent – 22 percent) of their personal
income. So if personal income increased by $78, disposable income would increase by
about $61 (= 0.78 × $78). (It is a meaningless coincidence that these two numbers are
both 78 percent.)
3. Finally, a change in disposable income leads to a change in consumption. According to
the 1964 Economic Report of the President, the CEA thought that the marginal
propensity to consume was about 0.93. So if disposable income increased by $61, we
would expect consumption to increase by about $57 (= 0.93 × $61).
Putting these three together, therefore, we see that an increase in GDP of $100 causes
consumption to increase by $57. The marginal propensity to spend in this economy was equal
to about 57 percent. It follows that the CEA thought that the multiplier was equal to about 2.3
because
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multiplier =
1
1 – marginal propensity to spend
=
1
1−0.57
=
1
0.43
= 2.3.
Now let us think about the change in autonomous spending. We have said that taxes were cut
by about $10 billion. We expect that most of this tax cut ended up in the hands of consumers.
Based on the marginal propensity to consume of 0.93, we would therefore expect there to be
an increase of about $9.3 billion in autonomous consumption,
change in autonomous spending = $9.3 billion.
Putting these two results together, we find that our prediction for the change in GDP as a
result of the tax cut is
change in real GDP = multiplier × change in autonomous spending
= 2.3 × $9.3 billion
= $21.4 billion.
Our answer is not exactly equal to the $20 billion predicted by the CEA, but it is very close. As
you might expect, the CEA was working with a more complicated model than the one we have
explained here, and, as a result, they came up with a slightly smaller number for the
multiplier.
A Word of Warning
All our analysis so far has ignored the fact that, through the price adjustment equation,
increased real GDP causes the price level to rise. This increase in prices serves to choke off
some of the effects of the increase in spending. In effect, we have ignored the supply side of
the economy. It is not that the Kennedy-Johnson administration economists were naïve about
the supply side, but they thought the demand side movements were much more relevant for
short-run policymaking purposes. More recent economic experience has convinced
economists that we ignore the supply side of the economy at our peril. Modern
macroeconomists would be careful to augment this story with a discussion of price
adjustment.
Toolkit: Section 16.20 “Price Adjustment”
You can review price adjustment in the toolkit.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Beginning in the early 1960s, growth of real GDP began to slow. This provided the
basis for the tax cut of 1964.
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2. The CEA economists used the aggregate expenditure model as the basis for their
analysis of the effects of the tax cut.
3. In response to the tax cut, consumption and real GDP both increased. This fits with
the prediction of the aggregate expenditure model.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Is the marginal propensity to consume independent of whether an income increase is
viewed as temporary or permanent?
2. If autonomous consumption is positive, is the level of savings at zero disposable income
positive or negative?
[1] See David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972).
[2] Economic Report of the President (Washington, DC: GPO, 2005):table B-2, GPO Access,
accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/2005/2005_erp .
[3] In terms of mathematics, we are saying that, if we divide through the consumption
function by disposable income, we get
consumption
disposable income
=
autonomous consumption
disposable income
+ marginal propensity to consume.
An increase in disposable income reduces the first term and the average propensity to
consume.
[4] Refining our theory of consumption is a subject for Chapter 13 “Social Security”.
[5] Robert J. Barro and Chaipat Sasakahu provide estimates of the “average marginal tax
rate.” Barro and Sasakahu, “Measuring the Average Marginal Tax Rate from the Individual
Income Tax” (NBER Working Paper No. 1060 [Reprint No. r0487], June
1984),http://www.nber.org/papers/w1060.
12.3 Income Taxes and Saving
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. When income taxes are cut, what happens to private savings?
2. When income taxes are cut, what happens to national savings?
Look back at Figure 12.2 “Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Policy”. We explained that there are
three channels through which income taxes affect the economy. In Section 12.2 “The Kennedy
Tax Cut of 1964”, we discussed the first of these in some depth: a cut in income taxes can
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stimulate consumption and increase aggregate spending. Figure 12.2 “Macroeconomic Effects
of Tax Policy” reveals that taxes can also affect potential output, both through their
influence on saving (and hence capital accumulation) and through their effect on labor supply.
We turn next to the savings channel.
Tax Cuts and Private Saving
We have already conducted most of the analysis we need to examine the effects of tax cuts on
saving. We know that a tax cut increases disposable income. Our theory of consumption
smoothing tells us that households will respond by increasing consumption and savings.
Specifically, we predict that a dollar’s worth of tax cuts will cause saving to increase by (1 −
marginal propensity to consume).
It is tempting to conclude that tax cuts therefore will lead both to higher consumption,
increasing output now, and to higher saving, increasing output in the future. Such an
argument is not right because it looks only at saving by households. We also need to look at
the effect of the tax cut on the government surplus or deficit.
Tax Cuts and National Saving
If the government is spending more than it receives in tax revenues, then it is running a
deficit. Conversely, if it is spending less than it receives in tax revenues, it is running a
surplus. National savings is the combined savings of the government and the private sector. If
the government is running a deficit,
national savings = private savings − government deficit,
and if the government is running a surplus,
national savings = private savings + government surplus.
These are just two different ways of saying the same thing because, by definition, the
government surplus equals minus the government deficit.
What happens if the government cuts taxes? If there are no associated changes in government
spending, then tax cuts translate dollar for dollar into the government budget. One million
dollars worth of tax cuts will increase the deficit (or decrease the surplus) by exactly $1
million. So even though a tax cut of a dollar increases private savings by $(1 − marginal
propensity to consume), it costs the government $1. The net effect (to begin with) is
to reduce national savings by an amount equal to the marginal propensity to consume.
If the tax cut succeeds in increasing income, there is additional savings resulting from the
multiplier process. Still, we expect the overall effect is a decrease in national savings. For
example, consider the Kennedy tax cut again. Taxes were cut by $10 billion. The resulting
change in income was roughly $20 billion. With the marginal propensity to save equal to 0.07,
the offsetting increase in private savings would have been about $1.4 billion. Evidently, the
result was a large decrease in national savings.
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Here we see one of the biggest problems with tax cuts. They are attractive in the short run
because they stimulate aggregate demand and increase output. They are also attractive
politically, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, they have the adverse long-run consequence of
reducing national savings. When national savings decreases, the economy does not build up
its capital stock so quickly, so future living standards are lower than they would otherwise be.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Since the marginal propensity to consume is less than 1, a tax cut will lead to a
household to consume more and save more.
2. National savings, the sum of public and private savings, will generally decrease when
there is a tax cut.
Checking Your Understanding
1. If the marginal propensity to consume from a tax cut is zero, what will happen to
national savings when taxes are cut?
2. If income taxes increase, what happens to the incentive of an entrepreneur to start a new
business?
12.4 The Reagan Tax Cut
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What was the state of the economy at the time of the Reagan tax cut?
2. What framework was used for analyzing the effects of this tax cut?
3. What were the effects of the tax cut?
When Ronald Reagan was elected US president in 1980, the US economy was not in very good
shape. The 1970s had been a very difficult time for economies throughout the world. The oil-
producing nations of the world, acting as a cartel, had increased oil prices substantially, and,
as a result, energy costs had increased. These energy prices triggered a severe recession in the
mid 1970s and a smaller recession in the late 1970s. Figure 12.8 “Real GDP in the
1970s” shows the US real gross domestic product (GDP) for this period. As well as recessions,
the United States was suffering from inflation that was very high by historical standards:
prices were increasing by more than 10 percent a year.
Figure 12.8 Real GDP in the 1970s
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The figure shows real GDP in the 1970s. There was a protracted recession in the mid-1970s
and a smaller recession toward the end of the decade.
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.
President Reagan and his economic advisors argued that high taxes were one of the causes of
the relatively poor performance of the US economy. In particular, they claimed that taxes on
income were deterring people from working as hard as they would otherwise. Unlike
President Kennedy’s advisors, who had argued that income tax cuts would increase real GDP
by stimulating aggregate expenditure, Reagan’s advisors said that tax cuts would increase
potential output. Proponents of this economic view became known as supply siders because
their focus was on the production of goods and services rather than the amount of spending
on goods and services.
After his inauguration, President Reagan pushed hard for changes in the tax code, and
Congress enacted the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) in 1981. This law reduced tax rates
substantially: Figure 12.9 “Marginal and Average Tax Rates, 1982 to 1984” shows marginal
and average tax rates for 1982, 1983, and 1984. The marginal tax rates are shown in part (a)
in Figure 12.9 “Marginal and Average Tax Rates, 1982 to 1984”: marginal rates decreased
significantly for taxable income up to about $80,000. [1] As a consequence, average tax rates
also decreased significantly between 1982 and 1984 (part (b) in Figure 12.9 “Marginal and
Average Tax Rates, 1982 to 1984”).
Figure 12.9 Marginal and Average Tax Rates, 1982 to 1984
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The figure shows marginal (a) and average (b) tax rates from 1982 to 1984, the period of the
Reagan tax cuts. Both marginal and average rates decreased substantially.
Source: Department of the Treasury, IRS 1987, “Tax Rates and Tables for Prior Years” Rev
9-87
The main mechanism that the supply siders proposed was that lower income taxes would
increase the incentive to work. To analyze this claim, we need to investigate how the decision
to supply labor depends on income taxes. As with our analysis of consumption, we look at
labor supply by thinking about the behavior of a single household. We then suppose that the
household can be taken as representative of the entire economy.
Labor Supply
Each individual faces a time constraint: there are only 24 hours in the day, which must be
divided between working hours and leisure hours. An individual’s
time budget constraint says that, on a daily basis,
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leisure hours + working hours = 24 hours.
The labor supply decision is equivalently the decision about how much leisure time to enjoy.
This decision is based on the trade-off between enjoying leisure and working to purchase
consumption goods. People like having leisure time, and they prefer more leisure to less.
Leisure can be thought of as a “good,” just like chocolate or blue jeans or cans of Coca-Cola.
People sacrifice leisure, working instead, because the money they earn allows them to
purchase goods and services.
To see this, we first rewrite the time budget constraint in money terms. The value of an hour
of time is given by the nominal wage. Multiplying through the time budget constraint by the
nominal wage gives us a budget constraint in dollars rather than hours:
(leisure hours × nominal wage) + nominal wage income = 24 × nominal wage.
The second term on the left-hand side is “nominal wage income” since that is equal to the
number of hours worked times the hourly wage.
Because wage income is used to buy consumption goods, we replace it by total nominal
spending on consumption, which equals the price level times the quantity of consumption
goods purchased:
(leisure hours × nominal wage) + (price level × consumption) = 24 × nominal wage.
This is the budget constraint faced by an individual choosing between consuming leisure and
consumption. Think of it as follows: it is as if the individual first sells all her labor at the going
wage, yielding the income on the right-hand side. With this income, she then “buys” leisure
and consumption goods. The price of an hour of leisure is just the wage rate, and the price of a
unit of consumption goods is the price level. Finally, if we divide this equation through by the
price level, we see that it is the real wage (the wage divided by the price level) that appears in
the budget constraint:
leisure hours × real wage + consumption = 24 × real wage.
It is the real wage, not the nominal wage, that matters for the labor supply decision.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market”
You can review the labor market in the toolkit.
Changes in the Real Wage
What happens if there is an increase in the real wage? There are two effects:
1. There is a substitution effect. An increase in the real wage means that leisure has
become relatively more expensive. You have to give up more consumption goods to get an
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hour of leisure time. If leisure becomes more expensive, we would expect the household to
“buy” fewer hours of leisure and more consumption goods—that is, to substitute from
leisure to consumption. This effect predicts that the quantity of labor supplied will
increase.
2. There is an income effect. An increase in the real wage makes the individual richer—
remember that we can think of income as equaling 24 × the real wage. In response to
higher income, we expect to see the household increase its consumption of goods and
services and also increase its consumption of leisure. This effect predicts that the quantity
of labor supplied will decrease.
Putting these predictions together, we must conclude that we do not know what will happen to
the quantity of labor supplied when the real wage increases. On the one hand, higher real
wages make it attractive to work more since you can get more goods and services for each
hour of time that you give up (the substitution effect). On the other hand, you can get the
same amount of consumption goods with less effort, which makes it attractive to work less
(the income effect). If the substitution effect is stronger, the labor supply curve has the
standard shape: it slopes upward, as in Figure 12.10 “Labor Supply”.
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Figure 12.10 Labor Supply
The response of the quantity of labor supplied to the real wage depends on both an income
effect and a substitution effect. When the substitution effect is larger than the income effect,
the supply curve has the “normal” upward-sloping shape.
In the end, the shape of the labor supply curve is an empirical question; we can answer it only
by going to the data. And as you might be able to guess, it turns out to be a difficult question
to answer, once we start dealing with the complexities of different kinds of labor. The view of
most economists who have studied labor supply is that higher real wages do lead to a greater
quantity of labor supplied, but the effect is not very strong. The income effect almost cancels
out the substitution effect. This means that the labor supply curve slopes upward but is quite
steep.
The Effect of the Reagan Tax Cuts on the Supply of Labor
Suppose an individual knows the nominal wage but also knows that she is going to be taxed
on any income that she earns at the going income tax rate. The wage rate that matters for her
decision is the after-tax real wage. Her real disposable income is
disposable income = hours worked × (1 − tax rate) × (
nominal wage
price level
)
= hours worked × (1 − tax rate) × real wage.
All our discussion of labor supply continues to hold in this case, except that we need to replace
the real wage with the after-tax real wage since it is the after-tax wage that matters to the
individual.
Figure 12.11 “Labor Supply Response to Tax Cut” shows the effect of a cut in taxes. If the labor
supply curve slopes upward, the tax cut leads to an increase in the quantity of labor supplied.
And if labor supply increases, then potential output also increases. In other words, one effect
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of tax cuts is to induce people to work harder and produce more real GDP. To keep things
simple, Figure 12.11 “Labor Supply Response to Tax Cut” is drawn supposing that there is no
change in the equilibrium real wage as a result of the tax cut. In fact, we would expect the real
wage to decrease somewhat as well. Buyers of labor as well as sellers of labor would benefit
from the tax cut. Indeed, it is this decrease in the real wage that induces firms to purchase the
extra labor that individuals wish to supply. (If we included this in our picture, then the after-
tax real wage would still increase but by less than shown in the figure.)
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Figure 12.11 Labor Supply Response to Tax Cut
The wage that matters for labor supply decisions is the after-tax real wage. If income taxes
are cut, and the real wage is unchanged, then households will supply more labor.
The Laffer Curve
Supply-side economics was controversial and generated a great deal of debate back in the
1980s and since. Yet the argument that we have just presented is not really controversial at
all. Almost all economists agreed that as a matter of theory, cuts in taxes could lead to
increases in the quantity of labor supplied. The disagreements concerned the magnitude of
the effect.
Some proponents of supply-side economics made a much stronger claim. They said that the
positive effects on labor supply could be so large that total tax revenues would increase, not
decrease. They argued that even though the government would get less tax revenue on each
dollar earned, people would work so much harder and generate so much more taxable income
that the government would end up with more revenue than before.
This argument was encapsulated in the so-called Laffer curve. Economist Arthur Laffer asked
what would happen if you graphed tax revenues as a function of the tax rate. Obviously (he
observed) if the tax rate is zero, then tax revenues must be zero. And, Laffer argued, if the tax
rate were 100 percent, so the government took every penny you earned, then no one would
have an incentive to work at all, and the quantity of labor supplied would drop down to zero.
Once again, income tax revenues would be zero. In between, tax revenues are positive.
Figure 12.12 “Laffer Curve” shows an example of a Laffer curve. There is some tax rate that
will lead to the maximum possible revenue for the government. This itself is not that
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interesting: the goal of the government is not to raise as much tax revenue as possible. But if
the tax rate lies to the right of that point, then—as the picture shows—a cut in taxes will
increase tax revenues.
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Figure 12.12 Laffer Curve
The Laffer curve says that it is possible for a reduction in the tax rate to lead to an increase
in tax revenues. Although this is a theoretical possibility at very high tax rates, most
economists view the Laffer curve as a theoretical curiosity with limited applicability to real
economies.
Just as almost all economists agreed that there would be some supply-side effects of income
tax cuts, almost all economists agreed that the Laffer curve argument was inapplicable to the
US economy (or indeed any other economy). The evidence indicated that the effects of tax cuts
on hours worked were likely to be relatively small. Almost no economists actually believed
that the economy was on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, where tax cuts could pay for
themselves.
Unfortunately, the Laffer curve argument was politically appealing, even though it was not
supported by economic evidence. Buoyed by this argument, President Reagan oversaw both
tax cuts and big increases in government spending. As a result, the US government ran large
budget deficits. Following on from the ERTA, President Reagan and President George H. W.
Bush after him were both forced to increase taxes to bring the budget back under control. [2]
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Prior to the Reagan tax cut, the US economy was experiencing both low growth in real
GDP and high inflation.
2. Reagan’s economic advisors stressed the effects of taxes on the supply side of the
economy, and in particular the incentive effects of taxes on labor supply and
investment.
3. The Reagan tax cuts led to considerably higher deficits in the United States.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What matters for labor supply decisions—the marginal tax rate or the average tax rate?
2. According to the Laffer curve, does a tax cut always increase tax revenues?
[1] In contrast to Figure 12.3, no tax was payable until taxable income was $2,300. This is
because the definition of taxable income at that time included the exemption.
[2] The economic history of the United States in the 1980s was quite complex. Because this
chapter concerns income taxes, we have considered only one of the policy changes of the
Reagan administration. Other changes in tax policy were designed to promote savings. We
have not discussed other aspects of President Reagan’s fiscal policy (there were large increases
in government purchases), the tight monetary policy pursued by the Federal Reserve, or the
behavior of interest rates and exchange rates. All these are matters for other chapters.
12.5 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
Our goal in this chapter was to understand the effects of tax changes on aggregate
consumption and aggregate output. A tax cut puts more income in the hands of households,
and thus consumption increases. The increase in consumption in turn leads to an expansion
in the overall level of economic activity. The framework does a good job of describing and
explaining actual economic outcomes during the Kennedy tax cut. We can thus have some
faith that our basic framework is reasonably sound. Having said that, it is a very simple model
that does have some deficiencies, most notably its neglect of the supply side of the economy.
Income tax cuts also decrease overall national saving. Income tax cuts increase household
disposable income and lead to increased saving by households (as well as increased
consumption). At the same time, however, income tax cuts mean that the government is
saving less (or borrowing more). The net effect is to decrease national saving. The theory of
economic growth tells us that reduced saving has the effect of decreasing future standards of
living.
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We then examined the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s. These tax cuts were aimed at stimulating
employment and output by encouraging people to work more. The belief that tax cuts lead to
an increase in the quantity of labor supplied is consistent with basic microeconomic
principles, but there is disagreement about the likely size of the effect.
Although we cast our discussion of the effects of taxes on spending using the tax cuts of the
Kennedy and Reagan administrations, the lesson is more general. It is common for the United
States and other countries to use variations in income tax rates as a tool of intervention. We
highlighted several effects of such interventions. Income tax changes alter the level of
household disposable income and thus influence consumption expenditures; they affect
saving and capital accumulation; and they affect labor supply. This policy tool therefore gives
the government considerable influence on the aggregate economy.
Indeed, when the crisis of 2008 hit the world’s economies, many countries responded by
implementing expansionary fiscal policies, including cuts in taxes. Australia, the United
Kingdom, Singapore, Austria, and Brazil are just a few of the countries who cut taxes in
response to the crisis.
We used the Kennedy tax cut to illustrate demand-side effects and the Reagan tax cut to
illustrate supply-side effects because those were the channels emphasized by the economic
advisors at the time. Just about every change in the income tax code, however, has effects on
consumption, saving, and labor supply. Every change in the code has short-run effects and
long-run effects, and, as we have seen, these effects can be contradictory. Thus whenever you
hear or read about proposed changes in taxes, you should try to remember that all these
different stories will be in operation. The politicians and pundits who are supporting or
opposing the change will typically talk about only one of them, depending on the spin they
wish to convey. The analysis of this chapter should help you always see the bigger picture.
Finally, remember that tax changes will typically have major effects on the distribution of
income. There are winners and losers from every change in the tax code. This, above all, is
why changes in the tax code are an endless source of political debate.
Key Links
Council of Economic Advisors:http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea
Christina Romer and David Romer narrative of tax changes in the United
States:http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/nadraft609
Internal Revenue Service
History: http://www.irs.gov/irs/article/0,,id=149200,00.html
Forms: http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/index.html?portlet=3
Withholding Tax
Calculator:http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=96196,00.html
NBER Tax Simulator: http://www.nber.org/~taxsim/taxsim-calc9/index.html
EXERCISES
1. Suppose that your income level is $55,000. Using the tax table for 2010 (Table 12.1
“Revised 2010 Tax Rate Schedules”), what are your marginal and average tax rates?
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2. Suppose that taxes paid were equal to a constant plus a tax rate times income. Devise
a tax schedule such that the marginal tax rate is 25 percent and the average tax at
$10,000 is $2,000. What is the constant?
3. In times of inflation, the nominal income of households increases. What happens over
time to their marginal and average tax rates?
4. Our tax function has a constant marginal tax rate at all levels of income. Explain why
this means that the average tax rate is also constant. Is the average tax rate higher,
lower, or equal to the marginal tax rate in this case?
5. We noted earlier that the average tax rate for someone earning $100,000 was 67
percent in 1963. However, there has been considerable inflation between 1963 and the
present day. What is the equivalent in current dollars of an income of $100,000 in
1963? (Look at the toolkit if you need a reminder of how to convert from nominal to
real variables.)
6. Suppose that autonomous consumption is 600 and the marginal propensity to
consume is 0.9. Graph the consumption and savings functions first with disposable
personal income on the horizontal axis and then with GDP on the axis. If there is a
change in taxes, how would that affect these graphs?
7. What is the difference between the marginal propensity to consume and the marginal
propensity to spend?
8. Why is a temporary tax cut likely to have a smaller impact on real GDP than a
permanent tax cut?
9. Using the logic of consumption smoothing, if a tax cut from 10 years ago will expire
next year, what will a household do now in anticipation of the coming tax change?
10. If labor supply is known to be relatively insensitive to changes in the real wage, what
does this imply about the argument that cuts in tax rates can lead to revenue
increases?
Economics Detective
1. Pick some country other than the United States. Can you find the income tax rates for
that country? How do they compare with those in the United States?
2. Go to the IRS web page. Suppose that you are a member of a married household with
total household income of $55,000. What are your marginal and average tax rates?
Compare these to the tax rates on individuals. Which group faces the higher marginal
income tax rate? What effects might this have on their behavior?
3. In the summer of 2010, the George W. Bush tax cuts were about to expire. What
would the change in tax rates be if the tax cuts had been allowed to expire?
4. Go to the Bureau of Economic Analysis website (http://www.bea.gov). Click on the
link “Personal Income and Outlays” and find out what has happened recently to
personal income and disposable income. Have they been increasing or decreasing?
Spreadsheet Exercises
1. Using a spreadsheet, enter the data for disposable income and consumption
fromTable 12.4 “Consumption and Income in the 1960s (Seasonally Adjusted, Annual
Rates)”. Now enter a formula to calculate the average propensity to consume and
another to calculate the marginal propensity to consume. Check that your answers are
the same as in Table 12.4 “Consumption and Income in the 1960s (Seasonally
Adjusted, Annual Rates)”.
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2. Suppose autonomous consumption is 6000 and the marginal propensity to consume
is 0.9. Furthermore, suppose the tax rate is 30 percent. Create a spreadsheet where
the first column is income, ranging from $0 to $100,000, by increments of $1,000.
Create columns showing the taxes paid at each income level, the level of disposable
income at each income level, and consumption at each income level. Graph the
relationship between consumption and income. What is the slope of the line?
Experiment with changing the marginal propensity to consume and the tax rate.
Explain how changing these parameters affect the relationship between consumption
and income.
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Chapter 13
Social Security
Death and Taxes
Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”
The current chapter is about both.
If you are like most readers of this book, you are at the very beginning of your working life,
and you have probably given little thought to your retirement. In the early years of work, you
might be asked to make some decisions regarding a company pension plan, but it is still
unlikely that you will spend much time thinking about how you will live when your working
life is over. This is normal; none of us is very good at imagining at the age of 20 what our life
will be like when we are 70. (Even at the age of 30, or 40, or 50, it is hard to imagine life at age
70.)
One message of this chapter, though, is that even though it is hard to think that far ahead, it is
also smart to try to do so. From the very beginning of your working life, you will be making
decisions that affect your life in retirement. And from the very beginning of your working life,
those decisions will—or should—be influenced by something called the Social Security system.
Social Security was born in the Great Depression. Many people suffered tremendous economic
hardship in the 1930s. As part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the
US government established several systems to alleviate such hardships. Social Security—one
of the most important—was designed to provide financial assistance to the elderly. More than
170 other countries, big and small, rich and poor, also have social security systems. To take a
few random examples, you will find social security in operation in Mexico, France, the United
Kingdom, Kiribati, Laos, Azerbaijan, Chile, Andorra, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Cyprus, Paraguay,
and Slovenia.
The Social Security system will give you money when you are older, but it takes money from
you when you are working. So even if it is hard to think about the effect that Social Security
will have on your income in the distant future, it is very easy to see the effect it has when you
are working. Workers are required to make Social Security contributions—one of the many
kinds of tax that we all pay—with the promise that they will receive reimbursement from the
system when they are older. The state of the US Social Security system is therefore something
that you should think about long before you receive payouts. Decisions about your personal
saving and consumption right now are, or at least should be, directly influenced by your
current tax contributions and expectations of your future Social Security payouts.
Opinion polls reveal that Social Security is one of the most well-supported government
programs in the United States. Yet the casual reader of the newspapers could be forgiven for
thinking that the system is perpetually in crisis. In the 1980s, for example, there was
discussion of serious difficulties with the funding of Social Security. A commission headed by
Alan Greenspan (who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank) identified
problems with the system and recommended a large number of changes, including some
increases in Social Security tax rates. These reforms were supposed to ensure the solvency of
Social Security well into the future. Yet, a few decades later, proposals for major reforms of
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Social Security are back under discussion. The exact form that Social Security will take in the
coming decades is an open question that will continue to play a major role in political debate.
We explain the details of the system more carefully later in this chapter, but the basic idea is
the following. The government taxes current workers and uses those revenues to pay retired
workers. When the system was originally set up, the idea was that payments to retired people
in a given year would be (approximately) funded by taxes on those working during that year,
so the system would be roughly in balance. For many years, this “pay-as-you-go” structure
worked fine. In some years, payments to workers were larger than tax receipts, and in some
years, they were smaller, but on the whole there was an approximate match between
payments and receipts.
In the 1980s, policymakers first began to pay serious attention to the fact that there was a
problem with the pay-as-you-go structure. Demographic changes mean that the system is not
balanced in the very long run. The number of retirees relative to the number of workers will
increase substantially over the next two decades, and without changes, the time will come
when tax revenues will no longer be sufficient to match the obligations of the system.
This is not a looming crisis. The best estimates suggest that the system will no longer be able
to pay the full amount of benefits near the middle of the century, although there is
disagreement on the exact date. The most recent Social Security Trustees report
(http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html) predicted this date as 2036, whereas in
2005 the Congressional Budget Office (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/60xx/doc6074/02-09-
Social-Security ) gave a date of about 2054. [1] Of course, changes will almost certainly be
made well before this crisis point. But what form should those changes take?
How should we reform Social Security?
This question matters to every single one of us. As workers, we all pay into the Social Security
system, and we all anticipate receiving benefits when we are retired. The current discussion
will determine both the level of taxes we pay now and the benefits we will receive in the future.
The average person could be forgiven for thinking that the debate over Social Security is
complicated, arcane, and impossible to understand without an immense amount of study. In
fact, the basics of the system are quite straightforward, and the most important elements of
the discussion can be understood using very little economics. In this chapter, we demystify the
arguments about Social Security. This will make it easier for you to understand why you pay
Social Security contributions, what you can expect to get in the future, and whether the
politicians and talking heads are making any sense when they discuss various reforms.
Road Map
At the heart of the economic analysis of Social Security is a very straightforward idea: “forced
saving.” Individuals are required to give up some of their income now—income that they
could, if desired, have used for current consumption—and, in return, they are promised
income in the future. Understanding Social Security from the individual perspective means
understanding the impact of this forced saving on individual choices.
Meanwhile, we also need to understand how Social Security looks from a government
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perspective. Social Security contributions are a source of government revenue, and Social
Security payments are an example of a government transfer. These revenues and payments
enter into the government’s budget constraint.
From the perspective of an individual, there is a disconnect in time between taxes and
payments. Individuals pay taxes during their working years and receive transfers during their
retirement years. But from the perspective of the government, taxes and payments take place
at the same time. In any given year there are some individuals who are working and paying
taxes, and the money they pay into the system is paid right back out to others who are in
retirement.
To address questions about reforming the Social Security program, we therefore need to
understand (1) the structure of the program and (2) how it interacts with individual choices
about consumption and saving. We study how individuals respond to Social Security by using
a model of consumption and saving that applies over an individual’s lifetime. Once we
understand how individuals make these choices, we ask how Social Security affects their
decisions. Then we think about how the government fits into the picture. We study these flows
into and from the Social Security program using the government budget constraint, to link
changes in the program with changes in taxes. [2] In the end, we are able to see how
individuals’ consumption and saving decisions are influenced by their beliefs about
government behavior.
[1] See the discussion at Charles P. Blahous III and Robert D. Reischauer, “Status of the Social
Security and Medicare Programs,” Social Security Administration, 2011, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, “CBO
Testimony,” Congressional Budget Office, February 9, 2005, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/60xx/doc6074/02-09-Social-Security .
[2] This tool is used elsewhere in the book in other applications, such as and .
13.1 Individual and Government Perspectives on Social Security
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How do households respond to variations in income over their lifetime?
2. What is the government’s budget constraint in a pay-as-you-go system?
3. What is the effect of Social Security on lifetime income?
We begin with the individual perspective on Social Security.
Social Security: The Individual’s View
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Household incomes tend to vary quite a lot, but households like their consumption to be
approximately constant over time. Households therefore use their savings to smooth out the
variations in their income. [1] For the purposes of understanding Social Security—both its
problems and its reforms—we need to examine this idea of consumption smoothing more
rigorously. Because Social Security is a program to provide for consumption in retirement, we
must carefully lay out the decisions of a household over the entire lifetime of its members. By
so doing, we can determine the likely effect of a promise of a transfer in the future on behavior
today. Bear in mind that these transfers may be far in the future: for a 25-year-old worker, we
are thinking about money that won’t be received for another 40 years or so.
As is often the case in economics, we start by looking at the simplest setup we can imagine.
We do this not because we think we can answer every question with a simple model, but
because we must make sure we understand the fundamentals of Social Security before we
worry about the complexities. So, to keep things simple, we examine the life of a single
individual—that is, think of the household as containing just one person. Hence we do not
have to worry about multiple wage earners (who might be of different ages), and we do not
have to worry about how to incorporate children (who grow up and leave the household) into
our story. In this chapter, we use the terms individual and household interchangeably. We call
our individual Carlo.
Carlo thinks about his income and consumption over his entire lifetime. Because he has the
possibility of saving and borrowing, his income and consumption need not be equal in any
given year. Carlo faces a lifetime budget constraint, however; in the end, his lifetime
spending is limited by his lifetime income. The life-
cycle model of consumption examines Carlo’s decisions about how much to consume
each year, given this budget constraint.
We begin with a simple numerical example. Suppose Carlo is 20 years old and very well
informed about his future. He knows that he is going to work for 45 years—that is, up to age
65. He knows that, every year, he will receive income of $40,000, excluding Social Security
contributions. He has to pay Social Security contributions on this income at a rate of 15
percent. Thus he knows he will pay $6,000 each year to Social Security, and his after-tax
income is $40,000 − $6,000 = $34,000. After he retires at age 65, he knows he will receive a
Social Security payment of $18,000 each year until he dies, 15 years later, on his 80th
birthday (of heart failure, brought on by the exertion of blowing out all those candles).
To decide on his lifetime consumption and saving patterns, Carlo needs to know what his
lifetime resources are. We know that, in general, a dollar today is not worth the same amount
as a dollar next year—or 60 years from now—because of interest rates and inflation. We
sidestep that problem for the moment by imagining that the real interest rate is zero. In
this case, it is legitimate to add together dollars from different time periods.
So Carlo earns $34,000 per year for each of his 45 working years and obtains $18,000 per
year for his 15 retired years. His total lifetime resources are as follows:
lifetime income = income during working years + income during retirement years
= ($34,000 × 45) + ($18,000 × 15)
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= $1,530,000 + $270,000
= $1,800,000.
Over his life, therefore, he has $1.8 million to spend. Figure 13.1 “Lifetime Income”shows his
lifetime income. His total lifetime resources are obtained by adding together the two
rectangles labeled “Lifetime Income from Working” and “Lifetime Social Security Income.”
The height of each rectangle gives his income, and the width of each rectangle gives the
number of years for which he earns that income.
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Figure 13.1 Lifetime Income
For 45 years, Carlo earns $34,000 per year (for a total of $1,530,000), and for 15 years,
Carlo receives $18,000 per year in Social Security payments (for a total of $270,000). His
total lifetime income is $1,800,000.
Carlo’s lifetime budget constraint says that his lifetime consumption must equal his lifetime
income,
lifetime consumption = lifetime income.
If Carlo wants to keep his consumption perfectly smooth, he will consume exactly the same
amount in each of his 60 remaining years of life. In this case, his consumption each year is
given by the following equation:
annual consumption =
lifetime consumption
60
=
1,800,000
60
= 30,000.
Figure 13.2 “Lifetime Consumption” shows Carlo’s consumption. The area of the rectangle is a
measure of Carlo’s lifetime consumption since—as before—the height of the rectangle is his
consumption per year, and the width is the number of years.
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Figure 13.2 Lifetime Consumption
For the 60 years of his remaining life, Carlo spends $30,000 per year, making a total of
$1,800,000 during his working years.
In each of his working years, Carlo earns $34,000 but consumes only $30,000. Thus he saves
$4,000 every year. When he is 21 years old, he therefore has $4,000 in the bank. When he is
22 years old, he has $8,000 in the bank. By the time he retires at age 65, he has saved
$180,000 (= 45 × $4,000).
During his retirement years, Carlo starts to draw on his savings. Social Security pays him
$18,000, so he needs to take an additional $12,000 from his savings to have $30,000 in
consumption. At age 66, therefore, he has savings of $180,000 − $12,000 = $168,000. For
each of his retirement years, his savings are reduced by a further $12,000. After his 15 years of
retirement, he has reduced his savings by $12,000 × 15 = $180,000 and dies at the age of 80
with exactly zero in the bank.
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Figure 13.3 “Lifetime Consumption and Saving” combines Figure 13.1 “Lifetime
Income”and Figure 13.2 “Lifetime Consumption” and shows Carlo’s income and consumption.
The difference between income and consumption in Carlo’s working years is his saving. Notice
the rectangles labeled “saving” and “dissaving.” One way of understanding his lifetime budget
constraint is that these two rectangles must be equal in area.
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Figure 13.3 Lifetime Consumption and Saving
During his 45 working years, Carlo saves $4,000 per year. During his 15 retirement years,
Carlo dissaves at a rate of $12,000 per year.
Figure 13.4 “Lifetime Wealth Accumulation” shows his wealth over his lifetime. It increases
from zero to $180,000 and then decreases again to zero. The fact that he ends his life with
exactly zero wealth is just another way of saying that he exactly satisfies his lifetime budget
constraint.
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Figure 13.4 Lifetime Wealth Accumulation
Over his working life, Carlo builds up his stock of wealth, so he has $180,000 in his bank
account when he retires. During retirement, he dissaves, exactly using up the $180,000 he
accumulated while working.
Social Security: The Government’s View
Now let us shift perspective and examine the Social Security system from the perspective of
the government. The original intention was that Social Security would be (approximately)
pay-as-you-go. Under a strict pay-as-you-go system, the inflows to the government in the
form of tax revenues are exactly balanced by outflows to retired people. In any given year, in
other words, the government takes money from those that are working and transfers all that
money—not a cent more, not a cent less—to those who are retired.
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Under this system the government does not maintain any kind of “savings accounts” for
individuals: it taxes you when you work and transfers the revenues to retirees at the same
time. The government promises to make payments to you after you retire, with these
payments being financed by those who will then be working.
Let us pause for a moment here. We have to determine how to capture transfers across
different generations in the economy in as simple a setup as possible. The easiest way to do
this is to suppose that everyone in the economy is just like Carlo. That is, every working
person in the economy earns $40,000 and pays $6,000 into the Social Security system. Every
retired person receives a Social Security payment of $18,000 per year.
Let us further suppose that there is the same number of people of every age in the economy.
In each year the same number of people is born, and—like Carlo—they all live to exactly the
age of 80. Like Carlo, everyone works for 45 years (from age 20 to 65) and is retired for 15
years (from age 65 to 80). If we wanted to calibrate this roughly to the US economy (that is,
make the numbers in the example a bit more realistic), we might suppose that there are 4
million people born every year. Since everyone lives to the same age, this means that there are
4 million 20-year-olds, 4 million 21-year-olds, and so forth, up to 4 million 79-year-olds. (This
implies a total population of 320 million, which is close to the size of the actual US
population.)
Having made these simplifications, it is a short step to realize that we might as well just
suppose that there is only one person of each age. The basic structure of the economy will be
the same, but the math will be much easier. (If you can prefer, though, you can multiply both
sides of every equation that follows by 4 million.)
Given this demography, what do the government finances look like? Every year, the
government collects $6,000 each in Social Security revenues from 45 working people, so that
the total revenues are given by the following equation:
Social Security revenues = 45 × $6,000 = $270,000.
Meanwhile, the government pays out $18,000 each year to 15 people:
Social Security payments = 15 × $18,000 = $270,000.
You can see that we have chosen the numbers for our example such that the Social Security
system is in balance: revenues equal receipts. A system like this one would indeed be pay-as-
you-go.
The Effect of a Change in Social Security Benefits
Now, what would happen in this example if the government decided it wanted to increase
Social Security payments by $3,000 per year? The total increase in payments would equal
$45,000 since all 15 retired individuals would receive the extra $3,000. If the government is
required to keep the Social Security system in balance, then it would also be obliged to
increase Social Security contributions by $1,000 per worker (since there are 45 workers). How
would Carlo (and everybody else like him) feel about this change?
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Remember that Carlo had income before Social Security of $40,000 per year and had to pay
$6,000 per year in Social Security contributions. Now he will have to pay $7,000 in
contributions, so his income after tax is equal to $33,000. In his retirement years, however,
Carlo will now get $21,000 a year instead of $18,000. His lifetime resources are therefore as
follows:
lifetime income = ($33,000 × 45) + ($21,000 × 15)
= $1,485,000 + $315,000
= $1,800,000.
Carlo’s lifetime resources are exactly the same as they were before. Of course, this means that
Carlo would choose exactly the same amount of consumption as before: $30,000 a year.
However, his saving behavior would be different. He would now only save $3,000 a year. At
the time of retirement, he would have saved a total of $135,000. Over the remaining 15 years
of his life, Carlo would draw on his savings at the rate of $9,000 per year, which—combined
with his Social Security payment of $21,000—would ensure that he had $30,000 to spend in
his retirement years. His saving and dissaving are illustrated in Figure 13.5 “Lifetime
Consumption and Saving”.
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Figure 13.5 Lifetime Consumption and Saving
For his 45 working years, Carlo saves $3,000 a year. For his 15 retirement years, Carlo
dissaves at a rate of $9,000 a year.
We have discovered a rather remarkable conclusion: the change in the government’s Social
Security scheme has no effect on Carlo’s lifetime resources or lifetime consumption. From
Carlo’s point of view, the change means that the government is saving more on Carlo’s behalf,
and therefore he does not need to save so much for himself. Carlo’s saving declines by exactly
the same amount as the increase in Social Security taxes ($1,000) per year; likewise, his
dissaving declines by exactly the same amount as the increase in Social Security payments.
Another example is even more striking. Suppose there were no Social Security system at all.
Then Carlo would receive $40,000 a year for 45 years but nothing at all in his retirement
years. His lifetime resources would equal
lifetime income = $40,000 × 45 = $1,800,000,
which is again the same as before. To enjoy lifetime consumption of $30,000 a year, Carlo
would save $10,000 in every working year and dissave $30,000 in every retirement year.
These numerical examples suggest an extraordinary conclusion: Social Security seems to be
completely irrelevant for Carlo. No matter what the scheme looks like, Carlo has the same
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lifetime resources and same lifetime consumption. This is an amazing and perhaps even
shocking finding. We have used some economics to analyze one of the most important
government programs, one that is a source of constant scrutiny and debate (and, not
incidentally, requires substantial resources for its administration). Not only have we found no
reason to expect a crisis in Social Security, we have found that it is irrelevant.
Should we now pack up and go home, saying that “economists have analyzed Social Security
and it is actually a nonissue”? We hope it is obvious that the answer is no. After all, all we have
done so far is present a numerical example. The example suggests that Social Security might
be irrelevant under certain circumstances, but it certainly does not prove that it is irrelevant
in general.
This is how economists very often work. A simple numerical example can help us understand
the operation of a complicated system like Social Security and can lead to some suggestive
conclusions. Our next task is to determine whether the conclusion from our example holds
more generally. We will first see that the result does not depend only on the particular
numbers that we chose. We will then try to understand exactly where the conclusion comes
from.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Households respond to variations in income over their lifetime through adjustments
in saving to smooth consumption.
2. In a pay-as-you-go system, the government’s payments to Social Security recipients
exactly matches the revenues received from workers.
3. The integration of the government and household budget constraints implies that in a
pay-as-you-go system, Social Security influences household saving but leaves lifetime
consumption and income unchanged.
Checking Your Understanding
1.What uncertainties did Carlo face over his lifetime?
2.In what parts of the discussion did we use the assumption that the real interest rate was
zero?
[1] We also discuss consumption smoothing in Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”.
13.2 A Model of Consumption
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the life-cycle model of consumption?
2. What are the effects of changes in a pay-as-you-go system?
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, examined an explicit example of what Social Security implies for households and for the
government. We can take away the following insights from this example:
Households decide on consumption and saving taking into account their lifetime income.
Lifetime income includes both taxes paid during working years and benefits received
during retirement.
From the government’s view, taxes received and benefits paid need to balance, at least
over long periods of time.
In the example, the Social Security program was irrelevant: individuals had the same
lifetime income and thus consumption opportunities regardless of the Social Security taxes
paid and benefits received.
We now go beyond our numerical example and give a more general analysis of how an
individual’s lifetime consumption choices are influenced by Social Security.
Household Budget Constraints
We first consider the budget constraints faced by an individual or household (remember that
we are using the two terms interchangeably). There are two household budget constraints.
The first applies in any given period: ultimately, you must either spend the income you receive
or save it; there are no other choices. For example,
disposable income = consumption + household savings.
Households also face a lifetime budget constraint. They can save in some periods of their life
and borrow/dissave in other periods, but over the course of any household’s lifetime, income
and spending must balance. The simplest case is when real interest rates equal zero, which
means that it is legitimate simply to add together income and consumption in different years.
In this case the lifetime budget constraint says that
total lifetime consumption = total lifetime income.
If real interest rates are not zero, then the budget constraint must be expressed in terms of
discounted present values. The household’s lifetime budget constraint is then
discounted present value of lifetime consumption = discounted present value of lifetime
income.
If the household begins its life with some assets (say a bequest), we count this as part of
income. If the household leaves a bequest, we count this as part of consumption. As in our
earlier numerical example, we can think about the lifetime budget constraint in terms of the
household’s assets. Over the course of a lifetime, the household can save and build up its
assets or dissave and run down its assets. It can even have negative assets because of
borrowing. But the lifetime budget constraint says that the household’s consumption and
saving must result in the household having zero assets at the end of its life.
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Toolkit: and
You can review both the household’s intertemporal budget constraint and the concept of
discounted present value in the toolkit.
To see how this budget constraint works, consider an individual who knows with certainty the
exact number of years for which she will work (her working years) and the exact number of
years for which she will be retired (her retirement years). While working, she receives
her annual disposable income—the same amount each year. During retirement, she receives a
Social Security payment that also does not change from year to year. As before, suppose that
the real interest rate is zero.
Her budget constraint over her lifetime states that
total lifetime consumption = total lifetime income = working years × disposable income+
retirement years × Social Security payment.
Our numerical example earlier was a special case of this model, in which
disposable income = $34,000,working years = 45,retirement years = 15,
and
Social Security payment = $18,000.
Plugging these values into the equation, we reproduce our earlier calculation of lifetime
income (and hence also lifetime consumption) as ($45 × $34,000) + (15 × $18,000) =
$1,800,000.
The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption
Economists often use a consumption function to describe an individual’s
consumption/saving decision:
consumption = autonomous consumption+ marginal propensity to consume × disposable
income.
The marginal propensity to consume measures the effect of current income on current
consumption, while autonomous consumption captures everything else, including past or
future income.
The life-cycle model explains how households make consumption and saving choices over
their lifetime. The model has two key ingredients: (1) the household budget constraint, which
equates the discounted present value of lifetime consumption to the discounted present value
of lifetime income, and (2) the desire of a household to smooth consumption over its lifetime.
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Toolkit: and
You can review the consumption function, consumption smoothing, and the life-cycle model
in the toolkit.
Let us see how this model works. According to the life-cycle model of consumption, the
individual first calculates her lifetime resources as
working years × disposable income + retirement years × Social Security payment.
(We continue to suppose that the real interest rate is zero, so it is legitimate simply to add her
income in different years of her life.) She then decides how much she wants to consume in
every period. Consumption smoothing starts from the observation that people do not wish
their consumption to vary a lot from month to month or from year to year. Instead,
households use saving and borrowing to smooth out fluctuations in their income. They save
when their income is high and dissave when their income is low.
Perfect consumption smoothing means that the household consumes exactly the same
amount in each period of time (month or year). Going back to the consumption function,
perfect consumption smoothing means that the marginal propensity to consume is
(approximately) zero. [1] If a household wants to have perfectly smooth consumption, we can
easily determine this level of consumption by dividing lifetime resources by the number of
years of life. Returning to our equations, this means that
consumption =
lifetime income
working years + retirement years
.
This is the equation we used earlier to find Carlo’s consumption level. We took his lifetime
income of $1,800,000, noted that lifetime income equals lifetime consumption, and divided
by Carlo’s 60 remaining years of life, so that consumption each year was $30,000. That is
really all there is to the life-cycle model of consumption. Provided that income during working
years is larger than income in retirement years, individuals save during working years and
dissave during retirement.
This is a stylized version of the life-cycle model, but the underlying idea is much more general.
For example, we could extend this story and make it more realistic in the following ways:
Households might have different income in different years. Most people’s incomes are not
constant, as in our story, but increase over their lifetimes.
Households might not want to keep their consumption exactly smooth. For example, if the
household expects to have children, then it would probably anticipate higher
consumption—paying for their food, clothing, and education—and it would expect to have
lower consumption after the children have left home.
The household might start with some assets and might also plan to leave a bequest.
The real interest rate might not be zero.
The household might contain more than one wage earner.
Working through the mathematics of these cases is more complicated—sometimes a lot more
complicated—than the calculations we just did, and so is a topic for advanced courses in
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macroeconomics. In the end, though, the same key conclusions continue to hold even in the
more sophisticated version of the life-cycle model:
A household will examine its entire expected lifetime income when deciding how much to
consume and save.
Changes in expected future income will affect current consumption and saving.
The Government Budget Constraint
The household’s budget constraints for different years are linked by the household’s choices
about saving and borrowing. Over the household’s entire lifetime, these individual budget
constraints can be combined to give us the household’s lifetime budget constraint. Similar
accounting identities apply to the federal government (and for that matter, to state
governments and local governments as well).
In any given year, money flows into the government sector, primarily from the taxes that it
imposes on individuals and corporations. We call these government revenues. The
government also spends money. Some of this spending goes to the purchase of goods and
services, such as the building of roads and schools or payments to teachers and soldiers.
Whenever the government actually buys something with the money it spends, we call
these government purchases (or government expenditures). Some of the money that
the government pays out is not used to buy things, however. It takes the form of transfers,
such as welfare payments and Social Security payments. Transfers mean that dollars go from
the hands of the government to the hands of an individual. They are like negative taxes. Social
Security payments are perhaps the most important example of a government transfer.
Any difference between government revenues and government expenditures and transfers
represents saving by the government.
Government saving is usually referred to as a government surplus:
government surplus = government revenues − government transfers − government
expenditures.
If, as is often the case, the government is borrowing rather than saving, then we instead talk
about the government deficit, which is the negative of the government surplus:
government deficit = −government surplus = government transfers + government
expenditures − government revenues.
Toolkit: and
You can review the government budget constraint in the toolkit.
Applying the Tools to Social Security
The life-cycle model and government budget constraint can be directly applied to our analysis
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of Social Security. Let us go back to Carlo again. Carlo obtains pretax income and must pay
Social Security taxes to the government. Carlo’s disposable income in any given year is given
by the equation
disposable income = income − Social Security tax.
Imagine that he receives no retirement income other than Social Security. Carlo’s lifetime
resources are given by the following equation:
lifetime resources = working years × income − working years × Social Security tax+
retirement years × Social Security income.
Now let us examine Social Security from the perspective of the government. To keep things
simple, we suppose the only role of the government in this economy is to levy Social Security
taxes and make Social Security payments. In other words, the government budget constraint
is simply the Social Security budget constraint. The government collects the tax from each
worker and pays out to each retiree. For the system to be in balance, the government surplus
must be zero. In other words, government revenues must equal government transfers:
number of workers × Social Security tax = number of retirees × Social Security payment.
Now, here is the critical step. We suppose, as before, that all workers in the economy are like
Carlo, and one worker is born every year. It follows that
number of workers = working years
and
number of retirees = retirement years.
But from the government budget constraint, this means that
working years × Social Security tax = retirement years × Social Security payment,
so the second and third terms cancel in the expression for Carlo’s lifetime resources. Carlo’s
lifetime resources are just equal to the amount of income he earns over his lifetime before the
deduction of Social Security taxes:
lifetime resources = income from working.
No matter what level of Social Security payment the government chooses to give Carlo, it ends
up taking an equivalent amount away from Carlo when he is working. In this pay-as-you-go
system, the government gives with one hand but takes away with the other, and the net effect
is a complete wash. We came to this conclusion simply by examining Carlo’s lifetime budget
constraint and the condition for Social Security balance. We did not even have to determine
Carlo’s consumption and saving during each year. And—to reiterate—the assumption that
there is just one person of each age makes no difference. If there were 4 million people of each
age, then we would multiply both sides of the government budget constraint by 4 million. We
would then cancel the 4 million on each side and get exactly the same result.
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We have gained a remarkable insight into the Social Security system. The lifetime income of
the individual is independent of the Social Security system. Whatever the government does to
tax rates and benefit levels, provided that it balances its budget, there will be no effect on
Carlo’s lifetime income. Since consumption decisions are made on the basis of lifetime
income, it also follows that the level of consumption is independent of variations in the Social
Security system. Any changes in the Social Security system result in changes in the level of
saving by working households but nothing else. As we saw in our original numerical example,
individuals adjust their saving in a manner that cancels out the effects of the changes in the
Social Security system.
The model of consumption and saving we have specified leads to a very precise conclusion:
the household neither gains nor loses from the existence of the Social Security system. The
argument is direct. If the well-being of the household depends on the consumption level over
its entire lifetime, then Social Security is irrelevant since lifetime income (and thus
consumption) is independent of the Social Security system.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The life-cycle model of consumption states that the household chooses its
consumption during each period of life subject to a budget constraint that the
discounted present value of lifetime income must equal the discounted present value
of lifetime consumption.
2. If the household chooses to perfectly smooth consumption, then consumption during
each period of life is equal to the discounted present value of income divided by the
number of years in a lifetime.
3. In general, a household’s lifetime income and consumption are independent of the
taxes and benefits of a pay-as-you-go Social Security system. Changes to the system
lead to adjustments in saving rather than consumption.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What are the two types of budget constraints that a household faces?
2. If working years increased by five and retirement years decreased by five, what would
happen to lifetime income?
[1] With perfect consumption smoothing, changes in current income will lead to changes in
consumption only if those changes in income lead the household to revise its estimate of its
lifetime resources.
13.3 Social Security in Crisis?
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
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1. What is the current state of the Social Security system in the United States?
2. What are some of the policy choices being considered?
The Social Security system in the United States went into deficit in 2010: tax receipts were
insufficient to cover expenditures. This was largely because the recession led to reduced
receipts from the Social Security tax. However, the Social Security Board of Trustees warns
that “[a]fter 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the number of beneficiaries
continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers.” [1]
It is hard to reconcile these statements with the model that we developed in Section 13.1
“Individual and Government Perspectives on Social Security” and Section 13.2 “A Model of
Consumption”. If Social Security is an irrelevance, why is there so much debate about it, and
why is there so much concern about its solvency? The answer is that our model
was too simple. The framework we have developed so far is a great starting point because it
tells us about the basic workings of Social Security in a setting that is easy to understand.
Don’t forget, though, that our discussion was built around a pay-as-you-go system in a world
where the ratio of retirees to workers was not changing. Now we ask what happens if we
complicate the demography of our model to make it more realistic.
The Baby Boom
During the period directly following World War II, the birthrate in many countries increased
significantly and remained high for the next couple of decades. People born at this time came
to be known—for obvious reasons—as the baby boom generation. The baby boomers in the
United States and the United Kingdom are clearly visible in Figure 13.6 “The Baby Boom in
the United States and the United Kingdom”, which shows the age distribution of the
population of those countries. If babies were being born at the same rate, you would expect to
see fewer and fewer people in each successive age group. Instead, there is a bulge in the age
distribution around ages 35–55. (Interestingly, there is also a second baby boomlet visible, as
the baby boomers themselves started having children.)
Figure 13.6 The Baby Boom in the United States and the United Kingdom
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If the same number of people were born every year, then a bar chart of population at
different age groups would show fewer and fewer people in each successive age group.
Instead, as these pictures show, the United States and the United Kingdom had a “baby
boom”: an unusually large number of children were born in the decades immediately
following World War II. In 2010, this generation is in late middle age.
Source: US Census Bureau, International Data Base,
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/informationGateway.php.
Figure 13.7 “The US Baby Boom over Time” presents the equivalent US data for 1980, 1990,
and 2000, showing the baby boom working its way through the age distribution.
Figure 13.7 The US Baby Boom over Time
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These pictures show the age distribution of the population as the baby boom generation gets
older. The “bulge” in the age distribution shifts rightward. In 1980, the baby boomers were
young adults. By 2000, even the youngest baby boomers were in middle age.
Source: US Census Bureau, International Data Base,
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/informationGateway.php.
As the baby boom generation makes its way to old age, it is inevitable that the
dependency ratio—the ratio of retirees to workers—will increase dramatically. In addition,
continuing advances in medical technology mean that people are living longer than they used
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to, and this too is likely to cause the dependency ratio to increase. The 2004 Economic Report
of the President predicted that the dependency ratio in the United States will increase from
0.30 in 2003 to 0.55 in 2080. [2] Roughly speaking, in other words, there are currently about
three workers for every retiree, but by 2080 there will only be two workers per retiree.
A Baby Boom in Our Model
In our framework, we assumed that there was always one person alive at each age. This meant
that the number of people working in any year was the same as the working life of an
individual. Likewise, we were able to say that the number of people retired at a point in time
was the same as the length of the retirement period.
Here is a simple way to represent a baby boom: Let us suppose that, in one year only, two
people are born instead of one. When the extra person enters the work force, the dependency
ratio will decrease—there is still the same number of retirees, but there are more workers. If
Social Security taxes are kept unchanged and the government continues to keep the system in
balance every year, then the government can pay out higher benefits to retirees. For 45 years,
retirees can enjoy the benefits of the larger workforce.
Eventually, though, the baby boom generation reaches retirement age. At that point the extra
individual stops contributing to the Social Security system and instead starts receiving
benefits. What used to be a boon is now a problem. To keep the system in balance, the
government must reduce Social Security benefits.
Let us see how this works in terms of our framework. Begin with the situation before the baby
boom. We saw earlier that the government budget constraint meant that Social Security
revenues must be the same as Social Security payments:
number of workers × Social Security tax = number of retirees × Social Security payment.
If we divide both sides of this equation by the number of retirees, we find that
annual social security payment to each worker
= (
number of workers
number of retirees
) × social security tax.
The first expression on the right-hand side (number of workers/number of retirees) is the
inverse of the dependency ratio.
When the baby boom generation is working. Once the additional person starts
working, there is the same number of retirees, but there is now one extra worker. Social
Security revenues therefore increase. If the government continues to keep the system in
balance each year, it follows that the annual payment to each worker increases. The
dependency ratio has gone down, so payments are larger. The government can make a
larger payment to each retired person while still keeping the system in balance. Retirees
during this period are lucky: they get a higher payout because there are relatively more
workers.
When the baby boom generation retires. Eventually, the baby boom generation will
retire, and there will be one extra retiree each year until the baby boom generation dies.
Meanwhile, we are back to having fewer workers. So when the baby boom generation
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retires, the picture is reversed. Social Security payments are higher than in our baseline
case, and revenues are back to where they were before the baby boomers started working.
Because there are now more retirees relative to workers—that is, the dependency ratio has
increased—retirees see a cut in Social Security benefits.
If the Economic Report of the President figures are to be believed, the coming increase in the
dependency ratio means that Social Security payments would have to decrease by about 45
percent if the Social Security budget were to be balanced every year. The reality is that this
simply will not happen. First, the Social Security system does not simply calculate payouts on
the basis of current Social Security receipts. In fact, there is a complicated formula whereby
individuals receive a payout based on their average earnings over the 30 years during which
they earned the most. [3] Of course, that formula could be changed, but it is unlikely that
policymakers will completely abandon the principle that payments are based on past earnings.
Second, retired persons already make up a formidable political lobby in the United States. As
they become more numerous relative to the rest of the population, their political influence is
likely to become even greater. Unless the political landscape changes massively, we can expect
that the baby boom generation will have the political power to prevent a massive reduction in
their Social Security payments.
Social Security Imbalances
To completely understand both the current situation and the future evolution of Social
Security, we must make one last change in our analysis. Although the Social Security system
was roughly in balance for the first half-century of its existence, that is no longer the case.
Because payments are calculated on the basis of past earnings, it is possible for revenues to
exceed outlays or be smaller than outlays. This means that the system is not operating on a
strict pay-as-you-go basis.
When the government originally established Social Security, it set up something called the
Social Security Trust Fund—think of it as being like a big bank account. Current workers pay
contributions into this account, and the account also makes payments to retired workers.
Under a strict pay-as-you-go system, the balance in the trust fund would always be zero. In
fact, in some years payments to workers are smaller than tax receipts, in which case the extra
goes into the Trust Fund. In other year payments exceed receipts, and the difference is paid
for out of the Trust Fund.
To be more precise,
tax revenues = number of workers × Social Security taxes = number of workers × tax rate ×
income
and
Social Security payments = number of retirees × Social Security payment.
If tax revenues exceed payments, then the system is running a surplus: it is taking in more in
income each period than it is paying out to retirees. Conversely, if payments exceed revenues,
the system is in deficit. In other words,
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Social Security surplus = number of workers × tax rate × income− number of retirees × Social
Security payment.
For the first half-century of Social Security, there was an approximate match between
payments and receipts, although receipts were usually slightly larger than payments. In other
words, rather than being exactly pay-as-you-go, the system typically ran a small surplus each
year. [4] The Social Security Trust Fund contains the accumulated surpluses of past years. It
gets bigger or smaller over time depending on whether the surplus is positive or negative. For
example,
Trust Fund balance this year = Trust Fund balance last year + Social Security surplus this
year.
(Strictly, that equation is true provided that we continue to suppose that the real interest rate
is zero.) If tax revenues exceed payments, then there is a surplus, and the Trust Fund
increases. If tax revenues are less than payments, then there is a deficit (or, to put it another
way, the surplus is negative), so the Trust Fund decreases.
The small surpluses that have existed since the start of the system mean that the Trust Fund
has been growing over time. Unfortunately, it has not been growing fast enough, and in 2010,
the fund switched from running a surplus to running a deficit. There are still substantial funds
in the system—almost a century’s worth of accumulated surpluses. But the dependency ratio is
so high that those accumulated funds will disappear within a few decades.
Resolving the Problem: Some Proposals
We can use the life-cycle model of consumption/saving along with the government budget
constraint to better understand proposals to deal with Social Security imbalances.
We saw that the surplus is given by the following equation:
Social Security surplus = number of workers × tax rate × income− number of retirees × Social
Security payment.
The state of the Social Security system in any year depends on five factors:
1. The level of income
2. The Social Security tax rate on income
3. The size of the benefits
4. The number of workers
5. The number of retirees
Other things being equal, increases in income (economic growth) help push the system into
surplus. [5] A larger number of the population of working age also tends to push the system
into surplus, as does a higher Social Security tax. On the other hand, if benefits are higher or
there are more retirees, that tends to push the system toward deficit.
Increasing Taxes or Decreasing Benefits
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Many of the proposals for reforming Social Security can be understood simply by examining
the equation for the surplus. Remember that the number of workers × the tax rate × income is
the tax revenue collected from workers, whereas the number of retirees × the Social Security
payment is the total transfer payments to retirees. If the system is running a deficit, then to
restore balance, either revenues must increase or payouts must be reduced.
The tax rate and the amount of the payment are directly under the control of the government.
In addition, there is a ceiling on income that is subject to the Social Security tax ($106,800 in
2011). At any time, Congress can pass laws changing these variables. It could increase the tax
rate, increase the income ceiling, or decrease the payment. If we simply think of the problem
as a mathematical equation, then the solution is easy: either increase tax revenues or decrease
benefits. Politics, though, is not mathematics. Politically, such changes are very difficult.
Indeed, politicians often refer to increases in taxes and/or reductions in benefits as a political
“third rail” (a metaphor that derives from the high-voltage electrified rail that provides power
to subway trains—in other words, something not to be touched).
Another way to increase revenue is through increases in GDP. If the economy is expanding
and output is increasing, then the government will collect more tax revenues for Social
Security. There are no simple policies that guarantee faster growth, however, so we cannot
plan on solving the problem this way.
Delaying Retirement
We have discussed the tax rate, the payment, and the level of income. This leaves the number
of workers and the number of retirees. We can change these variables as well. Specifically, we
can make the number of workers bigger and the number of retirees smaller by changing the
retirement age. This option is frequently discussed. After all, one of the causes of the Social
Security imbalance is the fact that people are living longer. So, some ask, if people live longer,
should they work longer as well?
Moving to a Fully Funded Social Security System
The financing problems of Social Security stem from a combination of two things:
demographic change and the pay-as-you-go approach to financing. Suppose that, instead of
paying current retirees by taxing current workers, the government were instead simply to tax
workers, invest those funds on their behalf, and then pay workers back when they are retired.
Economists call this a fully funded Social Security system. In this setup, demographic
changes such as the baby boom would not be such a big problem. When the baby boom
generation was working, the government would collect a large amount of funds so that it
would later have the resources to pay the baby boomers their benefits.
As an example, Singapore has a system known as the Central Provident Fund, which is in
effect a fully funded Social Security system. Singaporeans make payments into this fund and
are guaranteed a minimum return on their payments. In fact, Singapore sets up three separate
accounts for each individual: one specifically for retirement, one that can be used to pay for
medical expenses, and one that can be used for specific investments such as a home or
education.
Some commentators have advocated that the United States should shift to a fully funded
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Social Security system, and many economists would agree with this proposal. [6] Were it to
adopt such a system, the US government would not in the future have the kinds of problems
that we currently face. Indeed, the Social Security reforms of the 1980s can be considered a
step away from pay-as-you-go and toward a fully funded system. At that time, the government
stopped keeping the system in (approximate) balance and instead started to build up the
Social Security Trust Fund.
But this is not a way to solve the current crisis in the United States. It is already too late to
make the baby boomers pay fully for their own retirement. Think about what happened when
Social Security was first established. At that time, old workers received benefits that were
much greater than their contributions to the system. That generation received a windfall gain
from the establishment of the pay-as-you-go system. That money is gone, and the government
cannot get it back.
Suppose the United States tried to switch overnight from a pay-as-you-go system to a fully
funded system. Then current workers would be forced to pay for Social Security twice: once to
pay for those who are already retired and then a second time to pay for their own retirement
benefits. Obviously, this is politically infeasible, as well as unfair. Any realistic transition to a
fully funded system would therefore have to be phased in over a long period of time.
Privatization
Recent discussion of Social Security has paid a lot of attention to privatization. Privatization is
related to the idea of moving to a fully funded system but with the additional feature that
Social Security evolves (at least in part) toward a system of private accounts where individuals
have more control over their Social Security savings. In particular, individuals would have
more choice about the assets in which their Social Security payments would be invested.
Advocates of this view argue that individuals ought to be responsible for providing for
themselves, even in old age, and suggest that private accounts would earn a higher rate of
return. Opponents of privatization argue, as did the creators of Social Security in the 1930s,
that a privatized system would not provide the assistance that elderly people need.
Some countries already have social security systems with privatized accounts. In 1981, Chile’s
pay-as-you-go system was virtually bankrupt and replaced with a mandatory savings scheme.
Workers are required to establish an account with a private pension company; however, the
government strictly regulates these companies. The system has suffered from compliance
problems, however, with much of the workforce not actually contributing to a plan. In
addition, it turns out that many workers have not earned pensions above the government
minimum, so in the end it is not clear that the private accounts are really playing a very
important role. Recent reforms have attempted to address these problems, but it remains
unclear how successful Chile’s transition to privatization will be.
As with the move to a fully funded Social Security system, a big issue with privatization is the
transition period. If, for example, the government announced a plan today to privatize Social
Security, it would have to deal with the fact that many retired people would no longer have
Social Security income. Furthermore, many working people would have already paid into the
program. Thus proposals to privatize Social Security must include a plan for dealing with
existing retirees and those who have paid into the system through payroll taxes.
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Some recent discussion has suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that privatization would help
solve the current Social Security imbalance. This is misleading. By cutting off the payroll tax
revenues, privatization makes the problem worse in the short run, not better. Although
privatization is certainly a proposal that can be discussed on its own merits, it should be kept
separate from the debate about how to balance existing Social Security claims with revenues.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Many studies predict that, if there are no policy changes, the Social Security system
will be bankrupt by the middle of this century. A main cause of this problem is
demographic change: fewer workers are supporting more retirees, and life
expectancies have increased.
2. Some possible policy remedies include raising taxes on workers, reducing benefits,
and increasing the retirement age.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What is the dependency ratio? Why might it change over time?
2. What is the Social Security Trust Fund?
[1] “A Summary of the 2011 Annual Reports: Social Security and Medicare Boards of
Trustees,” Social Security Administration, accessed June 24,
2011,http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html.
[2] Economic Report of the President (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004), accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/pdf/2004_erp .
[3] Kaye A. Thomas, “Understanding the Social Security Benefit Calculation,” Fairmark,
accessed July 20, 2011, http://www.fairmark.com/retirement/socsec/pia.htm.
[4] “Trust Fund Data,” Social Security Administration, January 31, 2011, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4a1.html. Over the first half-century of the
program, the Trust Fund accumulated slightly less than $40 billion in assets. This might
sound like a big number, but it amounts to only a few hundred dollars per worker.
[5] The effect of economic growth is lessened because of the fact that Social Security payments
are linked to past earnings. Higher growth therefore implies higher payouts as well as higher
revenues. Still, on net, higher growth would help Social Security finances.
[6] “Economic Letter,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, March 13, 1998, accessed July
20, 2011, http://www.frbsf.org/econrsrch/wklyltr/wklyltr98/el98-08.html. This letter
discussed the transition to a fully funded Social Security system.
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13.4 The Benefits and Costs of a Social Security System
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the benefits of having a Social Security system?
2. How does a Social Security system help someone deal with the uncertainties of life?
3. What are the effects of Social Security on national saving?
We have seen how demographic changes in the economy, combined with the pay-as-you-go
form of Social Security, are leading to funding problems within the US system. The United
States is not alone; many other countries also have pay-as-you-go systems and are facing
similar demographic challenges. We have also examined some ways of resolving these
financing problems. Yet we have not addressed another more basic question: why have a
Social Security system at all? After all, our analysis suggests that people may adjust their
private saving behavior in a way that undoes the effects of Social Security. What advantages
and disadvantages of Social Security have we so far missed?
The Uncertainties of Life
A century or two ago, if you were unlucky enough to fall into serious poverty, there was very
little in the way of government help, even in the richest countries. You were likely to end up in
the poorhouse (sometimes called a workhouse or an almshouse), where you obtained the bare
minimum of shelter and food in exchange for grueling work. For those who were old and poor,
the poorhouse was a place to die an ignominious death:
Numerous as are the old men’s homes, old ladies’ homes, and homes for aged couples
that are supported by private charity, they are yet, as every worker among the poor
knows, too few to meet the demand. Our almshouses are also practically homes for the
aged poor. Some almshouse inmates became paupers before they were aged, but many
of them led independent and self-respecting lives, and even put by something for the
future while physically able to earn wages. When wages ceased, savings, if any were
made, were used up or else lost in unwise investments, and at the end almshouse relief
and the pauper’s grave were preferred to exposure and starvation. [1]
Social Security in the United States and other countries was set up largely to save old people
from this fate.
Carlo did not face any of the problems suggested by the quotation. In Carlo’s world there was
no uncertainty: working and retirement income were known at the start of his working life,
and his dates of retirement and death were also known with certainty. Carlo had no risk of
using up all his savings before he died, or of losing his money in “unwise investments.” But
Carlo’s world is not the world in which we live. In practice, individuals face enormous
uncertainty both about their lifetime income and their consumption needs in retirement.
The mere fact that we live in an uncertain world is not, in and of itself, a reason for the
government to intervene. Private insurance markets might be available that allow individuals
to purchase insurance to cover themselves against these kinds of risks. As an example, many
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people have disability insurance that they either purchase individually or obtain through their
employer. Disability insurance means that if you are unlucky enough to suffer an accident or
illness that prevents you from working, you will still receive income. It is also possible to
purchase annuities (which are sort of a reverse life insurance): these are assets that pay out a
certain amount each year while you are alive and allow you to insure yourself against the
uncertain time of your death.
Early discussions of Social Security highlighted the insurance role of the program. During the
Great Depression, it became clear that insurance provided through markets was woefully
incomplete. Thus the government created a variety of safety nets, financed by public funds.
Social Security was one of these programs. An early pamphlet on Social Security summarizes
this view:
In general, the Social Security Act helps to assure some income to people who cannot
earn and to steady the income of millions of wage earners during their working years
and their old age. In one way and another taxation is spread over large groups of
people to carry the cost of giving some security to those who are unfortunate or
incapacitated at any one time. The act is a foundation on which we have begun to build
security as States and as a people, against the risks which families cannot meet one by
one. [2]
Financial sophistication has increased markedly since the 1930s, but insurance markets are
still far from perfect, so most people agree that the government should continue to provide the
insurance that private markets fail to deliver. As President George W. Bush’s Council of
Economic Advisors wrote, “To protect against this risk [of living an unusually long time], a
portion of the retirement wealth that a worker has accumulated must be converted into an
annuity, a contract that makes scheduled payments to the individual and his or her
dependents for the remainder of their lifetimes.” [3] Once we acknowledge two things—(1)
there is major uncertainty in life, and (2) insurance markets are lacking—we see a clear role
for Social Security.
The Complexity of Optimization
There is another reason to think that our analysis of Carlo was much too simple. For Carlo, it
was quite straightforward to determine his optimal level of consumption: all he had to do was
to calculate his lifetime income, divide by the number of years of life that he had left, and he
knew his optimal level of consumption.
We said earlier that the basic idea of this life-cycle model continues to hold even in a more
complicated world, where incomes are not constant, real interest rates are not zero, and
consumption needs may vary over one’s lifetime. If you have a PhD in economics, you even
learn to solve these problems in a world of uncertainty.
Yet when one considers all the uncertainties of life, the problem certainly becomes very
complex. Most individuals do not have PhDs in economics, and most people—even including
those with economics PhDs—are not able to forecast their income and consumption needs
very accurately. As a result, it seems likely that many people are not capable of making good
decisions when they are thinking about consumption and saving over their entire lifetimes. As
stated in the 2004 Economic Report of the President, “Some individuals may not be capable
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of making the relevant calculations themselves and may not be able to enlist the service of a
financial professional to advise them.” [4] Social Security can therefore be seen as a program
that provides assistance to individuals unable to make optimal decisions on their own. [5]
In general, economists believe both that people are aware of their own self-interests and are
capable of making good decisions. Economists tend to be suspicious of arguments that suggest
that the government can make better decisions for people than they can make for themselves.
At the same time, research by economists and psychologists suggests that individuals are
subject to biases and errors of judgment in their decision making. And if government
paternalism makes sense anywhere, then it is likely to be in the context of lifetime saving
decisions. After all, we are not talking about deciding which kind of coffee to buy or what price
to set for a product this month. There is no room for learning from your mistakes, there are no
second chances, and the consequences of error are enormous. In life, you only get old once.
Distortions and Administrative Costs
The key arguments in favor of Social Security are therefore that it provides some insurance
that may not be available through private markets and protects people in the face of their
inability to make sound decisions when they are planning for the distant future. But just
because there are some shortcomings of private insurance and annuity markets, we should
not presume that government can do things better. Against the benefits of the Social Security
system must also be set some costs.
First, any government program requires resources to operate. It costs about 1 percent of the
benefits paid to administer the Social Security system. This is a direct cost of the program.
Second—and more interestingly in terms of economics—whenever we have a government
scheme that affects the taxes that people pay, there will be some distortionary effects on
people’s willingness to work. Taxes lower the relative price of leisure compared to
consumption goods, which may induce people to work less. Because Social Security imposes a
tax on the incomes of working people, it distorts their choices. This is another cost of the
Social Security system.
The Effect on National Savings
There is another effect of Social Security that is much more subtle. It reduces the savings of
the nation as a whole. This means less capital and ultimately lower living standards. The
intuition is as follows. When individuals save, they make funds available in the financial
markets for firms to borrow. Thus saving leads to investment and a buildup of the economy’s
capital stock. But as we saw, Social Security reduces the individual incentive to save. People
don’t need to save if the government will provide for them in retirement. Furthermore, the
taxes being collected by the government are not being used to finance capital investment
either; they are being paid out to old workers.
A pay-as-you-go system thus tends to reduce overall national saving. In a fully funded Social
Security system, this is not an issue, and indeed this is one of the most compelling arguments
in favor of a gradual shift to a fully funded system.
Redistributive Effects of Social Security
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Social Security redistributes income in ways that may not be desirable. After all, those who
benefit the most from Social Security are those who live the longest. Thus the scheme
effectively redistributes money from the unlucky people who die young to the lucky ones who
live for a very long time. This is a politically charged argument, for life expectancy is
correlated with poverty, race, and sex. The life expectancy of poor African American men is
significantly lower than the life expectancy of rich white American women, for example. Social
Security may redistribute resources, from poor African American men to rich white American
women.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Some benefits of a Social Security system arise from the provision of insurance over
the uncertainties of life and in helping people make once in a lifetime choices that are
very complex.
2. Through the Social Security system, retirees receive benefits until they die. This is a
form of insurance to deal with the uncertainties of life.
3. Since a pay-as-you-go Social Security system provides income during retirement
years, it reduces the incentive for households to save.
Checking Your Understanding
1. How does Social Security help people who are unable to make choices on their own?
2. In what ways does Social Security redistribute resources across households?
[1] Henry Seager, Social Insurance: A Program of Social Reform, Chapter V—“Provision of
Old Age,” 1910, accessed August 9, 2011, http://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/seager5 .
[2] Mary Ross, “Why Social Security?” Bureau of Research and Statistics, 1937, accessed July
20, 2011, http://www.ssa.gov/history/whybook.html.
[3] Economic Report of the President (Washingon, DC: GPO, 2004), accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/pdf/2004_erp , p. 130.
[4] Economic Report of the President (Washingon, DC: GPO, 2004), accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/pdf/2004_erp , p. 130.
[5] That said, figuring payments under the current social security system is not easy either. To
understand why, check out the information on benefits at the Social Security Administration
website. “Your Retirement Benefit: How It Is Figured,” Social Security Administration,
January 2011, accessed July 20, 2011, http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/10070.html.
13.5 Social Security in the Real World
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What aspects of the real world are highlighted, and which are missed in our simple
framework?
2. Why do people disagree about Social Security reform?
Our discussion of Social Security deliberately used a simple framework. Using that
framework, we first showed that, in the simplest case, the Social Security system actually has
no effect on the lifetime consumption of households. We also explained that, once we move
away from this simple setup, there are some arguments both for and against a Social Security
system.
Complications
The world is much more complicated than our simple framework, and we need to make sure
that our analysis has not left out some important feature of the real world that would change
our conclusion. In this section, we briefly discuss some complications to our model. Some of
these complications provide some additional reasons to support a Social Security system;
others identify additional costs of the system. However, these additional costs and benefits are
much less important than those we have already identified.
Positive Real Interest Rates
We based all our discussion on an assumption that the real interest rate is zero. When the real
interest rate is zero, it is legitimate to add real income in different years and consumption in
different years. With a real interest rate of zero, adding income levels in different periods is
not a problem. But if the real interest rate is positive, this is not correct. To add income and
consumption in different years, we have to calculate discounted present values.
Toolkit:
You can review discounted present value in the toolkit.
Suppose you will receive some income next year. The value of that this year is given by the
following equation:
discounted present value =
next year’s income
1 + real interest rate
.
Income earned in the future has a lower value from the perspective of today. The mathematics
of the lifetime budget constraint is harder once we allow for nonzero interest rates, so we will
not go through the formal calculations here. Without going through all the details of the
analysis, what can we conclude?
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The main observation is a rather surprising one. Once we introduce a positive real interest
rate, the Social Security system makes people worse off. Remember that we concluded earlier
that the system had no effect on the total resources in the hands of the household. Households
are taxed when they are young, though, and get that money returned to them when they are
old. With positive real interest rates, they would strictly prefer the money when they were
young.
This result seems odd. A Social Security system allows the government, in effect, to borrow
from the future, taxing younger generations to pay older generations. So how does it end up
making people worse off? A key part of the answer is that, when the system was first
introduced, the first generation of old people obtained benefits without having to make
contributions. In the past, therefore, the introduction of the Social Security system did make
one group of people better off.
Economic Growth
As we know, most economies grow over time. We neglected this in our analysis. Economic
growth has two implications for Social Security: one unimportant and one more significant.
First, economic growth is another reason why individuals’ incomes increase over the course of
their lifetimes. We have already observed that this does not change the fundamental idea of
lifetime consumption smoothing: you still add lifetime income in both working and
nonworking years and then divide by the number of years of life to find the optimal level of
consumption.
More interestingly, economic growth also means that Social Security payments increase over
time. As the income of workers increases because of economic growth, so too does the amount
of tax collected by the government. If the Social Security system is in balance at all times,
Social Security payments must also increase. Thus when workers are retired, they continue to
enjoy the benefits of economic growth. (In fact, if the growth rate of the economy happened to
be the same as the real interest rate, the effect of positive economic growth would exactly
offset the negative effect of real interest rates.) Normally, the effect of economic growth
partially offsets the negative effect of positive real interest rates.
Access to Credit Markets
In our setting, individuals were able to save without difficulty at the market real interest rate
(which was zero in our basic formulation). In the jargon of economics, individuals have good
access to credit markets. Yet many individuals in reality have a limited ability to borrow and
lend. [1] There is ample evidence that many people do not actively participate in stock
markets: they do not hold mutual funds or shares of individual companies’ stocks. Such
individuals typically save by putting money in a bank, and the interest they earn is relatively
low. In particular, it is lower than the interest that the Social Security Trust Fund can earn.
Social Security in effect allows the government to do some saving on behalf of individuals at a
better interest rate than they themselves can earn. Thus individuals who do not have good
access to capital markets can be made better off by access to a Social Security system.
This is in some ways the exact opposite of the argument for privatization. Supporters of
privatization argue that if individuals can make their own investment decisions, they can earn
a better interest rate than is provided by Social Security. They point out that, on average, the
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stock market provides a better rate of return than is provided by the system. This argument is
correct: people may be able to do better. We need to recognize, though, that these higher
returns would come at the cost of higher risk—which brings us right back to the original
argument for why we need a Social Security system.
Moral Hazard
Finally, because Social Security serves as a form of insurance, it is subject to problems that are
faced by all insurance systems. One of these goes by the name moral hazard, which simply
means that the presence of insurance may cause people to change their behavior in bad ways.
For example, if people have fire insurance, they may be less likely to keep a fire extinguisher
in their homes. Similarly, because people know that the government will provide them with
Social Security, they have less incentive to manage their own saving in a careful manner.
Why Do People Disagree about Social Security?
President George W. Bush’s suggestions for reforming the Social Security system encountered
a lot of opposition and rapidly became a partisan issue in US politics. Yet it seems as if Social
Security is a program that we could analyze completely and carefully using the tools of
economics. Why is a basic economic program such as Social Security so politicized?
Some people, of course, will view any proposal from the perspective of politics. There are
undoubtedly people who supported President George W. Bush’s proposals not on their merits
or demerits but just because they support the Republican Party. Likewise, there are surely
Democrats who opposed the president’s proposals simply because they came from a
Republican. But leaving such extreme partisan viewpoints aside, there are still good reasons
why reasonable people might have different opinions on Social Security:
People differ in their assessment of the importance of market failure in
insurance markets. A key argument for Social Security is that private markets do not
permit people to insure themselves against the risk of poverty in old age. Insurance and
annuity markets do exist, so some people argue that this failure of markets is no longer
very significant. At the same time, it requires financial sophistication to take advantage of
these markets. Many people do not have the expertise to use these markets or access to
financial professionals who could advise them.
People differ in their beliefs about whether individuals can make good
decisions about lifetime consumption and savings. Economists generally think
that individuals are the best judges of their own well-being. As a consequence, economists
are suspicious of arguments that suggest that the government knows better than you do
how you should make your own private decisions (such as how to manage your money).
However, the decision making required for lifetime financial planning is very complicated,
and the consequences of error are so severe, that many economists nonetheless think that
failures of individual decision making are a good reason to support Social Security.
People differ in their beliefs about how much government should be involved
in people’s lives. Some people are, in general, philosophically opposed to significant
government involvement in individual decisions. Even if individuals make poor decisions
about their lifetime consumption and savings and end up poor, these people would argue
that individuals should bear the consequences of their own mistakes, and government
should not bail them out. Others tend to the view that government has a critical role to
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play in protecting the unfortunate and unlucky.
People have different views about fairness and equality. Some people have the
view that an important function of government is to protect the worst off in society and to
redistribute some resources from those who are relatively rich to those who are poorer.
Such people tend to be strong supporters of programs such as Social Security because it
protects those who, through bad luck or poor decisions, would otherwise end their lives in
poverty. Others disagree, saying that government should not be involved in redistribution
of resources. They also point out, as we observed earlier, that Social Security, by its very
nature, benefits those who live for a long time, so it is not a good deal for groups with
lower life expectancies.
Beyond Social Security
You may have heard in the news that discussion of the need to reform Social Security applies
to other government programs. In particular, if a part of the Social Security program is a
growing imbalance in the age distribution, then other programs that support transfers to older
people are potentially in trouble as well.
A leading example of this is the Medicare program. [2] This program provides health care to
the elderly. A second example is Medicaid, which is also a publically funded program,
administered at the state level, to provide health care; this program is intended to provide
assistance to poor people. [3] These programs, like Social Security, entail large outlays by the
government. In his testimony in June 2008 to the Senate Finance Committee, Peter Orszag,
the director of the CBO, stated the following: “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
projects that total federal Medicare and Medicaid outlays will rise from 4 percent of GDP
[gross domestic product] in 2007 to 12 percent in 2050 and 19 percent in 2082, which, as a
share of the economy, is roughly equivalent to the total amount that the federal government
spends today. The bulk of that projected increase in health care spending reflects higher costs
per beneficiary rather than an increase in the number of beneficiaries associated with an aging
population.” [4]
This quote contains two key ideas. First, it seems likely that outlays for these
two programs will be growing rapidly over the next 50 or so years. From the CBO projections,
the share of spending on Medicare and Medicaid grows while the share of spending on Social
Security is basically constant after 2020. [5] Second, in contrast to Social Security, the
problem is not only demographics. Instead, as noted in the testimony, a significant part of the
increased cost of these programs comes from the increases in treatment per individual, rather
than the number of individuals.
Thus as you use the tools provided in this chapter to ponder Social Security, keep in mind that
other programs have similar budgetary challenges. Long-term solutions are needed either to
finance the projected increase in outlays or to reduce the costs of these programs.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The framework we presented captures the idea that saving is used to smooth
consumption over a lifetime, and lifetime income includes taxes paid during working
years together with retirement benefits. The framework did not allow for positive real
interest rates or economic growth. It also ignored uncertainties of life.
2. Much of the disagreement about Social Security can be traced to a debate about its
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value in terms of providing insurance over uncertain lifetimes and the ability of
individuals to act in their own interests when making consumption and saving
choices.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Give two reasons why there is disagreement about Social Security reform.
2. What does it mean not to have access to credit markets?
3. What other government programs are facing budgetary problems? Are the sources of
these problems the same as Social Security?
[1] In our example, individuals wanted to save and not to borrow because they obtained
income early in life. If we made more realistic assumptions about the patterns of wages over
the lifetime, we would typically find that people want to borrow at certain times of their lives.
For example, people often borrow early in life to finance their education.
[2] You can find information about this program at
Medicare.gov:http://www.medicare.gov/default.asp.
[3] “Medicaid Program—General Information,” US Department of Health and Human
Services, June 16, 2011, accessed July 20, 2011, http://www.cms.hhs.gov/MedicaidGenInfo.
[4] “The Long-Term Budget Outlook and Options for Slowing the Growth of Health Care
Costs,” Congressional Budget Office, June 17, 2008, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=9385.
[5] This comes from figure 1 of the following testimony: “The Long-Term Budget Outlook and
Options for Slowing the Growth of Health Care Costs,” Congressional Budget Office, June 17,
2008, accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=9385.
13.6 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
Throughout the world, people contribute to and benefit from social security programs like
that in the United States. Yet, owing to demographic changes and other factors, the US Social
Security system as we currently know it is unlikely to survive. The challenges faced by the
United States are present in many other countries with similar demographics. In much of the
developed world, the ratio of workers to retirees will decrease over the next decades. Armed
with the tools of this chapter, you are now equipped to understand the implications of
proposed changes to Social Security programs, both in the United States and the rest of the
world.
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Our analysis of Social Security combines two tools often used in macroeconomics. The first is
the life-cycle model of consumption/saving, which provides insights into how individuals and
households make consumption and saving decisions over long time horizons. We saw that
people do not have to match their consumption to their spending each year; instead they can
save or borrow to keep their consumption relatively smooth over their lifetimes. However,
they must still satisfy a budget constraint over their entire lifetime.
The second is the government budget constraint. We first examined the case where the
government kept the Social Security system in balance. In this case, revenues and payments
were equal each year. Then we examined the case where the government did not necessarily
match revenues and spending. In this case, there is still an accounting of government flows
that links surpluses and deficits today with future obligations.
Our discussion illustrates a very important fact about how the economy works: household
behavior typically responds to government policy. In the case of Social Security, we saw that
households reduce their saving when the government saves on their behalf.
Key Links
Obama Council of Economic Advisors on Social
Security:http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/seniors-and-social-security
Social Security Administration
Tax rates: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/taxRates.html
Tax base limits: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/cbb.html#Series
Programs in other countries: http://www.ssa.gov/international/links.html
The Central Provident Fund in
Singapore:http://mycpf.cpf.gov.sg/Members/home.htm
Social security in China: http://www.gov.cn/english/official/2005-
07/28/content_18024.htm
EXERCISES
1. Suppose that disposable income is $50,000, working years is 50, retirement years is
20, and the Social Security payment is $20,000. What is the lifetime income for this
household?
2. Suppose a household lives for two periods, working and earning disposable income of
$10,000 in the first period and obtaining retirement income of $5,000 in the second
period. Suppose that the real interest rate is not 0 percent (as in our example of Carlo)
but rather is 10 percent. What is the discounted present value of the household’s
lifetime income? (Refer to the toolkit if you need a reminder of how to calculate a
discounted present value.) How would you write the lifetime budget constraint when
the real interest rate is not 0 percent?
3. Some rapidly growing countries, such as China, have a very high saving rate.
Everything else being the same, explain why a household in a rapidly growing
economy would tend to have a low and not a high saving rate. The social security
system in China is not very generous. Explain how this would help you to understand
the high saving rate in China.
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4. Using the life-cycle model, how would the level of consumption respond to an
increase in
a) retirement relative to working years?
b) the annual labor income during working years?
c) payments of Social Security during retirement relative to income earned
during working years?
5. The equation for lifetime earnings is key to understanding the effects of Social
Security. Explain in your words why the last two terms on the right side of that
equation disappear using the government budget constraint.
6. Suppose you expect to live for 50 more years. Suppose also that, because the company
you work for had a successful year, you get a $50,000 bonus. If you smooth your
consumption perfectly, how much of your bonus will you spend this year, and how
much will you save? (You can assume the real interest rate is zero.)
7. Suppose you expect to live for 50 more years. Suppose also that, because you have
done an excellent job this year, you get a $2,000 raise. This means you expect that
your income will be $2,000 higher every year. If you smooth your consumption
perfectly, how much of this raise will you spend this year, and how much will you
save? (You can assume the real interest rate is zero.)
8. Suppose you expect to live for 50 more years. Suppose also that, because the company
you work for had a successful year, your boss tells you (and you believe her!) that you
will get a $50,000 bonus one year from now. If you smooth your consumption
perfectly, what will happen to your consumption and saving this year? (You can
assume the real interest rate is zero.)
9. Why do you think that the Singaporean government allows people to withdraw funds
from the government saving scheme in order to buy a house or apartment but not in
order to take a vacation?
10. Suppose a government institutes a pay-as-you-go social security scheme. Explain why
the first generation of recipients are clear beneficiaries from the scheme.
11. Give two reasons why households do not smooth their consumption perfectly.
Economics Detective
1. Find the most recent Social Security Administration release. What is the current
status of the program? When is it forecasted to go bankrupt?
2. Pick a country other than the United States. What is the social security system like
there? What is its current status?
3. Go to http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/cbb.html#Series. What does the
contribution and benefits base mean? Using the correcting for inflation tool, what has
happened to the contribution and benefit bases in real terms over the past 20 years?
4. Go to the Social Security Administration (http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/10070.html) to
figure out how to calculate the benefits for someone about to retire in your group of
family or friends.
Spreadsheet Exercises
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1. Consider the life of Carlo, as summarized in Figure 13.1 “Lifetime Income”. Write a
spreadsheet program to reproduce the calculations of lifetime income and
consumption made in that figure. Introduce a real interest rate of 5 percent into your
program. Recalculate the discounted present value of lifetime income. What will Carlo
consume each period of his life?
2. Use your spreadsheet program from Problem 1 to determine how changes in Social
Security affect consumption and saving. Do this first with a real interest rate of 0 and
then with a 5 percent real interest rate. Compare your results.
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Chapter 14
Balancing the Budget
$14,587,727,605,443.44…
…is a big number. It is the total amount of US government debt outstanding as of June 11,
2011. This number, which changes every day, is reported by the US Treasury Department at
the Treasury Direct website (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np).
The debt of the United States is the subject of a growing political storm in Washington.
Indeed, in August 2011 there seemed to be a very real possibility that the US Congress would
refuse to raise the “debt ceiling”—an upper limit on the size of the government debt. Had that
occurred, the government would no longer have been able to fulfill all its obligations. Many
commentators believe that the US government is facing a crisis with respect to its budget
policies—specifically, the fact that the government is running persistent budget deficits. The
issues are not the stuff of dry academic debate. If you are a typical reader of this book, you will
be working and paying taxes over the next 50 years.Yours is the future generation that will be
called on to deal with present-day deficits; debates about government deficits today are
debates about your standard of living. If deficits matter to anyone, they should matter to you.
Just like a household, a government has income and outlays. If a household’s outlays exceed
its income, then it must borrow to finance its spending. And if a household borrows
repeatedly, it builds up debt. The same is true of governments. If a government spends more
than its income, then it is running a deficit that must be financed by borrowing. Repeated
government deficits lead to the existence of a stock of government debt.
In recent decades, the US federal government has run a deficit much more often than not. The
federal government has been in deficit for all but 4 years between 1960 and 2011. As a
consequence, the stock of debt outstanding in the United States has increased from $290
billion to more than $14 trillion.
Most of us cannot really conceptualize what this sum means. We can try visual images: if we
stacked up 14 trillion dollar bills, we would get a pile half a million miles high—more than
twice the distance to the moon. But it is easiest to get a handle on the deficit if we divide by
the number of people in the economy to obtain the debt per person. As of August 9, 2011,
according to the US National Debt Clock (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock), this number is
$46,905.36. This means that if the government wanted to pay off its debt today, each and
every woman, man, and child in the United States would have to be taxed by this amount, on
average, to pay off the obligations of the government.
US citizens hold more than half of the debt—about 60 percent. So if the government were to
pay off its debt, the majority would end up being redistributed in the economy from taxpayers
to holders of US government bonds. Foreigners hold the remaining 40 percent, so this money
would be transferred from US taxpayers to citizens of other countries. The US government is
not proposing to pay off the existing debt, however. To the contrary, the government is
projected to run budget deficits for the foreseeable future, meaning that the stock of debt, and
the obligation of future generations, will continue to grow. [1]
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In response to concern over government deficits, one proposal has arisen over and over again:
a balanced-budget amendment to the US Constitution. Such a measure would simply make
deficits illegal. A balanced-budget amendment came within one vote of passing in a 1997 US
Senate vote, and one was passed by the US House of Representatives in 1997. Another bill was
introduced by a group of US House members in 2003. Here is part of the text of the 2003 bill:
SECTION 1. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal
year, unless three-fifths of the whole number of each House of Congress shall provide by
law for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a rollcall vote.
SECTION 2. The limit on the debt of the United States held by the public shall not be
increased, unless three-fifths of the whole number of each House shall provide by law for
such an increase by a rollcall vote.
SECTION 3. Prior to each fiscal year, the President shall transmit to the Congress a
proposed budget for the United States Government for that fiscal year in which total
outlays do not exceed total receipts. [2]
The Tea Party, which rose to some political prominence in the United States in 2010,
campaigned in favor of a balanced-budget amendment as well. In July 2011, the House of
Representatives passed HR 2560, called the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act, which (among other
things) called for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget to be transmitted to the
states for their consideration. [3] This bill was not passed by the Senate. Whether this political
activity will ever generate a constitutional amendment remains an open question and a point
of debate in the 2012 election.
The discussion of constitutional limits on budget deficits is not limited to the United States. In
2009, Germany amended its constitution to limit federal budget deficits to 0.35% of GDP by
2016. This limit applies when the German economy is operating near its potential output. The
regulations allow the German government to run deficits during recessions but require
surpluses in times of high economic activity. [4]
Should the government be forced to balance its budget each year, as such measures suggest?
There are certainly good reasons why households sometimes incur debt—to pay for a house, a
new car, or advanced education. Perhaps the same is true of governments. We should not
presume that deficits are harmful without first trying to understand why they occur. Others
have even argued that deficits are neither good nor bad but are simply unimportant. Indeed,
Vice President Cheney is reported to have said that “[President] Reagan proved that deficits
don’t matter.” [5]
So are deficits bad for the economy, good for the economy, or just irrelevant? Our goal in this
chapter is to understand the economic effects of government budget deficits so that we can
evaluate competing claims such as these and ultimately help you answer the following
question.
Should the government be forced to balance its budget?
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Road Map
We go through five steps in our evaluation of the merits of a balanced-budget amendment:
1. We make sure that we know what we are talking about. “Debt” and “deficit” are technical
terms with precise meanings. We go through their definitions carefully.
2. We examine the causes of the deficit in an accounting sense. Specifically, we examine how
and why the budget deficit depends on the state of the economy. We can then explore the
implications—again in an accounting sense—of a balanced-budget law.
3. We progress to a deeper understanding of why deficits occur. We examine why
governments choose to run deficits. At this point, we examine possible benefits of deficits
to the economy.
4. We examine why deficits might be harmful to the economy.
5. We examine the argument for why deficits might be irrelevant.
[1] These forecasts are available from the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO;http://www.cbo.gov).
[2] Although such bills are typically termed “balanced-budget amendments,” they often, as is
the case here, permit surpluses. US House of Representatives, “H.J.RES.22—Proposing a
Balanced-Budget Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” February 13, 2003,
accessed July 20, 2011, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.J.RES.22:.
[3] The Cut, Cap, and Balance Bill is presented at “Bill Text Versions: 112th Congress (2011–
2012) H.R.2560,” THOMAS: The Library of Congress, accessed September 20,
2011,http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.2560: For ongoing discussion, read
Rep. Mike Coffman, “Balanced Budget Amendment Caucus,” accessed July 20,
2011,http://coffman.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=257&Itemi
d=10.
[4] The fiscal situation in Germany is described in “Reforming the Constitutional Budget
Rules in Germany,” Federal Ministry of Finance—Economics Department, September 2009,
accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_21127-1522-4-
30 ?101116013053.
[5] Quoted in Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the
Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon and Schuster), 291.
14.1 Deficits and Debt
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the difference between the deficit and the debt?
2. What are the links between the deficit and the debt?
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http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.2560:
http://coffman.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=257&Itemid=10
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3. What are the budget constraints faced by the government?
We begin by being careful and precise about terminology. The terms deficit and debt are
sometimes used sloppily in everyday discourse; as a consequence, much nonsense is spoken
about fiscal policy. We must first make sure that we understand exactly what these terms
mean. [1]
Budget Deficit: Definition
The government deficit is the difference between government outlays and
government revenues. Inflows and outflows are part of the circular flow of income.
Revenues flow to the government when it imposes taxes on households and firms and when it
collects money through various other fees. For our purposes here, we do not need to
distinguish all the different kinds of taxes, and we do not worry about whether they are paid
by firms or by households. All that matters is that, in the end, some of the income generated
in the economy flows to the government. [2]
Money flows out in the form of government purchases of goods and services and government
transfers. Government purchases include things like roads, streetlamps, schools, and
missiles. They also include wage payments for government employees—that is, the purchase
of the services of teachers, soldiers, and civil servants. Outlays also occur when government
gives money to households. These are called transfer payments, or transfers for short.
Examples include unemployment insurance, Social Security payments, and Medicare
payments. Finally, transfers include the interest payments of the government on its
outstanding obligations.
The outlays of the government and its revenues are not always equal. The difference between
government purchases and transfers and government revenues represents a government
deficit, as set out in the following definition:
government deficit = outlays – revenues= government purchases + transfers − tax revenues=
government purchases − (tax revenues − transfers)= government purchases − net taxes.
Often we find it useful to group taxes and transfers together as “net taxes” and separate out
government purchases, as in the last line of our definition.
When outflows are less than inflows, then we say there is a government surplus. In other
words, a negative government deficit is the same thing as a positive government surplus, and
a negative government surplus is the same thing as a positive government deficit:
government surplus = −government deficit.
A government surplus is sometimes called “government savings.” When the government runs
a deficit, borrowing from the financial markets funds such spending. When the government
runs a surplus, these funds flow into the financial markets and are available for firms to
borrow.
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To illustrate the calculation of the deficit, we examine some made-up numbers in Table 14.1
“Calculating the Deficit”. Our equation defining the deficit tells us that we can calculate it two
ways. Look, for example, at year 3. The level of government spending is 200, tax receipts are
160, and transfers are 20.
We can add together purchases and transfers to get total outlays of the government, which
is 220. Then we can subtract revenues of 160 to find that the deficit is 60.
We can subtract transfers from tax receipts to get the amount of net taxes. Here, net taxes
are 140. We subtract this from purchases of 200 to find a deficit of 60.
Obviously, we get the same answer either way; it is just a matter of how we group the different
terms together. It might seem natural to group transfers with government expenditures (since
they are both outlays). Conceptually, though, transfers are more like taxes, in that they
represent a flow of dollars that is not matched by a flow of goods or services. The difference is
that taxes flow from into the government; transfers flow the other way. Government
expenditures are very different: they represent purchases of real gross domestic product (real
GDP) produced in the economy, thus contributing to the overall demand for output.
Table 14.1 Calculating the Deficit
Year Government
Purchases
Tax
Revenues
Transfers Net
Taxes
Deficit
1 50 30 10 20 30
2 100 160 40 120 -20
3 200 160 20 140 60
4 200 220 20 200 0
5 140 160 20 140 0
In Table 14.1 “Calculating the Deficit”, the deficit varies considerably over time. It is low in
year 1, negative in year 2 (in other words, there is a surplus), high in year 3, and zero in years
4 and 5. Between year 1 and year 2, government purchases and transfers increased, but tax
revenues increased even more. In fact, they increased sufficiently to turn the deficit into a
surplus. Between years 2 and 3, government purchases increased, and transfers decreased.
However, the decrease in transfers was less than the increase in government purchases, so
total government outlays increased substantially. Tax revenues stayed constant, so the
government went back into deficit.
In years 4 and 5 the government ran a balanced budget. If we compare year 4 to year 3, we see
that the budget could be balanced by raising taxes (from 160 to 220) and leaving outlays
unchanged. Conversely, by comparing year 5 to year 3, we see that the budget could be
balanced by cutting spending and leaving taxes unchanged. A balanced budget is consistent
with high taxes and high spending or low taxes and low spending. It is the combination of low
taxes and high spending that give us a deficit. Table 14.1 “Calculating the Deficit” makes it
clear that changes in the deficit can be explained only by examining all components of the
government budget constraint.
The Single-Year Government Budget Constraint
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We begin with the government budget constraint as it operates in a single year. This budget
constraint can be seen in terms of the flows into and from the government sector in the
circular flow, as shown in Figure 14.1 “The Government Sector in the Circular Flow” (which
explicitly shows that taxes come from households and firms). Later we discuss a second
government budget constraint that links spending and revenues over longer periods of time.
Figure 14.1 The Government Sector in the Circular Flow
The inflows into the government sector come from taxes and borrowing from the financial
sector. The outflows comprise government purchases and government transfers.
You might be wondering how it is possible for the government to have outlays that exceed its
revenues. The answer is given by the government budget constraint. The
government budget constraint says that the deficit, which is the difference between
outlays and revenues, must be financed by borrowing. If outlays exceed revenues in a given
year, then the government must somehow make up the difference. It does so by borrowing
from the public. In this sense, the government is no different from a household. Each of us
can, like the government, spend more than we earn. When we do, we must either borrow from
someone or draw on our savings from the past.
The government borrows by issuing government debt. This debt can take several forms.
The government has many types of obligations, ranging from short-term Treasury Bills to
longer-term bonds. For our analysis, we do not need to distinguish among these different
assets.
Toolkit: Section 16.22 “The Government Budget Constraint” and Section 16.16 “The Circular
Flow of Income”
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You can review the government budget constraint and the circular flow of income in the
toolkit.
The Deficit: Recent Experience
Table 14.2 “Recent Experience of Deficits and Surpluses (Billions of Dollars)” shows some
actual numbers for the United States: receipts, outlays, and the federal budget deficit in
current dollars for fiscal years 1990 to 2010. [3]
Table 14.2 Recent Experience of Deficits and Surpluses (Billions of Dollars)
Fiscal
Year
Receipts Outlays Surplus or
Deficit (−)
1990 1,032.0 1,253.1 -221.0
1991 1,055.1 1,324.3 -269.2
1992 1,091.3 1,381.6 -290.3
1993 1,154.5 1,409.5 -255.1
1994 1,258.7 1,461.9 -203.2
1995 1,351.9 1,515.9 -164.0
1996 1,453.2 1,560.6 -107.4
1997 1,579.4 1,601.3 -21.9
1998 1,722.0 1,652.7 69.3
1999 1,827.6 1,702.0 125.6
2000 2,025.5 1,789.2 236.2
2001 1,991.4 1,863.2 128.2
2002 1,853.4 2,011.2 -157.8
2003 1,782.5 2,160.1 -377.6
2004 1,880.3 2,293.0 -412.7
2005 2,153.9 2,472.2 -318.3
2006 2,406.9 2,655.1 -248.2
2007 2,568.0 2,728.7 -160.7
2008 2,524.0 2,982.5 -458.6
2009 2,105.0 2,517.7 -1,412.7
2010 2,161.7 3,455.8 -1,294.1
Source: “Historical Budget Tables,” Congressional Budget Office, January 2011, accessed
September 20, 2011,http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/120xx/doc12039/HistoricalTables[1] .
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In the early 1990s, the government ran a deficit of about $200–300 billion every year. (Note
that a negative number in the last column corresponds to a government deficit.) In the mid-
1990s, however, the deficit began to decrease. Both outlays and receipts were increasing, but
receipts were increasing more quickly. By 1998, the federal budget was in surplus, and it
reached a peak of $236 billion in 2000. Thereafter, revenues decreased for several years,
while spending continued to increase. By 2002, the budget had gone back into deficit again,
and by the middle of the decade, the deficit was at record levels.
As is evident from Table 14.2 “Recent Experience of Deficits and Surpluses (Billions of
Dollars)”, the budgetary picture changed dramatically with the onset of the severe recession in
2008. Revenues decreased and outlays increased so that the budget deficit widened
considerably, to more than $1 trillion in both 2009 and 2010.
If you look at data on the government budget, you will see that the federal budget is divided
into “on-budget” and “off-budget” items. Table 14.3 “On-Budget, Off-Budget, and Total
Surplus, 2010 (Billions of Dollars)” shows these numbers for fiscal year 2010. The
Congressional Budget Office defines off-budget items as follows. “Spending or revenues
excluded from the budget totals by law. The revenues and outlays of the two Social Security
trust funds (the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Disability
Insurance Trust Fund) and the transactions of the Postal Service are off-budget.” [4]
The transactions of the US Postal Service are not that important, so you can essentially think
of the off-budget items as being the Social Security system. Since the Social Security system
was in surplus over much of this period, the on-budget deficit is larger than the total.
From Table 14.3 “On-Budget, Off-Budget, and Total Surplus, 2010 (Billions of Dollars)”, the
total government deficit of $1,294 billion in 2010 reflects an on-budget deficit and a small off-
budget surplus.
The idea behind the separate budgeting is that Social Security represents a known set of
future government obligations. For this reason the government has, in effect, set aside a
separate account for Social Security revenues and outlays (much as you, as an individual,
might decide you want a separate account for your savings). [5] At least in theory, this
separates the debate about Social Security from the debate about current government
spending and receipts. Many policy discussions do focus just on the “on-budget” accounts. In
the end, though, all these monies flow either into or from the federal government. The
humorist Dave Barry once remarked that what distinguishes off-budget items is that “these
are written down on a completely different piece of paper from the regular
budget.” [6]
What is more, there are other known future obligations, such as Medicare, that
are not treated separately. The on-budget/off-budget distinction is really no more than an
accounting fiction, and in terms of the overall economic effects of the deficit, it is better to
focus on the total.
Table 14.3 On-Budget, Off-Budget, and Total Surplus, 2010 (Billions of Dollars)
Receipts Outlays Surplus or
Deficit (−)
On-Budget 1,530.1 2,9091.1 -1,371.1
Off-Budget 631.7 554.7 77.0
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Total 2,161.7 3,455.8 -1,294.1
Source: US Treasury, Financial Management Service, October 2010 Statement, accessed
September 20, 2011, http://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/mts0910.txt.
There are mixed messages to take away from Table 14.2 “Recent Experience of Deficits and
Surpluses (Billions of Dollars)”. The experience of budget surpluses in the 1990s tells us that
budget balancing is possible. At the same time, more recent experience suggests that
substantial changes in receipts and/or outlays are now needed to balance the budget. To
explore this somewhat further, look at Table 14.4 “Federal Outlays, 2010 (Billions of Dollars)”,
which shows various outlays for 2010. As we already know, total spending for that year was
$3.5 trillion. National defense, Social Security, and health-care programs together account for
$2.2 trillion, or about 63 percent of the total outlays. Other nondiscretionary spending—
largely outlays such as retirement payments to federal employees, unemployment insurance,
housing assistance, and food stamps—accounts for a further $401 billion. Interest payments
account for $196 billion. These categories together account for more than 80 percent of
federal outlays.
Table 14.4 Federal Outlays, 2010 (Billions of Dollars)
Item Amount Total Outlays
(%)
Defense 689 19.9
Nondefense Discretionary Spending 658 19.0
Social Security 701 20.3
Health Care Programs (including
Medicare and Medicaid)
810 23.4
Other Nondiscretionary Spending 401 11.6
Interest Payments 196 5.7
Total 3,456 100.0
Source: Compiled from data in CBO, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: An Update,” August
2011, accessed September 20, 2011,http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/123xx/doc12316/08-24-
BudgetEconUpdate . Totals do not add up because of rounding errors.
Just looking at those numbers should make it clear that it is very difficult to balance the
budget simply by cutting federal spending. Almost everyone agrees that there is waste in the
federal government, and there are programs that could and almost certainly should be
abolished. (This is not to say that you could find even a single program that everyone would
want to abolish. Every program benefits someone, after all. But there are certainly programs
that most people would agree are wasteful.) However, the vast majority of the budget is taken
up with either essential functions of government or programs that enjoy huge political
popularity. Few politicians would sign up for closing the public schools, the abolition of
unemployment insurance, or the cancellation of veterans’ benefits.
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The budget accounts distinguish between mandatory and discretionary spending. Many of the
big items listed in Table 14.4 “Federal Outlays, 2010 (Billions of Dollars)” fall into the
mandatory category—that is, outlays that are required by existing law. Less than 40 percent of
outlays in 2010 were discretionary, and half of those were national defense spending. The
remaining outlays were mandatory spending or payment of interest on the outstanding
debt. [7]
If the government were to pass a balanced-budget amendment, in other words, the hard job of
cutting spending or raising taxes would remain. Recall Section 3 of the amendment that we
quoted in the chapter opener: “the President shall transmit to Congress a proposed budget…in
which total outlays do not exceed total receipts.” Even with a balanced-budget amendment,
the president would still have to propose either major cuts in existing popular programs or
increases in taxes. However, such an amendment might provide “political cover” for the
president and Congress: they could explain their support for unpopular spending cuts or tax
increases by saying that the balanced-budget amendment gave them no choice.
The Intertemporal Government Budget Constraint
We discussed in Section 14.1.2 “The Single-Year Government Budget Constraint” that the
single-period government budget constraint links spending and revenues to the deficit (or
surplus) of the government each year. There is a second constraint faced by the government,
called the intertemporal budget constraint, linking deficits in one year to deficits in
other years.
When you take out a loan, you will ultimately have to repay it. The same is true of the
government; when it takes out a loan, it will ultimately have to repay the loan as well. If the
government chooses to pay for its expenditures today by borrowing instead of through current
taxes, then it will need additional taxes at some point in the future to pay off its loan. The
intertemporal budget constraint is just a fancy way of saying that, like everyone else, the
government has to pay off its loans at some point. [8] As a consequence, tax and spending
decisions at different dates are linked. Although governments can borrow or lend in a given
year, the government’s total spending over time must be matched by revenues.
To express the intertemporal budget constraint, we introduce a measure of the deficit called
the primary deficit. The primary deficit is the difference between government
outlays, excluding interest payments on the debt, and government revenues. The
primary surplus is equal to the minus of the primary deficit and is the difference between
government revenues and government outlays, excluding interest payments on the debt. In
our example in Table 14.1 “Calculating the Deficit”, the deficit in year 1 was 30. If payment of
interest on outstanding debt was 5, then the primary deficit would be 25, and the primary
surplus would be −25.
The intertemporal budget constraint says that if the government has some existing debt, it
must run surpluses in the future so that it can ultimately pay off that debt. Specifically, it is
the requirement that
current debt outstanding = discounted present value of future primary surpluses.
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This condition means that the debt outstanding today must be offset by primary budget
surpluses in the future. Because we are adding together flows in the future, we have to use the
tool of discounted present value. If, for example, the current stock of debt is zero, then the
intertemporal budget constraint says that the discounted present value of future primary
surpluses must equal zero.
Toolkit: Section 16.3 “Discounted Present Value”
You can review the meaning and calculation of discounted present value in the toolkit.
Linking the Debt and the Deficit
The stock of debt is linked directly to the government budget deficit. When the government
runs a budget deficit, it finances the deficit by issuing new debt. The deficit is a flow, which is
matched by a change in the stock of government debt:
change in government debt (in given year) = deficit (in given year).
If there is a government surplus, then the change in the debt is a negative number, so the debt
decreases. The total government debt is simply the accumulation of all the previous years’
deficits. From this equation, the stock of debt in a given year is equal to the deficit over the
previous year plus the stock of debt from the start of the previous year. (In this discussion, we
leave aside the fact that the government may finance part of its deficit by issuing new money.
In the United States and most other economies, this is a minor source of funding for the
government. [9])
To see the interactions between deficits and the stock of debt in action, examine Table 14.5
“Deficit and Debt”, which takes the deficit numbers from Table 14.1 “Calculating the
Deficit” and calculates the corresponding debt. We suppose that there is initially zero debt at
the beginning of year 1. The deficit of 30 in the first year means that there is outstanding debt
of 30 at the end of that year. In the second year, there is a budget surplus of 20. This reduces
the debt, but it is not sufficient to bring the debt all the way back to zero. Outstanding debt at
the end of the year is 10. In the third year, the deficit of 60 must be added to the existing debt
of 10, so the debt at the end of the year is 70.
Table 14.5 Deficit and Debt
Year Deficit Debt (Start of
Year)
Debt (End of
Year)
1 30 0 30
2 -20 30 10
3 60 10 70
4 0 70 70
5 0 70 70
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In years 4 and 5, the government runs a balanced budget: the deficit is zero. But the stock of
debt stays unchanged. The debt is equal to the accumulation of all the deficits. Eliminating
deficits (for example, by a balanced-budget amendment) means that the debt stays at its
existing level. Eliminating deficits is not the same thing as paying off the debt.
Figure 14.2 US Surplus and Debt, 1962–2010
Source: Congressional Budget Office.
The experience of the US deficit and debt held by the public since 1962 is summarized
inFigure 14.2 “US Surplus and Debt, 1962–2010”. The surplus is shown in the upper figure,
and the level of debt is shown in the lower figure. All values are in current dollars. At the far
left of the graph, we see that the US government ran relatively small deficits (negative
surpluses) in the 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, the debt increased slowly. From the mid-
1970s to the mid-1990s, deficits were substantial, so the amount of debt outstanding grew
rapidly. As we saw earlier, there was a brief period of surplus in the late 1990s and a
corresponding decrease in the debt, but deficit spending recommenced during the George W.
Bush administration (2001–2008). The debt increased again.
Although an analysis of deficits and debt is often presented using data similar to those
inFigure 14.2 “US Surplus and Debt, 1962–2010”, this figure is incomplete in two ways: (1)
these numbers are not corrected for inflation (they are current dollar figures), and (2) there is
no sense of how large the deficit and the debt are relative to the aggregate economy. Figure
14.3 “US Surplus and Debt as a Fraction of GDP, 1962–2010” remedies both defects by
showing the surplus and the debt as a fraction of nominal GDP. Because nominal GDP is also
measured in dollars, these ratios are just numbers. We see that the deficit has been a relatively
stable fraction of GDP, averaging about 2.7 percent of GDP. The debt level has averaged about
36 percent over the period.
Figure 14.3 US Surplus and Debt as a Fraction of GDP, 1962–2010
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Source: Congressional Budget Office and Economic Report of the President.
The federal debt is now in excess of $14 trillion. So if the United States were to pass a
balanced-budget amendment binding on the federal government, to take effect in 2012, say,
the stock of debt would thereafter remain fixed at well over $14 trillion. To reduce the stock of
debt outstanding, the deficit must be negative: the change in the stock of debt will be negative
only if the government runs a surplus.
Moreover, the government must pay interest on its outstanding debt. Recall that when the
government runs up debt, it is borrowing from the general public. The debt of the government
is an asset from the perspective of households: it is one of the ways in which people can hold
their saving. Holders of government bonds earn interest on these assets. Look again at Table
14.4 “Federal Outlays, 2010 (Billions of Dollars)”. In the United States, interest payments on
the debt amounted to $184 billion in 2005. Interest payments on the debt amount to more
than half of the deficit. Balancing the budget therefore means that, once we exclude interest
payments, spending plus transfers would have to be much smaller than tax revenues. If there
is outstanding debt, a balanced budget means that the government must run a primary
surplus.
To summarize, we have discovered three things about a balancing the budget:
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1. A balanced budget means that the deficit equals zero.
2. A balanced budget means that the debt is constant.
3. If there is existing debt, a balanced budget means that the government must run a primary
surplus.
Who Holds the Debt?
Given that the US government makes such large interest payments on outstanding debt, who
receives those payments? US government debt is held by households, firms, and governments
in many countries. Table 14.6 “Foreign Holdings of US Treasury Securities as of August 2008
(Billions of Dollars)” lists some of the foreign countries holding US Treasury securities (bills,
bonds, and notes) in two different months: August 2008 and May 2011.
Table 14.6 Foreign Holdings of US Treasury Securities as of August 2008 (Billions of Dollars)
Country Holding as of
August 2008
Holdings as of May
2011
Japan 585.9 912.4
China 541.0 1159.8
oil
exporters
179.8 229.8
Mexico 33.5 27.7
Canada 27.7 90.7
total 2,740.3 4,514.0
Source: “Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities,” US Department of the Treasury, July
18, 2011, accessed July 20, 2011, http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-
center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt.
In May 2011, the total foreign ownership of US Treasury securities was more than 45 percent
of the total privately held US public debt (“privately held” means we are excluding debt held
by the Federal Reserve System). As you can see from Table 14.6 “Foreign Holdings of US
Treasury Securities as of August 2008 (Billions of Dollars)”, the ownership of US debt has
changed significantly over the past few years. Japan was the largest holder of US debt in
August 2008, but more recently China has taken its place.
You might wonder how these countries came to hold such a large fraction of US debt. Part of
the answer goes back to the interaction between trade and capital flows between the United
States and the rest of the world. The key is the link between trade deficits and borrowing from
abroad:
borrowing from other countries = imports − exports = trade deficit.
This equation tells us that whenever a country runs a trade deficit, it must finance that deficit
by borrowing from abroad. The United States has been running trade deficits since the early
1970s. Consequently, foreign countries have been accumulating US assets, and government
debt is one important such asset.
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Observers sometimes comment on the fact that a substantial fraction of government debt is
“owed to ourselves” (that is, it is held by US citizens) and therefore less of a cause for concern
than the fraction that is owned by foreigners. Does this reasoning make sense? The answer is
“not very much.” To see why, consider a US citizen who owns some US government bonds.
Now imagine that she sells those bonds to a German bank and uses the proceeds to buy some
General Motors (GM) shares that are currently owned by a French investment bank.
All that has happened here is some rebalancing of portfolios. One individual decided to shift
her assets around, so she now owns GM shares instead of government bonds. Likewise, the
German bank decided it wanted more US bonds in its portfolio, whereas the French
investment bank decided it wanted fewer GM shares. These kinds of transactions go on all the
time in our economy.
Our hypothetical citizen is just as wealthy as she was before; she is simply holding her wealth
in a different form. The same is true for the German and French financial institutions. Yet
foreigners hold more of the national debt than previously. Domestic or foreign ownership of
the debt can change with no implications for the overall indebtedness of individuals or the
country. It is more meaningful to look at the amount of foreign debt that has been
accumulated by a country as a result of its borrowing from abroad. Foreign debt represents
obligations that will have to be repaid at some future date.
Commentators sometimes express worry over the fact that foreign central banks—notably
those of Japan and China—own substantial amounts of US debt. There is a legitimate concern
here: if one or more of those banks suddenly decided they no longer wanted to hold that debt,
then there might be a large change in US interest rates and resulting financial instability. But
the real issue is not that the debt is foreign owned. Rather, it is that a large amount of debt is
held by individual institutions big enough to move the market.
At the same time, the Chinese are equally concerned about the value of the US government
debt they hold. In their view, they traded away goods and services for pieces of paper that are
claims to be paid by the US government. These claims are in nominal terms (in dollars).
Hence any change in the exchange rate changes the value of this debt to the Chinese. If, for
example, the dollar depreciates relative to the Chinese renmimbi (RMB), then the real value
(in terms of Chinese goods and services) of this debt is reduced.
The RMB/dollar exchange rate was 8.28 in January 2000. A holder of a US dollar bill could
obtain 8.28 RMB in exchange. This rate was 8.07 in January 2006. However, by June 2011,
the exchange rate was 6.48. This means that someone who exchanged RMB for dollars in
2000 and then sold those dollars for RMB in June 2011 lost about 20 percent in nominal
terms.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The deficit is the difference between government outlays and government revenues. It
is a flow. The debt is a measure of the stock of outstanding obligations of the
government at a point in time.
2. The change in the debt between two dates is equal to the deficit incurred during the
time between those two dates.
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3. The government faces a single-year constraint that its deficit must be financed by
issuing new debt. The government also faces an intertemporal budget constraint that
its debt at a point in time must equal the discounted present value of future primary
surpluses.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What is the difference between the budget deficit and the primary deficit?
2. If the government runs a surplus, does this mean the stock of debt must be negative?
3. Is it legal for residents of other countries to hold US debt?
4. Table 14.2 “Recent Experience of Deficits and Surpluses (Billions of Dollars)” is in
current dollars. What does that mean?
[1] The CBO (http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=6060&sequence=13) has a glossary of
terms on its web page.
[2] The government also collects Social Security payments, which are discussed in more detail
inChapter 13 “Social Security”. These are just another kind of tax.
[3] Government budget numbers in the United States are reported for a “fiscal year,” which
runs from October to September. Thus fiscal year 2000 ran from October 1, 1999, to
September 30, 2000.
[4] Congressional Budget Office, Glossary, accessed October 19,
2011,http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=2727&type=0&sequence=14
[5] We discussed the Social Security Trust Fund, as this account is called, in Chapter 13
“Social Security”.
[6] Dave Barry, “The Mallomar Method,” DaveBarry.com, March 24, 1991, accessed August
28, 2011, http://www.davebarry.com/misccol/mallomar.htm.
[7] “Budget and Economic Outlook: Historical Budget Data,” Congressional Budget Office,
January 2011, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/120xx/doc12039/HistoricalTables[1] .
[8] Actually, there is one way in which the government is different from private individuals.
For practical purposes, we expect that the government will go on forever. This means that the
government could always have a stock of outstanding debt. However, there are practical limits
on this stock—for one thing, households will not lend unlimited amounts to the government.
Thus it is generally fair to say that additional borrowing by the government will have to be
repaid.
[9] See Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small” for more discussion. More precisely, then, every
year,change in government debt = deficit − change in money supply.Written this way, the
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equation tells us that the part of the deficit that is not financed by printing money results in
an increase in the government debt.
14.2 The Causes of Budget Deficits
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How does fiscal policy affect the budget deficit?
2. How does the state of the economy affect the budget deficit?
3. How do we determine whether a budget deficit results from fiscal policy or the state of
the economy?
Now that we have defined budget deficits, budget surpluses, and the government debt, it is
time to examine what determines these economic variables. The budget deficit reflects two
forces: the stance of fiscal policy and the state of the economy.
Fiscal policy refers to the choice by the government of (1) its levels of spending on goods and
services, (2) its transfers to households, and (3) the tax rates it sets on households and firms.
Most countries have different levels of government, so some tax and spending decisions are
made for the whole country, whereas others are made locally. In principle, we can include all
levels of government in our discussion. This means that, in the United States, “government”
can refer to the totality of local government, state government, and the federal government. In
practice, though, it is the decisions of the federal government that have the main impact on
the overall fiscal policy of the country. The same is true in other countries—local government
decisions are not usually very important for the overall stance of fiscal policy.
Tools of Fiscal Policy
There are two aspects of fiscal policy: government spending and tax/transfer policy. These
fiscal policy choices determine the deficit. [1]
Government Spending
Over long periods of time, government spending increases as an economy gets richer. Over
shorter periods of time, however, the level of government spending is not closely influenced
by the overall level of economic activity. For this reason, we typically suppose that
government spending is an exogenous variable that is determined “outside” our framework
of analysis. We illustrate this in Figure 14.4 “Government Spending”.
Figure 14.4 Government Spending
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We suppose that government spending is independent of the level of gross domestic product
(GDP), which means that it shows up as a horizontal line.
Taxation
Our interest here is in deficits and the debt rather than the details of taxation, so we take a
very simple approach to taxation. We assume that there is a constant tax rate that applies to
all levels of income and abstract away from all the other complexities of the tax schedule. This
view of the tax and transfer system is summarized by the following equation:
net taxes = tax rate × income.
We illustrate this relationship in Figure 14.5 “The Tax Function”. The slope of the line is the
tax rate. In other words, for every dollar increase in income, net tax receipts increase by the
amount of the tax rate.
Figure 14.5 The Tax Function
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Net tax receipts depend on the state of the economy. When income is higher, the government
collects more in taxes and pays out less in transfers.
Taxes depend positively on income because of the way the tax code is written. Conversely,
transfers (such as unemployment insurance or Medicare payments) tend to depend negatively
on income: when people are richer, they are less likely to need transfers from the government.
The tax rate in the figure captures the overall effect: higher income increases net tax revenues
both because people pay more taxes and because they receive fewer transfers.
Table 14.7 “Tax Receipts and Income” provides an example of tax receipts at different levels of
income, when the tax rate is 10 percent. At the level of an individual household, taxes increase
and transfers decrease as the household’s income increases. At the level of the entire
economy, exactly the same thing is true. As real GDP increases, tax receipts increase and
transfers decrease. Increased income, holding the tax rate fixed, leads to increased tax
receipts. At the same time, increases in the tax rate lead to higher tax receipts at each level of
income. Thus there are two factors determining tax receipts in the economy: the tax rate and
the overall level of economic activity.
Table 14.7 Tax Receipts and Income
Income Tax Rate Tax
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Receipts
0 0.1 0
100 0.1 10
500 0.1 50
1,000 0.1 100
2,000 0.1 200
5,000 0.1 500
The Budget Deficit and the State of the Economy
As the level of economic activity—real GDP—increases, the tax receipts of the government also
increase. To determine the deficit, we need to know both the current fiscal policy (as
summarized by the level of government purchases and the tax rate) and the level of economic
activity. Building on the example in Table 14.7 “Tax Receipts and Income”, suppose that
government purchases are 200 and the tax rate is 10 percent. The relationship between the
level of economic activity (GDP) and the deficit is given in Table 14.8 “Deficit and Income”. In
this example, the level of GDP must reach 2,000 before the budget is in balance (Figure 14.6
“Government Spending and Tax Receipts”).
Table 14.8 Deficit and Income
GDP Government
Purchases
Tax
Receipts
Deficit
0 200 0 200
100 200 10 190
500 200 50 150
1,000 200 100 100
2,000 200 200 0
5,000 200 500 -300
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Figure 14.6 Government Spending and Tax Receipts
Tax receipts increase as income increases, whereas government spending is unaffected by
the level of GDP.
The dependence of the deficit on real GDP and the stance of fiscal policy are summarized
in Figure 14.7 “Deficit/Surplus and GDP”, which graphs the numbers from Table 14.8 “Deficit
and Income”. The deficit/surplus is measured on the vertical axis, and real GDP is measured
on the horizontal axis. The deficit/surplus line is drawn for a given tax rate. As real GDP
increases, the deficit decreases. Thus the line in Figure 14.7 “Deficit/Surplus and GDP” has a
negative slope.
Figure 14.7 Deficit/Surplus and GDP
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The deficit equals government purchases minus net tax receipts. The deficit is positive when
GDP is low, but the budget goes into surplus when GDP is sufficiently high.
The deficit/surplus is the difference between the level of government purchases and the level
of receipts. There is a particular level of economic activity such that the budget is exactly in
balance. In our example, this level of GDP is 2,000. The deficit is zero when income is 2,000
because that is the point at which government purchases equal tax revenues. For levels of
income in excess of this level of GDP, the government budget is in surplus. In Figure 14.7
“Deficit/Surplus and GDP”, we see that the budget deficit/surplus line crosses the horizontal
axis when GDP is 2,000.
Increases in government purchases or reductions in the tax rate are examples of
expansionary fiscal policy. Decreases in government purchases or increases in the tax rate
are called contractionary fiscal policy. Expansionary fiscal policy increases the deficit for
a given level of real GDP. An increase in government spending shifts the deficit line upward,
as shown in Figure 14.8 “Expansionary Fiscal Policy”. With a decrease in the tax rate, by
contrast, the intercept stays the same, but the line rotates upward. The effect is still to
increase the deficit at all positive levels of income.
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Figure 14.8 Expansionary Fiscal Policy
Expansionary fiscal policy causes the deficit to increase at all levels of income, so the deficit
line shifts upward. This picture illustrates the case of an increase in government purchases.
Cyclically Adjusted Budget Deficit
Given that the deficit depends on both the level of real GDP and the stance of fiscal policy, it is
useful to have a way to distinguish these two influences. Put differently, it is helpful to know if
the deficit is large because of the level of economic activity or because of the choices of
government spending and taxes. This distinction came to the forefront in the 2004
presidential election in the United States. One of the issues raised in the debates between
President George W. Bush and Senator Kerry was how the forecasted surplus from 2000
turned into the massive deficits of 2004. Were the deficits caused by the state of the economy
or the policy decisions undertaken by President George W. Bush? To answer such questions,
we need to decompose changes in the deficit into changes due to fiscal policy and changes due
to the level of economic activity.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO; http://www.cbo.gov) produces a measure of the
budget deficit, called the cyclically adjusted budget deficit, for this purpose. The CBO
first calculates a measure of potential output—the level of GDP when the economy is at full
employment. Then it calculates the outlays and revenues of the federal government under the
assumption that the economy is operating at potential GDP. The deficit is calculated by
subtracting revenues from outlays. For obvious reasons, the cyclically adjusted budget deficit
is also sometimes called the full-employment deficit. [2]
Figure 14.9 “The Cyclically Adjusted Budget Deficit” illustrates this idea. We first calculate the
level of potential output and then use the deficit line to tell us the cyclically adjusted budget
deficit or surplus for the economy. The figure shows two possibilities. In the first case, there is
a government deficit when actual output is equal to potential output. In the second case, there
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is a government surplus when output is equal to potential output. Of course, the practical
calculations are somewhat trickier than this picture suggests, but the idea is straightforward.
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Figure 14.9 The Cyclically Adjusted Budget Deficit
To determine the cyclically adjusted deficit or surplus in an economy, calculate the level of
potential output and then use the deficit/surplus line to determine what the deficit or surplus
would be at that level of output. In panel (a), the economy has a cyclically adjusted deficit,
whereas in panel (b), it has a cyclically adjusted surplus.
Figure 14.10 “Cyclical Deficit” and Figure 14.11 “Structural Deficit” show that there are two
distinct reasons why a government might go from surplus into deficit—as happened in 2002,
for example. Suppose that, last year, the economy was at potential output and there was a
cyclically adjusted surplus (point A). Now imagine that this year there is a government deficit.
One possibility is that the economy went into recession, as in Figure 14.10 “Cyclical Deficit”,
point B. This is called a cyclical deficit because it is due to the state of the business cycle.
Another is that the stance of fiscal policy has changed—for example, because of an increase in
government spending, as in Figure 14.11 “Structural Deficit”, point C. The CBO calls this
a standardized deficit (or structural deficit).[3]
Figure 14.10 Cyclical Deficit
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The economy went from surplus (A) to deficit (B) because of recession. Real GDP declines,
tax receipts decrease, and the budget goes into deficit. The economy moves along the
deficit/surplus line.
Figure 14.11 Structural Deficit
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The economy went from surplus (A) to deficit (C) because of changes in fiscal policy. Real
GDP does not change: it is at potential output in both cases. The deficit/surplus line shifts
upward.
Cyclical Deficits and a Balanced-Budget Requirement
We have identified two factors that determine the size of the deficit: the stance of fiscal policy
and the state of the economy. We can use this information to learn more about the effects of a
balanced-budget amendment on the economy.
Suppose that the economy is at potential output. A balanced-budget requirement would say
that the economy must be neither in surplus nor in deficit at this point. In other words, a
balanced-budget requirement describes the overall stance of fiscal policy. The deficit/surplus
line must be shifted to ensure that it passes through the horizontal axis at potential output, as
shown in Figure 14.12 “Balanced-Budget Requirement”.
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Figure 14.12 Balanced-Budget Requirement
A balanced-budget requirement implies that the full-employment deficit/surplus must be
zero. The deficit/surplus line must pass through zero when real GDP equals potential output.
Now suppose that, for some reason, the economy goes into recession. In Figure 14.13
“Recession with a Balanced-Budget Amendment”, this means that output goes from potential
output to some lower level. We know that this leads to a deficit, which is shown as a shift from
point A to point B. Under a balanced-budget rule, the government is not allowed to let this
situation persist. Instead the government must respond by increasing taxes or cutting
spending, moving the economy from point B to point C. Similarly, if the economy went into a
boom, this would tend to lead to a surplus. The government would be forced to cut taxes or
increase spending to bring the budget back into balance. A balanced-budget amendment
would force the government to conduct procyclical fiscal policy. [4]
Figure 14.13 Recession with a Balanced-Budget Amendment
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If the economy were to go into recession, a balanced-budget requirement would force the
government to increase taxes or cut spending to bring the budget back into balance.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. At a given level of GDP, an expansionary fiscal policy increases the budget deficit, and
a contractionary fiscal policy decreases the budget deficit.
2. As the level of economic activity increases, tax revenues increase, transfers decrease,
and the budget deficit decreases.
3. By examining the cyclically adjusted budget deficit, it is possible to evaluate how
much of the budget deficit is due to the state of the economy and how much is due to
the stance of fiscal policy.
Checking Your Understanding
1. In Table 14.8 “Deficit and Income”, why do tax receipts increase with real GDP?
2. What do we know about fiscal policy if the cyclically adjusted budget deficit is negative?
3. If the budget is in deficit, what do we know about the level of real GDP compared to
potential GDP?
[1] In other chapters we examine the effects of government spending on the aggregate
economy. For example, Chapter 7 “The Great Depression” explained how changes in
government spending can sometimes be used to stimulate the overall economy.
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[2] “The Cyclically Adjusted and Standardized Budget Measures,” Congressional Budget
Office, April 2008, accessed July 20,
2011,http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/90xx/doc9074/StandBudgetTOC.2.1.htm.
[3] A key simplification in these pictures is that the level of potential GDP is independent of
taxes and government spending. Chapter 12 “Income Taxes” explains why potential output
itself might be affected by the tax code.
[4] In fact, the effects of a balanced-budget amendment would be even worse. The
countercyclical fiscal policy would cause GDP to decrease even further, thus requiring even
bigger cuts in spending or increases in taxes.
14.3 The Benefits of Deficits
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. When do countries run government budget deficits?
2. Why might a country incur a government budget deficit?
To evaluate the merits of a balanced-budget amendment, we need to know why governments
run deficits in the first place. After all, governments may have good reasons for these policies.
We have seen one explanation for deficits: governments run deficits because of economic
downturns. Reductions in gross domestic product (GDP), other things being equal, lead to
increases in the budget deficit. We are more concerned with why governments choose to run
persistent structural deficits, though. We first look to history for clues.
Government Debt: A Historical Perspective
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Figure 14.14 Ratio of US Debt to GDP, 1791–2009
Source: Debt data from
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm; GDP data
from https://eh.net/.
Figure 14.14 “Ratio of US Debt to GDP, 1791–2009” shows the ratio of US federal government
debt to GDP from 1791 to 2009. The US Civil War in the 1860s, World War I in 1917, and
World War II in the early 1940s all jump out from this figure. These are periods in which the
stock of US federal debt soared. During the Civil War, the stock of debt was $64,842,287 in
1860 and peaked at $2,773,236,174 in 1866. The debt level was more than 40 times higher in
1866 than in 1860.
In 1915 (after World War I had started but before the United States had entered the war), the
stock of debt was $3,058,136,873.16, not much more than the level in 1866. By 1919, the level
of the debt was $27,390,970,113.12, an increase of almost 800 percent. During World War II,
there was again a significant buildup of the debt. In 1940, the level of debt outstanding was
$42,967,531,037.68, or about 42 percent of GDP. By 1946, this had increased by about 527
percent to $269,422,099,173.26. In 1946, the outstanding debt was 121 percent of GDP.
There are two other periods that show a significant buildup of the debt relative to GDP. The
first is the Great Depression. This buildup was not due to a big increase in borrowing by the
government. Rather, it was largely driven by the decline in the level of GDP (the denominator
in the ratio). The second is the period from the 1980s to the present. The buildup of the debt
in the 1980s was unprecedented in peacetime history.
Figure 14.14 “Ratio of US Debt to GDP, 1791–2009” also shows a dramatic asymmetry in the
behavior of the debt-to-GDP ratio. Although the increases in this ratio are typically rather
sudden, the decreases are much more gradual. Look again at the rapid increase in the debt-to-
GDP ratio around the Civil War. After the Civil War ended, the debt-to-GDP ratio decreased
but only slowly. As seen in the figure, the debt-to-GDP ratio decreased for about 45 years,
from 1870 to 1916. Part of this decrease was due to the growth in GDP over the 45 years, and
part was due to a decrease in nominal debt outstanding until around 1900.
Why Do Governments Run Deficits?
It is evident that during periods of war the debt is higher. What underlies this relationship
between wars and deficits? War is certainly expensive. Take, for example, the conflicts in Iraq
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and Afghanistan. Congress has already appropriated about $1 trillion for these wars, and a
Congressional Budget Office study projected the conflicts would eventually cost the United
States about $2.4 trillion. When government purchases increase due to a war, a government
can either increase taxes to pay for the war or issue government debt. Remember that when
the government runs a deficit to pay for a war, it is borrowing from the general public. The
government’s intertemporal budget constraint reminds us that—since government debt is
ultimately paid for by taxes in the future—the choice is really between taxing households now
or taxing them later. History tells us that deficits have been the method of choice:
governments have chosen to tax future generations to pay for wars.
There are two arguments in favor of this policy:
1. Fairness. Any gains from winning a war will be shared by future generations. Hence the
costs should be shared as well: the government should finance the war with debt so that
future generations will repay some of the obligations. To take an extreme case, suppose a
country is fighting for its right to exist. If it wins the war, future generations will also
benefit.
2. Tax smoothing. A good fiscal policy is one where tax rates are relatively constant. In the
face of a rapid increase in spending, such as a war, the best policy is one that pays for the
spending increase over many periods of time, not in one year.
Taxation is expensive to the economy because it distorts economic decisions, such as saving
and labor supply. The amount people want to work depends on their real wage, after taxes. So
if tax rates are increased to finance government spending, this reduces the benefit from
working. Put differently, increased income taxes increase the price of consumption relative to
leisure. The fact that people work less when taxes increase is a distortionary effect of taxation.
Instead of bunching all this distortionary taxation into a short amount of time, such as a year,
it is more efficient for the government to spread the taxation over many years. This is
called tax smoothing. So by running a budget deficit, the government imposes relatively
small distortions over many years rather than imposing large distortions within a single year.
Toolkit: Section 16.1 “The Labor Market”
For more analysis of the choice underlying labor supply, you can review the labor market in
the toolkit.
Similar arguments apply to other cases in which governments engage in substantial spending.
Imagine that the government is considering putting a large amount of resources into cancer
research. The discovery of a successful cancer treatment would, of course, benefit many
generations of citizens. Because households would share the gains in the future, the costs
should be shared as well. By running a budget deficit, the government is able to distribute the
costs across generations of citizens in parallel with the benefits. From the perspective of both
fairness and efficiency, there are some gains to deficit spending.
More generally, we might want to make a distinction among different types of government
purchases, just as we do among private purchases. We know that the national accounts
distinguish consumption purchases (broadly speaking, things from which we get short-run
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benefit, such as food and movies) from investment purchases (things that bring long-term
benefit, such as factories and machinery). Likewise, we might want to distinguish between
government consumption, such as wages of employees at the Department of Motor Vehicles,
from government investment, such as spending on cancer research. We could then argue that
it makes more sense to borrow to finance government investment rather than government
consumption.
Although a very nice idea in principle, this approach to the government accounts often
founders on the practicalities and the politics of implementation. First, it is not at all clear
how to classify many government expenditures. Was a launch of the space shuttle
consumption or investment? What about the wages of teachers in the public schools? What
about the money spent on national parks? Second, politicians would have a strong incentive to
classify expenditures as investment rather than consumption, to justify deferring payment.
Another benefit of deficits is that they can play a role in economic stabilization. [1] In the
short run, the level of economic activity can deviate from potential GDP. As a consequence,
aggregate expenditures play a role in determining the level of output. Fiscal policy influences
the level of aggregate expenditures. Changes in government purchases directly affect
aggregate expenditures because they are a component of spending, and changes in taxes
indirectly affect aggregate demand through their effect on consumption. Hence deficit
spending can help to stabilize the economy.
In summary, there are several arguments for allowing governments to run deficits. We would
forswear these benefits if we were to adopt a balanced-budget amendment. [2] But we
conclude by noting that there is a further, much less benign, reason for government deficits:
they may benefit politicians even if they do not benefit the country as a whole. Deficits allow
politicians to provide benefits to constituents today and leave the bill to future generations. If
politicians and voters care more about current benefits than future costs, then they have a
strong incentive to incur large deficits and let future generations worry about the
consequences.
Deficits around the World
Do other countries also run deficits in the way that the United States does? Table 14.9 “Budget
Deficits around the World, 2005*” summarizes the recent budgetary situation for several
countries around the world. With the exception of Argentina, all the countries were running
deficits in 2005. [3]
Table 14.9 Budget Deficits around the World, 2005*
Country Revenues Expenditures Deficit
Argentina 42.6 39.98 -2.62
China 392.1 424.3 32.2
France 1,006 1,114 108
Germany 1,249 1,362 113
Italy 785.7 861.5 75.8
* Data are in millions of US dollars.
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Source: CIA Fact Book,http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2056.html.
France, Germany, and Italy are of particular interest. These three countries are part of the
European Union (EU). In January 1999, when the Economic and Monetary Union was
formed, a restriction on the budget deficits of EU countries went into effect. This measure was
contained in legislation called the Stability and Growth Pact. [4] Its main component is a
requirement that member countries keep deficits below a threshold of 3 percent of GDP. This
threshold is not set to zero to allow countries the ability to deal with fluctuations in real GDP.
In other words, although the EU does not impose a strict balanced-budget requirement, it
does impose limits on member countries. In recent years, however, these limits have been
exceeded. For example, in 2005, Germany’s deficit was more than 4.5 percent of its GDP.
During the past few years, Germany has been in a recession and, as highlighted by Figure 14.7
“Deficit/Surplus and GDP”, its deficit grew considerably. Instead of imposing contractionary
fiscal policies to reduce its deficit, Germany allowed its deficit to grow outside the bounds set
by the Stability and Growth Pact. The economic crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession that
impacted many of the world economies had a further effect on the budget deficits of countries
in Europe, contributing to severe debt crises and bailouts in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. [5]
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Countries run government budget deficits when faced with large expenditures, such
as a war.
2. By running a deficit, a government is able to spread distortionary taxes over time.
Also, a deficit allows a government to allocate tax obligations across generations of
citizens who all benefit from some form of government spending. Finally, stabilization
policy often requires the government to run a deficit.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What does it mean to say that a tax is “distortionary”?
2. What is the political benefit to deficit spending?
3. When does “fairness” provide a basis for running a deficit?
[1] Chapter 7 “The Great Depression” spelled out in detail the role for fiscal policy in
stabilizing output.
[2] One of the arguments for deficits—funding wars—is an explicit exception (and the only
such exception) written into the bill from that we quoted earlier.
[3] The table deliberately does not express the deficits relative to any measure of economic
activity in the country. Thus it is hard to say whether these deficits are large or small. An
Economics Detective exercise at the end of the chapter encourages you to look at this
question.
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[4] This pact is discussed in detail in “Stability and Growth Pact,” European Commission
Economic and Financial Affairs, accessed September 20,
2011,http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/sgp/index_en.htm.
[5] We examine what happened in these countries in Chapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”.
14.4 The Costs of Deficits
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the crowding-out effect?
2. When is the crowding-out effect of government deficits large?
We now turn to the costs of deficit spending. (Although we refer to this as “deficit spending,”
the same arguments apply if we analyze the effects of a reduction in the government surplus.)
First, we need to understand what happens in the financial sector of the economy if the
government runs a deficit.
Savings and Investment
Earlier, we examined the circular flow of income in the government sector. Now we turn our
attention to the circular flow in the financial sector, which is shown in Figure 14.15 “The
Financial Sector in the Circular Flow”. [1] As with all sectors in the circular flow, the flows into
and from the sector must match. In the case of the government sector earlier in the chapter,
the balance of these flows is another way of saying that the government must satisfy its budget
constraint. The rules of accounting tell us that, in the financial sector, the flows in must
likewise match the flows out, but what is the underlying economic reason for this? The answer
is that the flows are brought into balance by adjusting interest rates in the economy. We think
of the financial sector of the economy as a large credit market in which the price is the real
interest rate.
Figure 14.15 The Financial Sector in the Circular Flow
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Funds flow into the financial sector as a result of household savings and borrowing from the
rest of the world. Funds flow from the government sector (to finance the government deficit)
and to the firm sector to finance investment.
Toolkit: Section 16.4 “The Credit (Loan) Market (Macro)”
You can review the credit market in the toolkit.
The Credit Market
The supply of loans in the credit market comes from (1) private savings of households and
firms, (2) savings or borrowing of governments, and (3) savings or borrowing of foreigners.
Households generally respond to an increase in the real interest rate by saving more. Higher
real interest rates also encourage foreigners to send funds to the domestic
economy. National savings are defined as private savings plus government savings (or,
equivalently, private savings minus the government deficit). The total supply of savings is
therefore equal to national savings plus the savings of foreigners (that is, borrowing from
other countries). The demand for credit comes from firms who borrow to finance investment.
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As the real interest rate increases, investment spending decreases. For firms, a high interest
rate represents a high cost of funding investment expenditures.
The matching of savings and investment in the aggregate economy is described by the
following equations:
investment = national savings + borrowing from other countries
or
investment = national savings − lending to other countries.
The response of savings and investment to the real interest rate is shown in Figure 14.16 “The
Credit Market”. In equilibrium, the quantity of credit supplied equals the quantity of credit
demanded. We have assumed that the country is borrowing from abroad, but nothing at all
would change—other than the way we describe the supply curve—if the domestic economy
were instead lending to other countries.
Figure 14.16 The Credit Market
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Adjustment of the real interest rate ensures that the flows into and from the financial sector
balance. The supply of loans comes from national savings plus borrowing from abroad. The
demand for loans comes from firms seeking funds for investment.
Crowding Out
Armed with this framework, we can determine what happens to saving, investment, and
interest rates when the deficit increases. Figure 14.17 “Crowding Out” begins with the credit
market in equilibrium at point A. The increased government deficit is shown as a leftward
shift of the national savings line. At each level of the real interest rate, the increased
government deficit means that national savings is lower.
Figure 14.17 Crowding Out
An increase in the deficit means a reduction in saving, so the saving line shifts leftward and
the new equilibrium entails a higher real interest rate and a lower level of investment. The
equilibrium decrease in saving and investment is less than the initial decrease in
government saving.
This shift in the savings line implies that the market for loans is no longer in equilibrium at
the original interest rate. Real interest rates increase in response to the excess of investment
over savings until the market is once again in equilibrium, at point B inFigure 14.17 “Crowding
Out”. Comparing A to B, we can see there are two consequences of the government deficit: (1)
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real interest rates increase, and (2) the amount of credit, and hence the level of investment, is
lower. The reduction in investment spending caused by an increase in government spending is
called crowding out. In addition, household spending on durable goods also decreases when
interest rates increase: this is also an example of crowding out. To the extent that household
spending on durables and investment are sensitive to changes in real interest rates, the
crowding-out effect can be substantial.
Crowding out also operates through net exports. From Figure 14.17 “Crowding Out”, we know
that an increase in the deficit leads to an increase in interest rates. Increased interest rates
have three effects:
1. They cause investment to decrease. This is the crowding-out effect.
2. They cause private saving to increase. Higher interest rates encourage people to save
rather than consume.
3. They attract funds from other countries. Investors in other countries see the higher
interest rates and decide to invest in the domestic economy.
The second and third effects explain why the supply of credit slopes upward in Figure 14.17
“Crowding Out”. As a result, the decrease in investment is not as large as the increase in the
deficit. The decrease in government saving is partly offset by an increase in private saving and
an increase in borrowing from abroad. Increased borrowing from abroad must result in a
decrease in net exports to keep the flows into and from the foreign sector in balance.
To understand these linkages, imagine that the United States sells additional government
debt, some of which is purchased by banks in Europe, Canada, Japan, and other countries.
These purchases of government debt require transactions in the foreign exchange market. If a
bank in Europe purchases US government debt, there is an increased demand for dollars in
the euro market for dollars, which leads to an appreciation in the price of the dollar. When
the dollar appreciates, US citizens find that European goods and services are cheaper, whereas
Europeans find that US goods and services are more expensive. US imports increase and
exports decrease, so net exports decrease.
To summarize, an increased government deficit leads to the following:
An increase in the real interest rate
An appreciation of the exchange rate
A reduction in investment and in purchases of consumer durables
An increase in the trade deficit
Table 14.10 “Investment, Savings, and Net Exports (Billions of Dollars)” shows the US
experience during the 1980s, when the US federal government ran a large budget deficit (the
negative entries in the federal budget surplus column). The table also reveals that the United
States ran a sizable trade deficit starting in 1983. This phenomenon became known as the
twin deficits.
Table 14.10 Investment, Savings, and Net Exports (Billions of Dollars)
Year Investment Trade
Surplus
National
Saving
Budget
Surplus
Error
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1980 579.5 11.4 549.4 -23.6 41.5
1981 679.3 6.3 654.7 -19.4 30.9
1982 629.5 0.0 629.1 -94.2 0.4
1983 687.2 -31.8 609.4 -132.4 46.0
1984 875 -86.7 773.4 -123.5 14.9
1985 895 -110.5 767.5 -126.9 17.0
1986 919.7 -138.9 733.5 -139.2 47.3
1987 969.2 -150.4 796.8 -89.8 22.0
1988 1,007.7 -111.7 915.0 -75.2 -19
1989 1,072.6 -88.0 944.7 -66.7 39.9
Source: Economic Report of the President (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004), table B-32.
Even though recent years have also seen high deficits in the United States, interest rates have
not increased, so we have not seen crowding out. This is because the Federal Reserve has also
been operating in credit markets to keep interest rates low. Although crowding out is
associated with fiscal policy, it also depends on what policies the monetary authority chooses
to pursue.
When crowding out does occur, its long-term consequences may be significant. Lower
investment translates, in the long run, into a lower standard of living. [2] An increase in
government spending means that the country has chosen to consume more now and less in
the future. Similarly, crowding out of net exports means that the economy is borrowing more
from other countries. This again means that the country has chosen to consume more now in
exchange for debt that must be paid back later. The crowding-out effect is perhaps the most
powerful argument in favor of a balanced-budget requirement.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Crowding out occurs when government deficits lead to higher real interest rates and
lower investment. The high interest rates can also cause the domestic currency to
appreciate, leading to a decrease in net exports.
2. The crowding-out effect is large when spending by households on durables and
investment spending are sensitive to variations in the real interest rate and when
exports are sensitive to changes in the exchange rate.
Checking Your Understanding
1. Why do higher interest rates cause the currency to appreciate?
2. In using the credit market to study the effects of government deficits on real interest
rates, what did we assume about household saving?
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[1] We also examined this sector in Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”.
[2] Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty” explained how investment feeds into
long-run economic growth.
14.5 The Ricardian Perspective
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What is the Ricardian theory about the effects of deficits on interest rates and real
gross domestic product (GDP)?
2. What is the evidence on the Ricardian theory?
Buried in our analysis of the crowding-out effect is a critical assumption. We argued that an
increase in the government deficit would reduce national savings at every level of the interest
rate. Implicitly, we assumed that the change in government behavior had no direct effect on
private savings. Instead, there was an indirect effect: savings increased when the interest rate
increased. But at any given level of interest rates, we assumed that private saving was
unchanged.
Perhaps that is not the most reasonable assumption. Consider the following thought
experiment:
The government sends you and everyone else a check for $1,000, representing a tax
cut.
The government finances this increase in the deficit by selling government bonds.
The government announces that it will increase taxes next year by the amount of the
tax cut plus the interest it owes on the bonds that it issued.
What will be your response to this policy? A natural reaction is just to save the entire tax cut.
After all, if the government cuts taxes in this fashion, then all it is doing is postponing your tax
bill by one year. Your lifetime resources have not increased at all. Hence you can save the
entire tax cut, accumulate the interest income, and use this income to pay off your increased
tax liability next year.
The Household’s Lifetime Budget Constraint
The household’s lifetime budget constraint tells us that households must equate the
discounted present values of income and expenditures over their lifetimes. We use it here to
help us understand how households behave when there are changes in the timing of their
income. In general, the budget constraint must be expressed in terms of discounted present
values:
discounted present value of lifetime consumption = discounted present value of lifetime
disposable income.
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When the real interest rate is zero, life is simple. It is legitimate simply to add together income
and consumption in different years. In this case, the lifetime budget constraint says that
total lifetime disposable income = total lifetime consumption.
The measure of income used in the household’s budget constraint is lifetime disposable
income. You can think of discounted lifetime disposable income as the difference between the
discounted present value of income (before taxes) and the discounted present value of taxes.
The effect of a government’s tax policy is through the discounted present value of household
taxes.
Toolkit: Section 16.23 “The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption”
You can review the life-cycle model of consumption in the toolkit.
Private Savings and Government Savings
In our earlier thought experiment, the increase in the government deficit was exactly offset by
an increase in private savings. This implication is shown in Figure 14.18 “Ricardian
Equivalence”: nothing happens. The composition of national savings changes, so public
savings decrease, and private savings increase. But these two changes exactly offset each other
since the private sector saves the entire amount of the tax cut. As a result, the supply curve
does not shift. Since national savings do not change, the equilibrium remains at point A, and
there is no crowding-out effect. Economists call this idea Ricardian equivalence, after
David Ricardo, the 19th century economist who first suggested such a link between public and
private saving. Ricardian equivalence occurs when an increase in the government deficit leads
to an equal increase in private saving and no change in either the real interest rate or
investment.
Figure 14.18 Ricardian Equivalence
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An increase in the government deficit is equivalent to a decrease in government savings,
which shifts national savings leftward. In a Ricardian world, private savings increases by
an offsetting amount, so the final result is no change in national savings.
The Ricardian perspective can be summarized by two related claims:
1. The timing of taxes is irrelevant.
2. If government purchases are unchanged, tax cuts or increases should have no effect on
the economy.
These claims follow from the government’s intertemporal budget constraint and the
household’s lifetime budget constraint, taken together. The government’s constraint tells us
that a given amount (that is, a given discounted present value) of government spending
implies a need for a given (discounted present value) amount of taxes. These taxes could come
at all sorts of different times, with different implications for the deficit, but the total amount of
taxes must be enough to pay for the total amount of spending. The household’s lifetime
budget constraint tells us that the timing of taxes may be irrelevant to households as well:
they should care about the total lifetime (after-tax) resources that they have available to them.
The implications of the Ricardian perspective are not quite as stark if the increased deficit is
due to increased government spending. Households should still realize that they have to pay
for this spending with higher taxes at some future date. Lifetime household income will
decrease, so consumption will decrease. However, consumption smoothing suggests that the
decrease in consumption will be spread between the present and the future. The decrease in
current consumption will be less than the increase in government spending, so national
savings will decrease, as in the analysis in Section 14.4 “The Costs of Deficits”. [1]
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If the Ricardian perspective is an accurate description of how people behave, then much of our
analysis in this chapter becomes irrelevant. Deficits are not needed to spread out the costs of
major government expenditures because households can do this smoothing for themselves.
Changes in taxes have no effect on aggregate spending, so there is no crowding-out effect.
As for a balanced-budget amendment, it too would be much less significant in such a world.
Ricardian households effectively “undo” government taxation decisions. However, the exact
effect of an amendment would depend on how the government chose to ensure budget
balance. Suppose the economy went into recession, so tax revenues decreased. There are two
ways to restore budget balance. One is to increase taxes. According to the Ricardian
perspective, this would have no effect on the economy at all. The other is to cut government
purchases. As we have seen, this would have some effects.
Evidence
The Ricardian perspective seems very plausible when we consider a thought experiment such
as a tax cut this year matched by a corresponding tax increase next year. At the same time, a
typical tax cut is not matched by an explicit future tax increase at a specified date. Instead, a
tax cut today means that at some unspecified future date taxes will have to be increased.
Furthermore, the Ricardian perspective requires that households have a sophisticated
economic understanding of the intertemporal budget constraint of the government.
It is therefore unclear whether this Ricardian view is relevant when we evaluate government
deficits. Do households understand the government budget constraint and adjust their
behavior accordingly, or is this just an academic idea—theoretically interesting, perhaps, but
of limited relevance to the real world? This is an empirical question, so we turn to the data.
There are two natural ways to examine this question. The first is to determine the relationship
between government deficits and real interest rates in the data. The second approach is to
examine the relationship between government deficits and private saving.
Deficits and Interest Rates
We want to answer the following question: do increases in government deficits causereal
interest rates to increase?
Figure 14.19 US Surplus/GDP Ratio and Real Interest Rate, 1965–2009
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There is some evidence that declines in the government surplus are associated with higher
real interest rates, contrary to the Ricardian view.
Source: Economic Report of the President, 2010, Tables B-63 and B-72.
Figure 14.19 “US Surplus/GDP Ratio and Real Interest Rate, 1965–2009” shows two series.
The first is the ratio of the US budget surplus to GDP, measured on the left axis. (Be careful—
this is the surplus, not the deficit. The economy is in deficit when this series is negative.) The
second is a measure of the real interest rate, measured on the right axis. The figure shows that
interest rates do seem to increase when the surplus decreases andvice versa. We can compute
the correlation between the surplus-to-GDP ratio and the real interest rate. For this data the
correlation is −0.16. The minus sign means that when the surplus is above average, the real
interest rate tends to be below its average value, consistent with the impression we get from
the graph. However, the correlation is not very large.
The 1980s stand out in the figure. During this period, the budget deficit grew substantially,
reflecting low economic activity as well as tax cuts that were enacted during the early years of
the Reagan administration. Starting in 1982, real interest rates increased substantially, just as
the budget deficit was widening. This is consistent with crowding out and contrary to the
Ricardian perspective. We must be cautious about inferring causality, however. It is false to
conclude from this evidence that an increase in the deficit caused interest rates to increase. It
might be that some other force caused high interest rates and low economic activity. [2]
Toolkit: Section 16.13 “Correlation and Causality”
You can review the definition of a correlation in the toolkit.
Government Deficits and Private Saving
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According to the Ricardian perspective, increases in the government deficit should be
matched by increases in private saving and vice versa. Private and government savings rates
for the United States are shown in Figure 14.20 “US Government and Private Savings
Rates”. [3] The private saving rate equals private saving as a percentage of real GDP. The
government saving rate essentially equals the government surplus as a percentage of GDP
(there are some minor accounting differences that we do not need to worry about).
Figure 14.20 US Government and Private Savings Rates
There is some evidence that private and government saving move in opposite directions, as
suggested by the Ricardian view.
Source: Calculations based on Economic Report of the President, Table B-32.
Private savings increased from the 1980 to 1985 period and decreased thereafter. Large
deficits emerged during the early 1980s (negative government savings). At this time, there
was an increase in the private savings rate. The government savings rate increased steadily
during the 1990s, and, during this period, the private savings rate decreased. These data are
therefore more supportive of the Ricardian view: private and government savings were
moving in opposite directions.
Turning to international evidence, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development study that examined 21 countries between 1970 and 2002 found that changes in
government deficits were associated with partially offsetting movements in private saving. On
average, the study found that changes in private savings offset about one-third to one-half of
changes in the government deficit. [4] Figure 14.21 “Government and Private Savings Rates in
Spain and Greece” and Figure 14.22 “Government and Private Savings Rates in France and
Ireland” reproduce some figures from this study. In Spain and Greece, for example, we see
patterns of savings that are consistent with the Ricardian perspective: private savings and
government savings move in opposite directions. By contrast, the pictures for Ireland and
France show little evidence of such an effect.
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Figure 14.21 Government and Private Savings Rates in Spain and Greece
Source: Economic Report of the President, 2010, Tables B-63 and B-72.
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Figure 14.22 Government and Private Savings Rates in France and Ireland
Source: Calculations based on Economic Report of the President, Table B-32.
The data from the United States and other countries indicate that this is almost certainly one
of those questions where the truth is in the middle. We do not observe households behaving
completely in accordance with the Ricardian perspective. As a result, we conclude that deficits
do have the real effects on the economy that we discussed at length in this chapter. At the
same time, there is evidence suggesting that households pay attention to the government
budget constraint. The Ricardian perspective is more than just an academic curiosity: some
households, some of the time, adjust their behavior to some extent.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. According to Ricardian theory, a government deficit will be offset by an increase in
household saving, leaving real interest rates and the level of economic activity
unchanged. The key to the theory is the anticipation of households of future taxes
when the government runs a deficit.
2. There is some evidence that interest rates are high when deficits are high, contrary to
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the prediction of the Ricardian view. But during some periods of large deficits, the
household saving rate is high as well. The evidence on Ricardian equivalence is not
conclusive.
Checking Your Understanding
1. If the government cuts taxes, what happens to public saving, private saving, and
national saving according to the Ricardian theory?
2. What is the difference between causation and correlation when we examine the
relationship between budget deficits and real interest rates?
[1] Since the Ricardian perspective says that the timing of taxes is irrelevant, the effect is the
same as it would be if the taxes were also imposed today. So one way of thinking about this is
to suppose that the government increases spending and finances that increase with current
taxes.
[2] For example, as explained in Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”, tight monetary policy
(such as that enacted in the 1980s) leads to high interest rates and can push the economy into
recession, leading to a deficit.
[3] These calculations rely on data from the Economic Report of the President (Washington,
DC: GPO, 2011), table B-32, accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop.
[4] See Luiz de Mello, Per Mathis Kongsrud, and Robert Price, “Saving Behaviour and the
Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy,” Economics Department Working Papers No. 397,
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, July 2004, accessed September
20,
2011,http://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/displaydocumentpdf/?cote=eco/wkp(2004)20
&doclanguage=en.
14.6 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
We started this chapter by asking whether the United States should adopt a balanced-budget
amendment to the constitution. This question has both political and economic ramifications.
It is not our purpose in this book to answer this question, or others like it, for you. Most
interesting questions do not have easy answers. Instead, they come down to assessments of
costs and benefits and judgments about which frameworks best describe the world that we
live in. Our intent here was to provide you with the ability to assess the arguments about a
balanced-budget amendment and, more generally, the effects of deficit spending on the
economy.
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We saw in this chapter that there are certainly both benefits and costs associated with deficit
finance. Key benefits include the ability to spread out the payments for large government
purchases and the opportunity to use deficits to stimulate economies in recession. The main
cost of deficits is that they increase real interest rates, thus crowding out investment and
slowing long-term growth.
As we also saw, these effects might be tempered by an increase in household savings in
response to government deficits. The evidence suggests that the Ricardian perspective on
deficits has partial validity. Changes in government savings are likely to be partially, but not
completely, offset by changes in households’ saving behavior.
We also noted that a balanced-budget amendment would not absolve government of the
difficult choices involved in balancing the budget. It is one thing to pass a law saying that the
budget must be balanced. It is quite another to come up with the spending cuts and tax
increases that are needed to make it happen.
Meanwhile, time is passing. Go and look again at the size of the debt outstanding reported at
the US Treasury (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np). How much
has it changed since you first checked it? How much has your share of the debt changed?
Key Links
The Congressional Budget Office: http://www.cbo.gov
US Treasury calculation of the public debt: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov
CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook
US national debt clock: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock
Debate on balancing the budget:
Concord Coalition: http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues
Americans for a Balanced-Budget Amendment:http://www.balanceourbudget.com
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:http://www.cbpp.org/archiveSite/bba.htm
EXERCISES
1. The following table is a table of the same form as Table 14.1 “Calculating the
Deficit” but with some missing entries. Complete the table. In which years was there
a balanced budget?
TABLE 14.11 CALCULATING THE DEFICIT
Year Government
Purchases
Tax
Revenues
Transfers Net Taxes Deficit
1 60 10 20 -10
2 80 100 20
3 120 20 100 -20
4 20 140 40
5 20 140 40
2. The following table lists income and the tax rate at different levels of income. In this
exercise the tax rate is different at different levels of income. For income below 500, the
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tax rate is 20 percent. For income in excess of 500, the tax rate is 25 percent. Calculate tax
receipts for this case.
TABLE 14.12 TAX RECEIPTS AND INCOME
Income Marginal
Tax Rate
Tax Receipts
0 0.2
100 0.2
500 0.2
1000 0.25
2000 0.25
5000 0.25
3. Consider the following table. Suppose that government purchases are 500, and the
tax rate is 20 percent. Furthermore, suppose that real gross domestic product (GDP)
takes the values indicated in the table. If the initial stock of debt is 1,000, find the
level of debt for each of the 5 years in the table.
TABLE 14.13 EXERCISE
Year GDP Deficit Debt
(Start of
Year)
Debt (End
of Year)
1 3,000 1,000
2 2,000
3 4,000
4 1,500
5 2,500
4. For the example in the preceding table titled “Exercise”, are the deficits and surpluses
due to variations in the level of GDP or fiscal policy? Suppose you were told that
potential GDP was 4,000. Is there a full employment deficit or surplus when actual
GDP is 3,000? Design a fiscal policy so that the budget is in balance when real GDP is
equal to potential GDP.
5. Draw a version of Figure 14.7 “Deficit/Surplus and GDP” using the data for tax receipts
you calculated in the table titled “Tax Receipts and Income”, and assuming
government purchases equal 475. At what level of GDP is the budget in balance?
6. The text says that expansionary fiscal policy increases the deficit given the level of
GDP. Would an expansionary fiscal policy necessarily increase the deficit if GDP
changes as well?
7. Compare Figure 14.14 “Ratio of US Debt to GDP, 1791–2009” (from 1940 onward)
with Figure 14.2 “US Surplus and Debt, 1962–2010”. Why do the figures look so
different from each other?
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8. Suppose that investment is very sensitive to real interest rates. What does this mean
for the slope of the demand curve in the credit market? Will it make the crowding-out
effect large or small?
Economics Detective
1. The price of government debt during the Civil War makes for a fascinating case
study. Both the Union and the Confederacy were issuing debt to finance their
expenditures. Try to do some research on the value of Civil War debt to answer the
following questions.
a) How much did the Union and the Confederacy rely on deficits rather than
taxes to finance the war efforts?
b) What do you think happened to the value of the Union and Confederacy debt
over the course of the war?
c) Do you think these values were positively or negatively correlated?
d) A starting point for your research is a website
(http://www.tax.org/Museum/1861-1865.htm) that summarizes the way in
which the North and the South financed their war efforts.
2. What happened to the budget deficits of European Union member countries during the
financial crisis that started in 2008? Were these cyclically adjusted budget deficits?
3. Using the CBO as a source, make a table of the budget deficits for the period 1990 to
the present in constant rather than current dollars (that is, obtain figures for real
receipts, outlays, and deficits). Describe the behavior of real receipts, real outlays, and
the real deficit over this period. Does it differ qualitatively from the description in the
text? (If necessary, check the toolkit for instructions on how to convert nominal
variables into real variables.)
4. Using the CBO as a source, make a table of the on-budget deficits for the period 1990
to the present. Compare these calculations with those reported in Table 14.2 “Recent
Experience of Deficits and Surpluses (Billions of Dollars)”. Explain the main
differences between these tables.
5. Each month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) posts its monthly budget review.
Look for the most recent monthly budget review. What are the largest outlays and
revenues? How large are interest payments on the debt?
6. We saw that the government budget went from surplus to deficit in 2002. Based on the
discussion in the text, try to find two different things that happened around this time
that might explain this change.
7. This exercise builds on Table 14.9 “Budget Deficits around the World, 2005*”.
a) Find the levels of GDP in 2005 for each country listed in Table 14.9 “Budget
Deficits around the World, 2005*”. Using this information, find the ratio of
the deficit to GDP for each of the countries.
b) Which country in the world has the highest ratio of debt to GDP? How do the
countries listed in Table 14.9 “Budget Deficits around the World,
2005*” compare in terms of the debt-to-GDP ratio?
c) For the countries listed in Table 14.9 “Budget Deficits around the World,
2005*”, find the growth rate of real GDP in 2005. Do countries that grow
faster have smaller deficits? Hint: The CIA Fact Book
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(https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html)
will be useful.
Spreadsheet Exercises
1. Suppose that government purchases are 500 and the tax rate is 20 percent. Create a
table to calculate the budget deficit for each level of income from 0 to 1,000,
increasing by 50 each time. At what level of income does the budget balance?
Compare your results to those in Table 14.8 “Deficit and Income”.
2. Create a spreadsheet to study the debt as in Table 14.5 “Deficit and Debt” using the
data from Table 14.1 “Calculating the Deficit”. But assume that the level of debt
outstanding at the start of the first period was 100, not 0. Assume that the interest
rate is 2 percent each year. Add a column to Table 14.1 “Calculating the Deficit” to
indicate the payment of interest on the debt. Calculate the deficit for each year and
then the debt outstanding at the start of the next year. Also calculate the primary
deficit in your spreadsheet. What happens to these calculations when the interest rate
increases to 5 percent?
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Chapter 15
The Global Financial Crisis
A World in Crisis
The following quotation describes a meeting held in Washington, DC, among the G-20
countries. [1]
President George W. Bush, who served as host for the G-20 discussions, said it was the
seriousness of the current crisis that had convinced him that massive government
intervention was warranted.
He said he felt “extraordinary measures” were needed after being told “if you don’t take
decisive measures then it’s conceivable that our country could go into depression greater
than the Great Depression.”
As we wrote this chapter in 2011, the world economy was slowly emerging from the worst
financial crisis since the Great Depression. Economists and others formerly thought that the
Great Depression was an interesting piece of economic history and nothing more. After all,
they thought, we now understand the economy much better than did the policymakers at that
time, so we could never have another Great Depression. But this belief that monetary and
fiscal policymakers around the world knew how to ensure economic stability was shattered by
financial turmoil that began in 2007, blossomed into a full-fledged global crisis in the fall of
2008, and led to sustained downturns in many economies in the years that followed.
That was the background to the November 2008 meeting of the G-20 countries. The world
leaders attending that meeting were attempting to cope with economic problems that they had
never even contemplated. The events that led to this meeting were unprecedented since the
Great Depression, in part because of the magnitude and worldwide nature of the crisis.
As the quotation from President George W. Bush attests, extraordinary times prompted
extraordinary action. The US government passed an “emergency rescue plan” in October
2008 to provide $700 billion in funding to (among other things) buy up assets of troubled
banks and firms. This was followed by a large stimulus package, called the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was passed during the first year of the Obama
administration. Other countries brought in similar stimulus packages. Increased government
expenditures and cuts in taxes were enacted by governments around the world. Monetary
authorities also took extraordinary steps, with many countries rapidly reducing interest rates
to very low levels. In addition, the US Federal Reserve and other monetary authorities
engaged in other unprecedented policies in an attempt to provide liquidity to the financial
system.
Although the roots of the crisis can be traced to 2007 or before, and although the implications
of the crisis are still being felt, the full-fledged crisis began in 2008. As shorthand, we
therefore refer to all these events as the “crisis of 2008,” and the question we ask in this
chapter is as follows:
What happened during the crisis of 2008?
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Road Map
In this chapter, we explore the policies enacted by governments to deal with the crisis. First
we need a framework to understand these events. We make sense of the events of the past few
years by drawing on the tools that we have developed in this book. We aim to do more than
just give a narrative account of what happened; we also offer explanations of what happened.
Whereas other chapters in this book are largely self-contained, this chapter is designed as a
capstone. We therefore make frequent references to topics discussed in other chapters.
The crisis of 2008 was a highly complex event, with many different and imperfectly
understood causes. Moreover, some of the details involve highly arcane aspects of financial
markets. We are not going to give you a comprehensive account of the crisis. But we will show
you how you can use the tools you have learned in this book to make some sense of what
happened. We highlight three themes in particular.
1. As emphasized in Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”, markets in the economy and
around the world are interconnected. Various connections among markets caused the
crisis to spill over across different financial markets, from financial markets into the real
economy, and from the United States to economies all around the world. These are
sometimes called “contagion problems.”
2. There were coordination failures in addition to contagion problems.
3. Monetary and fiscal policies are interconnected. We will see that responses to the crisis
around the globe often required monetary and fiscal authorities to work together.
We start by summarizing events in the United States. In doing so, we use a tool from game
theory to study how financial instability might arise. We use this framework to consider both
recent events in the United States and events from the Great Depression. We then look
specifically at the housing market at the start of the 21st century.
After understanding the experience in the United States, we study how the crisis spread from
the United States to other countries. We stress both financial and trade links across countries
as ways in which the crisis spread. We look at a few countries in particular, such as the United
Kingdom, China, Iceland, and the countries of the European Union. The crisis in the
European Union is particularly interesting to economists because the interconnections
between the monetary and fiscal authorities are very different to those in other places. Finally,
we consider exchange rates and currency crises.
[1] Associated Press, “World Leaders Pledge to Combat Global Crisis,” Minnesota Public
Radio News, November 17, 2008, accessed July 25,
2011,http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/17/financial_meltdown. The G-
20 countries are a group of 20 of the richest countries in the world.
15.1 The Financial Crisis in the United States
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LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What was the role of coordination games in the crisis?
2. What was the monetary policy response to the crisis?
3. What was the fiscal policy response to the crisis?
Starting in 2007 and stretching well into 2008, the United States and other countries
experienced financial crises that resembled those of the Great Depression. Through the
summer of 2011 (when this chapter was written), unemployment remained high, and real
gross domestic product (real GDP) growth was low in the US economy. Some countries in
Western Europe, such as Greece, were close to defaulting on their government debt.
One indicator of the seriousness of these events is the dramatic action that policymakers took
in response. For example, on October 3, 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law the
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which authorized the US Treasury to spend
up to $700 billion for emergency economic stabilization. [1] As stated in the bill,
The purposes of this Act are—
1. to immediately provide authority and facilities that the Secretary of the Treasury
can use to restore liquidity and stability to the financial system of the United States;
and
2. to ensure that such authority and such facilities are used in a manner that—
1. protects home values, college funds, retirement accounts, and life savings;
2. preserves homeownership and promotes jobs and economic growth;
3. maximizes overall returns to the taxpayers of the United States; and
4. provides public accountability for the exercise of such authority.
This was an extraordinary amount of funding—equivalent to more than $2000 for every man,
woman, and child in the United States. Perhaps even more strikingly, the funding was to allow
the Treasury to do something it had never done before: to purchase shares (that is, become
part owners) of financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies. The United
States, unlike some other countries, has never had many cases of firms being owned by the
government. Moreover, in previous decades, the trend around the world has been for less
government ownership of business—not more. It would have been almost unthinkable even a
few months previously for a Republican president to have put in place mechanisms to permit
this extent of government involvement in the private economy.
News accounts at the time made many different claims about the financial crisis, including the
following:
Banks and other financial institutions were failing.
Housing prices had plummeted.
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So-called subprime mortgage loans had been made to borrowers in the early part of the
decade, and the default rate on mortgages was rising because borrowers were no longer
able to repay the loans.
Low interest rates fueled asset bubbles that eventually burst.
The financial crisis started in the United States but then spread to other countries.
Stock markets around the world fell substantially.
The next Great Depression might be around the corner.
Each news item has an element of truth, yet each can also mislead. We first sort through the
events of 2008 and the policy responses. Then we look at the current state of the economy and
at more recent policy actions.
Coordination Games and Coordination Failures
As discussed in Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”, the United States and other economies
experienced severe economic downturns in the early 1930s, together with instability in
financial markets. It was little wonder that news accounts in 2008 and 2009 were filled with
discussions of the parallels and differences between then and now. When we looked at
financial instability during the Great Depression in Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”, we
studied a “bank-run game”—a strategic situation where depositors had to decide whether to
leave their money in the bank or take it out. The bank-run problem is a leading example of a
coordination game—a game with two key characteristics:
1. The game has multiple Nash equilibria.
2. These Nash equilibria can be ranked.
In a Nash equilibrium, everyone pursues their own self-interests given the actions of others.
This means that no single individual has an incentive to change his or her behavior, given the
choices of others. In a coordination game, there is more than one such equilibrium, and one of
the Nash equilibria is better than the others. When the outcome of the coordination game is
one of the outcomes that are worse than other possible equilibrium outcomes, then we say
a coordination failure has occurred.
Toolkit: Section 16.9 “Nash Equilibrium”
Nash equilibrium is explained in more detail in the toolkit.
The possibility of coordination failure suggests two more fundamental questions:
1. What gives rise to these coordination games?
2. What can the government do about them?
Economists know that there are many situations that give rise to coordination games. Bank
runs are just one example. In the crisis of 2008, actual bank runs did not occur in the United
States, but they did happen in other countries. More generally, the financial instability that
arose was similar in nature to a bank run. [2] Instead of failures of small neighborhood banks,
we saw the failure or the near failure of major financial institutions on Wall Street, many of
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which had other banks as their clients. As noted by then president of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner, the process of intermediation has gone beyond
traditional banks to create a parallel (shadow) financial system in the United States: “The
scale of long-term risky and relatively illiquid assets financed by very short-term liabilities
made many of the vehicles and institutions in this parallel financial system vulnerable to a
classic type of run, but without the protections such as deposit insurance that the banking
system has in place to reduce such risks” [3]
But the use of coordination games does not stop with bank runs. We can think of the decline
in housing values as coming from a coordination failure. Even more strikingly, the circular
flow of income itself can generate something that looks very like a coordination game.
Imagine a situation where the economy is in a recession, with high unemployment and low
levels of income. Because income is low, households choose low levels of spending. Because
spending is low, firms choose low levels of production, leading to low income. By contrast,
when income is high, then households engage in lots of spending. This leads firms to choose
high levels of production, leading to high income.
What can governments do in the face of coordination games? One feature of these games is
that the outcome of the game depends on the beliefs that people hold. An important aspect of
economic policy may therefore be to support optimism in the economy. If people believe the
economy is in trouble, this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if they believe the economy is
strong, they act in such a way that the economy actually is strong.
Crisis in the United States
There was no single root cause of the crisis of 2008. Economists and others have pointed to all
sorts of factors that sowed the seeds of the crisis; we will not go through all these here. What is
clear is that the housing market in the United States played a critical early role. As we saw
in Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”, events in the housing market were linked to
events in the credit market, the labor market, and the foreign exchange market.
We begin with an equation that teaches us how the value of a house is determined. InChapter
9 “Money: A User’s Guide”, we explained that houses are examples of assets and that the value
of any asset depends on the income that the asset generates. More specifically, the value of a
house this year is given by the value of the services provided by the house plus the price of the
house next year:
value of the house this year =
nominal value of service flow from the house over the next year
nominal interest factor
+
price of the house next year
nominal interest factor
.
This equation tells us that three factors determine the value of a house. One is the flow of
services that the house provides over the course of the coming year. In the case of a house that
is rented out, this flow of services is the rental payment. If you own the home that you live in,
you can think of this flow of services as being how much you would be willing to pay each year
for the right to live in your house. That value reflects the size of the house, its location, and
other amenities. The higher the flow of services from a house, the higher is its current price.
The second factor is the price you would expect to receive were you to choose to sell the house
next year. If you expect housing prices to be high in the future, then the house is worth more
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today. This is true even if you do not actually plan to sell the house next year. One way of
seeing this is to recognize that if you choose not to sell the house, its worth to you must be at
least as large as that price.
The third factor is the interest rate—remember that the interest factor equals (1 + the interest
rate). The flow of services and next year’s price both lie in the future, and we know that
income in the future is worth less than income today. We use the technique of discounted
present value to convert the flow of services and the future price into today’s terms. As in
the formula, we do so by dividing by the interest factor. One implication is that a change in the
interest rate affects the current value of a house. In particular, a reduction in interest rates
leads to higher housing prices today because a reduction in interest rates tells us that the
future has become more relevant to the present.
Although we have written the equation in nominal terms, we could equally work with the real
version of the same equation. In that case, the value of the service flow and the future price of
the house must be adjusted for inflation, so we would use the real interest factor rather than
the nominal interest factor.
Toolkit: Section 16.3 “Discounted Present Value”
You can review discounted present value in the toolkit.
Now that you understand what determines the current value of a house, imagine you are
making a decision about whether or not to buy a house. Unless you have a lot of cash, you will
need to take out a mortgage to make this purchase. If interest rates are low, then you are more
likely to qualify for a mortgage to buy a house. In the early 2000s, mortgage rates were
relatively low, with the consequence that large numbers of households qualified for loans. In
addition, many lenders offered special deals with very low initial mortgage rates (which were
followed by higher rates a year or so later) to entice borrowers. The low interest rates
encouraged people to buy houses. We saw this link between interest rates and spending
in Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”.
Lenders are also more willing to give you a mortgage if they think the price of a house is going
to increase. Normally, you need a substantial down payment to get a loan. But if your
mortgage lender expects housing prices to rise, then the lender will think that it will have the
option of taking back the house and selling it for a profit if you cannot repay your mortgage in
the future.
Thus, the expectation of rising housing prices in the future increases the current demand for
houses and thus the current price of houses. In the early and mid-2000s, rising housing prices
were seen in many markets in the United States and elsewhere. The rise in prices was fueled
at least in part by expectations, in a manner that is very similar to a coordination game.
However, the optimism that underlies the price increases can at some point be replaced by
pessimism, leading instead to a decrease in housing prices. Looking back at our equation for
the value of a house, how can we explain the decrease in housing prices in 2007 and 2008?
Interest rates did not rise over that time. It also seems unlikely that the service flow from a
house decreased dramatically. This suggests that the main factor explaining the collapse of
housing prices was a drop in the expected future price of houses. Notice the self-fulfilling
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nature of expectations: if everyone expects an asset to decrease in value in the future, it
decreases in value today.
But what happens when housing prices start to decrease? Suppose you had put down $20,000
and borrowed $200,000 from a bank to buy a $220,000 home. If the price of your house
decreases to, say, $150,000, you might just walk away from the house and default on the loan.
Of course, default does not mean that the house disappears. Instead, it is taken over by the
bank. But the bank does not want the house, so it is likely to try to sell it. When lots of banks
find themselves with houses that they do not want, then the supply of houses increases, and
the price of houses decreases.
We now see that there is a vicious circle operating:
1. Housing prices decrease.
2. People default on their loans.
3. Banks sell more houses in the market.
4. Housing prices decrease even more.
This again looks a lot like a coordination game. If housing prices are low, there are more
mortgage defaults and thus houses put on the market for sale. The increased supply of houses
drives down housing prices even further.
The crisis of 2008 may have begun in the housing market, but it did not stop there. It spread
beyond housing to all corners of the financial markets. As explained in Chapter 9 “Money: A
User’s Guide”, a loan from your perspective is an asset from the perspective of the bank.
Banks that held mortgage assets did not simply hold on to those assets, but neither did they
merely sell them on to other banks. Instead, they bundled them up in various creative ways
and then sold these bundled assets to other financial institutions. These financial institutions
in turn rebundled the assets for sale to other financial institutions and so forth. The bundling
of assets was designed to create more efficient sharing of the risk in financial markets. [4] But
there were also costs: (1) it became harder to evaluate the riskiness of assets, and (2) the
original bank had a reduced incentive to carefully evaluate the loans that it made because it
knew the risk would be passed on to others. This incentive problem made the bundles of
mortgage loans riskier.
The Policy Response in the United States
The US government did not stand idle as these events were unfolding. They took the following
actions: (1) they provided more deposit insurance, (2) they decreased interest rates, (3)
they facilitated various mergers and acquisitions of financial entities, and (4) they bailed out
some financial institutions. Some of these actions were an outgrowth of policies enacted after
the Great Depression. The most important of these, deposit insurance, is discussed next.
Guarantee Funds and the Role of Deposit Insurance
In Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”, we explained that, during the Great Depression, much
of the disruption to the financial system came through bank runs. But in 2007 and 2008, we
did not see bank runs in the United States. This was a striking difference between the crisis of
2008 and the Great Depression. The absence of bank runs is almost certainly because deposit
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insurance “changes the game.” To see how, look at the bank-run coordination game in part (a)
of Figure 15.1 “The Payoffs in a Bank-Run Game with and without Deposit Insurance”. In
particular, look at the outcome if other players run and you do not run. In that case you get
zero, so this would be a bad decision. You do better if you choose to participate in the run,
obtaining 20. If everybody else chooses to run on the bank, you should do the same thing. In
this case, the bank fails. But if everyone else leaves their money in the bank, you should do
likewise. In this case, the bank is sound. The fact that there are two possible equilibrium
outcomes is what makes this a coordination game.
Deposit insurance, which is run by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(FDIC;http://www.fdic.gov/deposit), insures the bank deposits of individuals (up to a limit).
Suppose that deposit insurance provides each depositor who leaves money in the bank a
payoff of 110 even if everyone else runs. Now the game has the payoffs shown in part (b)
of Figure 15.1 “The Payoffs in a Bank-Run Game with and without Deposit Insurance”. The
strategy of “do not run” is now better than “run” regardless of what other people do. You
choose “do not run”—as does everyone else in the game. The outcome is that nobody runs and
the banks are stable. Remarkably, this policy costs the government nothing. Since there are no
bank runs, the government never has to pay any deposit insurance. By changing the rules of
the game, the government has made the bad equilibrium disappear.
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Figure 15.1 The Payoffs in a Bank-Run Game with and without Deposit Insurance
You deposit $100 in the bank. Part (a) shows payoffs without deposit insurance. There are
two Nash equilibria: if all people leave their money in the bank, then you should do the
same, but if all people make runs on the bank, you are better running as well. In Part (b),
deposit insurance means that the game has a unique equilibrium.
Decreasing Interest Rates
Deposit insurance may have prevented bank runs, but credit markets still did not function
smoothly during the crisis of 2008. So what else was going on in credit markets? During the
financial crisis, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) decreased its target interest rate. The way in
which it does this and its implications for the aggregate economy are covered inChapter 10
“Understanding the Fed”. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) reduced the target
federal funds rate from 4.75 percent in September 2007 to 1.0 percent by the end of October
2008 and 0.25 percent by the end of the year. The target rate is indicated in the last column of
the Table 15.1 “The Federal Funds Rate: Target and Realized Rates”.
However, the Fed lost its usual ability to tightly control the actual federal funds rate. We see
this in the other columns of Table 15.1 “The Federal Funds Rate: Target and Realized Rates”.
The column labeled “average” is the average federal funds rate over the day. The highest and
lowest rates during the day are indicated as well. Prior to September 2008, the average and
target rates were very close, but from mid-September onward, the average rate frequently
diverged from the target. In addition, the difference between the high and low rates was much
higher after the middle of September 2008.
Table 15.1 The Federal Funds Rate: Target and Realized Rates
Date Average Low High Target
October 14,
2008
1.1 0.25 2 1.5
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October 7,
2008
2.97 0.01 6.25 2
September
29, 2008
1.56 0.01 3 2
September
15, 2008
2.64 0.01 7 2
July 16, 2008 1.95 0.5 2.5 2
Source: Data summarized from “Federal Funds Chart,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
2008, http://www.newyorkfed.org/charts/ff.
As we explained in Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”, these low interest rates meant that
the Fed had hit the zero lower bound on monetary policy. Because nominal interest rates
cannot be less than zero, the Fed was no longer able to stimulate the economy using the
normal tools of monetary policy. Because its traditional tools were proving less effective than
usual, the Fed turned to other, unusual, policy measures. The Fed created several lending
facilities through which it provided funds to financial markets. For example, a commercial
paper funding facility was created on October 7, 2008, to promote liquidity in a market that is
central to the credit needs of both businesses and households.[5] The Board of Governors
listed these as tools of the Fed in addition to three familiar tools: open-market operations,
discount-window lending, and changes in reserve requirements.
Short-term interest rates, such as the overnight rate on interbank loans (the so-called LIBOR
[London Interbank Offered Rate]), followed the Federal Funds rate down for much of 2008.
(As the name suggests, this is the rate on loans that banks make to each other overnight.) But
when the crisis became severe in September and October 2008, the LIBOR rose
sharply. [6] This rate averaged just about 5 percent for the month of September and 4.64
percent in October. [7] Short-term rates increased despite the Fed’s attempts
to reduce interest rates.
Why did these rates not decrease along with the Fed’s targeted federal funds rate? One
explanation comes from the following equation:
loan rate × probability of loan repayment = cost of funds to the bank.
On the left hand side is the loan rate charged by a bank—for example, the interest rate on a car
loan, a household improvement loan, or a small business loan. The other term is the
likelihood that the loan will actually be repaid. Together these give the expected return to the
bank from making a loan. The right side is the cost of funds to the bank. This might be
measured as the rate paid to depositors or the rate paid to other banks for loans from one
bank to another. When this equation holds, the cost of the input into the loan process,
measured as the interest cost on funds to the bank, equals the return on loans made. The bank
does not then expect to make any profits or losses on the loan.
In Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”, we argued that interest rates on loans usually follow
the federal funds rate quite closely. If the Fed reduces the targeted federal funds rate, this
reduces the cost of funds to banks. Banks typically follow by decreasing their lending rates.
This close connection between the cost of funds and the loan rate holds true provided there is
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a stable probability of loan repayment. In normal times, that is (approximately) true, so
variations in the federal funds rate lead directly to variations in loan rates.
During the fall of 2008, the link was weakened. Though the Fed reduced its targeted interest
rate so that the cost of funds decreased, loan rates did not decrease. The reason was a fall in
the perceived probability of loan repayment: banks perceived the risk of default to be much
higher. Banks were cautious because they had suffered through the reduction in the value of
mortgage-based assets and had seen some financial institutions fail. The state of the economy,
with increasing unemployment and decreasing asset prices, led banks to be more prudent. In
terms of our equation, the probability of repayment was decreasing at the same time as the
cost of funds was decreasing. As a consequence, loan rates did not decrease as rapidly as the
bank’s costs of funds.
There was also a reduction in the amount of lending. The quantity of loans decreased because
banks became more careful about whom to lend to. When you go to a bank to borrow, it
makes an evaluation of how likely you are to repay the loan. During the fall of 2008, bank
loans became much more difficult to obtain because many customers were viewed as higher
credit risks. Even more significantly, the uncertainty of repayment was not limited only to
loans from banks to households. Many of the loans in the short-term market are from banks
to other banks or to firms. Uncertainty over asset valuations, growing out of the belief that
some mortgage securities were overvalued, permeated the market, making lenders less willing
to extend credit to other financial institutions.
Another factor in keeping interest rates high was the behavior of investors who held deposits
that were not covered by federal deposit insurance—particularly deposits in “money market
funds.” In the early part of October 2008, there were huge outflows from money market funds
into insured deposits as investors sought safety. This was a problem for the banking system,
because it left the financial system with fewer funds to provide to borrowers. It also led short-
term interest rates to rise.
So while the presence of deposit insurance was valuable in reducing the risk faced by
individual households, banks still perceived higher lending risks. They therefore looked for
ways to limit this risk. One prominent device they used is known as a credit default swap.
This is a fancy term for a kind of financial insurance contract. The buyer of the contract pays a
premium to the seller of the contract to cover bankruptcy risk. For example, suppose an
institution owns some risky bonds issued by a bank. To shed this risk, the institution engages
in a credit swap with an insurance provider.
These swaps played a big role in the stories of two key players in the financial crisis: American
International Group (AIG) and Lehman Brothers. The US government eventually bailed out
AIG, but Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Because Lehman Brothers was an active trader of
credit default swaps, their exit severely curtailed the functioning of this market. Without the
added protection of these default swaps, lenders directly faced default risk and hence decided
to charge higher loan rates. AIG was also a prominent player in the credit swap
market. [8] They sold insurance to cover many defaults, some linked directly to the holding of
mortgages. As the mortgage crisis loomed, likely claims against AIG increased, putting them
too on the brink of bankruptcy.
So although there were no bank runs during the crisis in the United States, credit markets
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were still severely disrupted. Given the centrality of the financial sector in the circular flow,
disruption in the credit markets led to a downturn in overall economic activity. Put yourself in
the place of a builder of new homes. Your customers are finding it hard to qualify for
mortgages. As a result, the demand for your product is lower (the demand curve has shifted
inward). Meanwhile (since the construction of a new home takes time), you need to borrow
from a bank to finance payments to your suppliers of raw materials and to pay your
carpenters and other workers. Tight credit markets mean that you find it more expensive to
obtain funds: interest rates are higher, and the terms are less generous. Not surprisingly,
disruption in the credit markets shows up particularly starkly in the market for new houses.
Facilitating Takeovers of Financial Firms
The problems of AIG, Lehman Brothers, and other financial firms led policymakers to worry
about such firms going bankrupt. In some cases, these firms had too many bad assets on their
books and were not able to continue in the market. One example is Bear Stearns, which was
heavily involved in the trading of assets that were backed by mortgages. In March 2008, it
became clear that those assets were highly overvalued. When the prices of these assets
decreased, Bear Stearns was close to bankruptcy. With the help of a loan
(http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/other20080627a2 ) from the
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (operating through the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York), JPMorgan Chase and Company acquired Bear Stearns.
It is perhaps remarkable that the Fed took such an active role in this acquisition. When a local
grocer goes out of business, you simply shift your business to another seller. Nobody expects
the government to take a role in rescuing the store. But when we are talking about large
financial firms, shifting from one financial intermediary to another may not be as easy. When
a large institution fails, it is highly disruptive to the financial system as a whole. The minutes
of the March 16, 2008, meeting of the Board of Governors confirm this view:
The evidence available to the Board indicated that Bear Stearns would have difficulty
meeting its repayment obligations the next business day. Significant support, such as an
acquisition of Bear Stearns or an immediate guarantee of its payment obligations, was
necessary to avoid serious disruptions to financial markets.
Thus the Fed thought it was necessary to ensure the takeover of Bear Stearns and hence the
continuation of its operations. In fact, prior to this takeover, Bear Stearns was listed among a
small set of financial firms as “primary dealers.” These are financial intermediaries that are
viewed as central to the orderly operation of financial markets and the conduct of monetary
policy. [9]
AIG received a loan up to $85 billion from the Fed in September 2008. The monetary
authority was concerned that a failure of AIG would further destabilize financial markets. As
part of this deal, the US government acquired a 79.9 percent equity ownership in
AIG.[10] AIG was special enough to warrant this government loan because of its role in
providing insurance (through credit default swaps) against the default on debt by individual
companies. Without this insurance, the debt of these companies becomes riskier, and they
find it harder to borrow. AIG was a large enough actor in this market for its departure to have
meant severe disruptions in the provision of insurance.
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In contrast to these actions for Bear Stearns and AIG, the Fed did nothing to help Lehman
Brothers, a 158-year-old financial firm. It went out of business in September 2008. There was
no bailout for this company from the Fed or the US Treasury. It simply disappeared from the
financial markets.
A $700 Billion Bailout
In October 2008, Congress passed and the president signed legislation called the “Emergency
Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” to provide $700 billion in funding available to the
Department of the Treasury. The legislation authorized the Treasury
(http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/financialsvcs_dem/essabill ) to purchase
mortgages and other assets of financial institutions (including shares) to create a flow of
credit within the financial markets. The Treasury Department then set up a Troubled Asset
Relief Program as a vehicle for making asset purchases. In addition to these measures, the
legislation called for an increase in FDIC deposit insurance to cover deposits up to a cap of
$250,000 instead of the standard cap of $100,000. [11]
One interesting element of the bailout legislation was the explicit interaction of the Treasury
and the Fed. A joint statement issued after the passage of this act indicated that these players
in the conduct of fiscal and monetary policy were working together to resolve the crisis. In the
United States, the Treasury and the Fed each contributed to the financing of these rescue
packages.
In Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”, we pointed out that
government deficit = change in government debt + change in money supply.
In other words, when the government runs a deficit, it must finance this deficit by either
issuing more debt or printing money. This equation is consistent with the institutional
structure in the United States where the Treasury and the Fed are independent entities. In
effect, the Treasury issues debt to finance a deficit, then some of that debt is purchased by the
Fed. When the Fed purchases debt, it injects new money into the economy.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Though there were no bank runs in the United States during the crisis of 2008, the
structure of coordination games is useful for thinking about instability of the housing
sector, the interactions of banks within the financial system, and the interaction
between income and spending.
2. During the crisis, the Fed moved aggressively to decrease interest rates and provide
liquidity to the system.
3. The George W. Bush administration created a $700 billion program to purchase or
guarantee troubled assets, such as mortgages and shares of financial firms.
Checking Your Understanding
1. As the probability of default increases, what happens to the lending rate?
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2. What is a credit default swap?
3. Why does the sale of bank-owned houses cause the price of houses to decrease?
4. We said that deposit insurance was available in 2008. Was it available during the Great
Depression?
[1] The full text of the bill and related facts are available at “Bill Summary & Status: 110th
Congress (2007–2008) H.R.1424,” THOMAS: The Library of Congress, accessed September
20, 2011, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.01424:.
[2] A recent article by Russell Cooper and Jonathan Willis explores in more detail the
significance of coordination problems and beliefs during the recent crisis: “Coordination of
Expectations in the Recent Crisis: Private Actions and Policy Responses,” Federal Reserve
Bank of Kansas City Quarterly Review, First Quarter 2010, accessed July 25,
2011,http://www.kansascityfed.org/PUBLICAT/ECONREV/PDF/10q1CooperWillis .
[3] From an address given by Geithner to the Economic Club of New York Press: “Timothy F.
Geithner: Reducing Systemic Risk in a Dynamic Financial System,” Bank for International
Settlements, June 9, 2008, http://www.bis.org/review/r080612b ?frames=0.
[4] Fannie Mae (http://www.fanniemae.com/kb/index?page=home) and Freddie Mac
(http://www.freddiemac.com), two government created and supported enterprises, were
among those involved in the bundling and reselling of mortgages to facilitate this sharing of
risks. These companies are currently in conservatorship.
[5] These are summarized by the Board of Governors, “Information Regarding Recent Federal
Reserve Actions,” Federal Reserve, accessed September 20,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/recentactions.htm. They are also discussed
in the press release: “Press Release,” Federal Reserve, October 7, 2008, accessed September
20, 2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20081007c.htm.
[6] “US Dollar LIBOR Rates 2008,” accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.global-
rates.com/interest-rates/libor/american-dollar/2008.aspx.
[7] The data are from the British Bankers’ Association.
[8] PBS Newshour provides a full report on AIG and credit swaps. They state that “AIG wrote
some $450 billion worth of credit default swap insurance” of the $62 trillion of credit swaps.
“Risky Credit Default Swaps Linked to Financial Troubles,” PBS Newshour, October 7, 2008,
accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-
dec08/solmancredit_10-07.html.
[9] The list of primary dealers is available at “Primary Dealers List,” Federal Reserve Bank of
New York, accessed July 25,
2011, http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/pridealers_current.html.
[10] See the announcement by the Board of Governors: “Press Release,” Board of Governors of
the Federal Reserve System, September 16, 2008, accessed July 25,
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2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/20080916a.htm. As authority
for this action, this announcement by the Fed cites Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act,
which allows the Fed to provide this type of funding in “unusual and exigent” circumstances:
“Section 13: Powers of Federal Reserve Banks,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
System, December 14, 2010, accessed July 25,
2011, http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/section13.htm.
[11] See “Insured or Not Insured?,” Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, accessed July 25,
2011, http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/information/fdiciorn.html. The FDIC does
not insure money market funds, though these were protected under a temporary Treasury
program: “Frequently Asked Questions about Treasury’s Temporary Guarantee Program for
Money Market Funds,” US Department of the Treasury, September 29, 2008, accessed
September 20, 2011, http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-
releases/Pages/hp1163.aspx.
15.2 From Financial Crisis to Recession
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. How did the financial crisis spread to the aggregate economy?
2. What was the fiscal policy response?
3. What was the monetary policy response?
So far we have focused on the financial side of the crisis of 2008 because the initial stage of
the crisis was within the financial sector. As in the Great Depression, though, the disruptions
in the financial sector then spread to the rest of the economy.
From Housing to the Aggregate Economy
The crisis of 2008 saw financial disruptions spread from financial markets to the economy at
large. In Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”, we introduced the aggregate expenditure
model to understand the reduction in economic activity in the early 1930s. That same
framework is useful in understanding recent events.
Toolkit: Section 16.19 “The Aggregate Expenditure Model”
You can review the aggregate expenditure model in the toolkit.
The aggregate expenditure model takes as its starting point the fact that gross domestic
product (GDP) measures both total spending and total production. When planned and actual
spending are in balance,
real GDP = planned spending
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= autonomous spending + marginal propensity to spend × real GDP.
Autonomous spending is the intercept of the planned spending line. It is the amount of
spending that there would be in the economy if income were zero. The equilibrium level of
real GDP is as follows:
real GDP =
autonomous spending
1 − marginal propensity to spend
.
The framework tells us that a reduction in autonomous spending leads to a decrease in real
GDP.
Just as in the Great Depression, the two leading candidates for the decrease in autonomous
spending are consumption and investment. Specifically, the crisis in the housing market had
two significant implications for the rest of the economy. First, the decrease in housing prices
starting in 2008 reduced the wealth of many households. Because households were poorer,
they reduced their consumption. Second, the disruptions in the financial system made it
difficult for firms to obtain financing, which meant that there was less investment. The
aggregate expenditure model teaches us that these reductions in consumption and investment
can lead to a reduction in real GDP.
Reductions in autonomous spending are magnified through the circular flow of income.
As spending decreases, income decreases, leading to further reductions in spending. This is
the multiplier process; it shows up as the term 1/(1 − marginal propensity to spend), which
multiplies autonomous spending in the expression for real GDP.
Toolkit: Section 16.16 “The Circular Flow of Income”
You can review the circular flow of income and the multiplier in the toolkit.
Stabilization Policy
We have already observed that, in contrast to the Great Depression, policymakers in the crisis
of 2008 took several actions to try to address the economic problems. In addition to the
measures aimed specifically at dealing with problems in the financial markets, policymakers
turned to monetary and fiscal policy in an attempt to counteract the economic downturn.
To begin our discussion of this stabilization policy, it is useful to start with a summary of the
state of the economy in the 2006–10 period. By so doing, we are making life somewhat easier
for us than it was for policymakers because they did not know in early 2009 what would
happen in the aggregate economy during that year. The annual growth rates of the main
macroeconomic variables during the crisis are highlighted in Table 15.2 “State of the
Economy: Growth Rates from 2006 to 2010”. All variables are in percentage terms.
From Table 15.2 “State of the Economy: Growth Rates from 2006 to 2010”, you can see how
US real GDP growth slowed in 2007, stalled in 2008, and turned negative in 2009. The
recovery in 2010 had a positive growth rate slightly larger than the decline in 2009. Had these
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growth rates been identical in absolute value, the economy would have recovered, roughly
speaking, to the 2008 level of real GDP. The annual growth rate of real GDP in the last quarter
of 2010 was a robust 3.1 percent, but the growth rate in the first quarter of 2011 was only 1.8
percent. Concerns remain over the viability of the current recovery.
The next four columns of Table 15.2 “State of the Economy: Growth Rates from 2006 to
2010” show that the declines in real GDP came largely from spending on investment and
durables by firms and households. Housing played a particularly significant role. This fits with
the theory of consumption smoothing that we discussed in Chapter 12 “Income
Taxes” and Chapter 13 “Social Security”. The last column shows the unemployment rate.
Although the economy enjoyed positive real GDP growth in 2010, the unemployment rate
remained high. [1]
Table 15.2 State of the Economy: Growth Rates from 2006 to 2010
Year GDP Consumption Household
Durables
Investment Housing Unemployment
Rate (%)
2006 2.7 2.9 4.1 2.7 -7.3 4.4
2007 1.9 2.4 4.2 -3.1 -18.7 5.0
2008 0.0 -0.3 -5.2 -9.5 -24.0 7.4
2009 -2.6 -1.2 -3.7 -22.6 -22.9 10.0
2010 2.9 1.7 7.7 17.1 -3.0 9.6
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce
(http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2010/txt/gdp2q10_adv.txt andhttp://www
.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2011/pdf/gdp1q11_2nd ) and Bureau of Labor
Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/cps).
Fiscal Policy
One of the priorities of the Obama administration after taking office in January 2009 was to
formulate a stimulus package to deal with the looming recession. As is clear fromTable 15.2
“State of the Economy: Growth Rates from 2006 to 2010”, growth in the economy was near
zero for the preceding year, and the unemployment rate was much higher than it had been in
the previous two years. Although the financial rescue plans of the George W. Bush
administration may have stemmed the financial crisis, the aggregate economy was now
limping along at best.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) was signed into law on
February 17, 2009. The stimulus package contained approximately $800 billion in spending
increases and tax cuts. These numbers are approximate for a couple of reasons: (1) parts of the
package depend on the state of the economy in the future, so the exact outlays are not
determined in the legislation, and (2) the disbursements were not all within a single year, so
the timing of the outlays and thus their discounted present value could not be precisely known
at the time of passage.
The package contained a mixture of spending increases and tax cuts. According to a
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study
(http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10682/Frontmatter.2.2.shtml) from November
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2009, federal government purchases of goods and services were to increase by about $90
billion over the 2009–19 period. Transfer payments to households were set to increase by
about $100 billion, and transfers to state and local governments were to increase by nearly
$260 billion. This last category of outlays was quite visible, taking the form of road projects
and other construction in towns across the United States. Interestingly, the federal
government was investing in infrastructure, thus building up the public component of the
capital stock.
In the same publication, the CBO provided a summary of ARRA’s macroeconomic effects in
November 2009. At that point, due to ARRA, the CBO estimated that federal government
outlays (not only spending on goods and services) had increased by about $100 billion, and
tax collections were lower by about $90 billion. So clearly some but not the entire stimulus
went into the US economy within seven months of ARRA’s passage. The CBO also produced
its own assessment of the effects of ARRA through September 2009. To do so, it had to use an
economic model to calculate the effects of the increases in outlays and reductions in taxes. In
many ways, the framework for the assessment is quite similar to the analysis of the Kennedy
tax cuts we discussed in Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”.
According to the CBO, ARRA meant that real GDP in the United States was between 1.2
percent and 3.2 percent higher than it would otherwise have been, whereas the
unemployment rate was between 0.3 and 0.9 percentage points lower. These numbers were
obtained by attaching a multiplier to each component of the stimulus package and calculating
the change in real GDP from that component. For example, the CBO estimated that the
multiplier associated with federal government purchases of goods and services was between 1
and 2.5. The effect of this federal spending on real GDP is simply the product of the spending
of the federal government funded under ARRA times the multiplier. The CBO did this
calculation for each component of the stimulus package and then added up the effects on real
GDP. The range of the effects reflects the range for each multiplier used in their analysis. The
CBO also calculated that 640,000 jobs were either created or retained due to ARRA. This
calculation underlies their estimate of how much ARRA reduced the unemployment rate in
the United States.
Some economists have disputed the effects of ARRA on economic activity, however. John
Taylor, a Stanford University economist, argued that the short-term nature of the tax cuts
meant that most households simply saved the tax cut, as the theory of consumption
smoothing predicts. This argument was supported by evidence of increasing saving rates by
households in the United States during the period of the tax cuts. [2]
During 2010 and 2011, there were some calls for further stimulus. The unemployment rate in
the United States remained high despite the stimulus; it was 9.5 percent in July 2010. The
Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.b.htm) tells us that while
job creation had been brisk in May 2010 at 432,000 jobs, the total job destruction in June and
July 2010 was 350,000. Further, real GDP growth was only 2.4 percent in the second quarter
of 2010, down from 3.7 percent in the first quarter. Together this news put more pressure on
policymakers to conduct further attempts at stabilization policy.
But at the same time, policymakers became increasingly concerned about the long-run fiscal
health of the government. In effect, they began to worry about the government budget
constraint, which we explained in Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”. The attention of
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policymakers moved away from stimulus and toward “fiscal consolidation.” This culminated
in a political battle in the summer of 2011 over an increase in the debt ceiling, a limit on the
amount of US debt outstanding. Ultimately an agreement was reached to allow an increase in
the ceiling, but this agreement was combined with a reduction in government spending of
nearly $900 billion over the coming 10 years and an agreement to seek further cuts in
spending amounting to another $1.5 trillion. [3] This agreement was not enough to avert a
downgrade of US debt from AAA to AA+ by Standard and Poors. [4]
Monetary Policy
The current state of monetary policy is well summarized in the Federal Open Market
Committee (FOMC) statement of August 10, 2010. Here is an excerpt: [5]
Press Release
Release Date: August 10, 2010
For immediate release
Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that
the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months.… Nonetheless,
the Committee anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context
of price stability, although the pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the
near term than had been anticipated.
Measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters and, with substantial
resource slack continuing to restrain cost pressures and longer-term inflation expectations
stable, inflation is likely to be subdued for some time.
The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 and
continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization,
subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally
low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.
To help support the economic recovery in a context of price stability, the Committee will keep
constant the Federal Reserve’s holdings of securities at their current level by reinvesting
principal payments from agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in longer-term
Treasury securities.…
Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman; William C.
Dudley, Vice Chairman; James Bullard; Elizabeth A. Duke; Donald L. Kohn; Sandra Pianalto;
Eric S. Rosengren; Daniel K. Tarullo; and Kevin M. Warsh.
Voting against the policy was Thomas M. Hoenig, who judges that the economy is recovering
modestly, as projected. Accordingly, he believed that continuing to express the expectation of
exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period was no longer
warranted and limits the Committee’s ability to adjust policy when needed.…
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We can make several observations about this FOMC statement. First, the FOMC shared the
general perception that the recovery is not very robust and is showing signs of slowing. Their
response was to maintain the targeted federal funds rate at between 0 and 0.25 percent. The
FOMC put the targeted rate into this range in December 2008; in August 2011 the Fed
indicated that it would keep rates low for at least another two years.[6]
Second, the FOMC talks about “reinvesting principal payments from agency debt and agency
mortgage-backed securities….” This somewhat complicated phrase refers to the fact that the
Fed purchased various assets in the attempt to keep financial markets working during the
financial crisis. [7] As reported by the Fed, “[s]ince the beginning of the financial market
turmoil in August 2007, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has grown in size and has
changed in composition. Total assets of the Federal Reserve have increased significantly from
$869 billion on August 8, 2007, to well over $2 trillion.” [8]Observers are waiting for the Fed
to reduce its holdings of these assets. The policy statement indicated that the Fed was not yet
ready to take those steps.
The final point concerns the position of Thomas Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve
Bank of Kansas City. Over the year, he took the view that monetary policy was too lax. As the
economy recovered, there was, he believed, no longer any need to keep interest rates at such
low levels. One of the implicit concerns here is that periods of low interest rates have tended
to promote bubbles in assets, such as housing. The FOMC had to weigh this concern against
the view that, with a slow economic recovery and no signs of inflation, expansionary monetary
policy was still warranted. When the FOMC took the unusual decision to commit to low
interest rates for two years, three members of the committee dissented from the decision.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Disruptions in the financial system led to reductions in consumption and investment,
which led to a decrease in real GDP.
2. An $800 billion stimulus package was passed in February 2009 to offset the
recessionary effects of the financial crisis.
3. From December 2008 through (at least) the summer of 2011 the target federal funds
rate was near zero.
Checking Your Understanding
1. If the federal funds rate is near zero, what is the real return on a loan in that market?
(Hint: if you are not sure about the answer, look up the Fisher equation in the toolkit for
more information.)
2. In Table 15.2 “State of the Economy: Growth Rates from 2006 to 2010”, what items are
counted as investment?
3. If the CBO calculates that the multiplier on tax cuts is 1.5 and taxes are cut by $100
billion, how much will GDP change by?
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[1] A recent BLS publication looked at job creation and job destruction up to 2009 to try to
understand the slow recovery of unemployment. “Business Dynamics Statistics Briefing:
Historically Large Decline in Job Creation from Startup and Existing Firms in the 2008–2009
Recession,” U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics, March 2011, accessed
September 20, 2011, http://www.ces.census.gov/docs/bds/plugin-
BDS%20March%202011%20single_0322_FINAL .
[2] Testimony reproduced in John B. Taylor, “The 2009 Stimulus Package: Two Years Later,”
Hoover Institution, February 16, 2011, accessed September 20,
2011,http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/2009-Stimulus-two-years-
later .
[3] The bill passed by the House of Representatives is contained here: “Text of Budget Control
Act Amendment,” House of Representatives Committee on Rules, accessed September 20,
2011,http://rules.house.gov/Media/file/PDF_112_1/Floor_Text/DEBT_016_xml .
[4] The decision to downgrade the debt is discussed at “Research Update: United States of
America Long-Term Rating Lowered to ‘AA+’ on Political Risks and Rising Debt Burden;
Outlook Negative,” Standard & Poor’s, August 5, 2011, accessed September 20,
2011,http://www.standardandpoors.com/servlet/BlobServer?blobheadername3 =MDT-
Type&blobcol=urldata&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobheadervalue
2=inline%3B+filename%3DUS_Downgraded_AA%2B &blobheadername2=Content-Dis
position&blobheadervalue1=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blob headername1=content-
type&blobwhere=1243942957443&blobh eadervalue3=UTF-8.
[5] “Press Release,” Federal Open Market Committee, August 10, 2010, accessed July 26,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20100810a.htm.
[6] You can find the FOMC statements and minutes of the meetings from December 2008
onward at “Meeting Calendars, Statements, and Minutes (2006–2012),” Federal Reserve,
accessed July 26, 2011, http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm.
[7] Those programs are summarized at “Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance
Sheet,” Federal Reserve, accessed July 26,
2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_crisisresponse.htm.
[8] The Fed maintains an interactive web site that displays and explains its balance sheet
items. “Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance Sheet,” Federal Reserve, accessed July
26, 2011,http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm.
15.3 The Crisis in Europe and the Rest of the World
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the ways the crisis spread from the United States to the rest of the world?
2. In what ways did the institutional structure of the European Union (EU) hamper
Europe’s ability to cope with the crisis?
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In Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”, we spoke of the day when people in several European
countries woke up to a new monetary regime that used different pieces of paper than were
used previously. In that chapter we used that experience to help us understand why people
hold money. When these countries adopted the euro, they were not expecting to wake up
about a decade later to read something like this:
“On the eve of a confidence vote that may bring down Papandreou’s government, euro-
area finance ministers pushed Greece to pass laws to cut the deficit and sell state assets.
They left open whether the country will get the full 12 billion euros ($17.1 billion)
promised for July” as part of last year’s 110 billion-euro lifeline.
“We forcefully reminded the Greek government that by the end of this month they have
to see to it that we are all convinced that all the commitments they made are fulfilled,”
Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters early today after
chairing a crisis meeting in Luxembourg. [1]
The euro was established by the Maastricht Treaty, but the implications of that treaty went
beyond the introduction of new pieces of paper. The nature of fiscal and monetary
interactions across the countries within the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) changed
dramatically as well.
On the monetary side, in addition to losing their national currencies, the countries that joined
the euro effectively lost their central banks. The Central Bank of Italy, say, which formerly
conducted monetary policy in that country, handed over that duty to the European Central
Bank (ECB). The same thing happened in other countries. Most significantly, the German
Bundesbank, which was one of the most important central banks in the world, also ceded its
powers to the ECB. Further, the Maastricht Treaty—and the Stability and Growth Pact that
followed a few years later—placed restrictions on fiscal policy by member countries. [2] Prior
to the introduction of the euro, member governments had complete discretion over their fiscal
policy. Within the EMU, however, constraints on deficit spending were placed on member
countries.
Taken together, these two factors radically changed the conduct of monetary and fiscal policy
in the countries of the EMU. Some commentators questioned whether adequate tools for
stabilization of aggregate economies were still available. Others wondered whether the
constraints on fiscal policy would be violated by member countries, leading to the possibility
of a debt crisis for a country within the euro area. In that event, how would the other member
countries respond?
The crisis of 2008 provided the first big tests of these questions. Debt problems—not only in
Greece but also in Portugal and Ireland—revealed that these concerns were well placed. We
start by discussing how the crisis spread from the United States to Europe and then turn to
the policy actions within Europe.
Sources of Spillovers
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In Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”, we explained how countries are linked
through the flows across national borders of goods, services, labor, financial capital, and
information. Countries do not exist in isolation, and these linkages imply that problems in one
country can be transmitted to others. In the crisis of 2008, we can point to three broad
channels of spillover from the United States to the rest of the world:
1. Within financial markets across borders (integrated financial markets)
2. From financial markets into real markets in the United States, followed by real spillovers
across countries
3. Contagion effects through market psychology
The first two linkages can be seen in the circular flow of income in Figure 15.2 “The Foreign
Sector in the Circular Flow”. In this version of the circular flow, we highlight the interactions
between a single country and the rest of the world. These interactions operate through the
flows of goods and services and financial assets. During good times, they are a key part of the
workings of the world economy. But during bad times, such as a financial crisis, these same
links create channels for the sharing of financial crises.
Figure 15.2 The Foreign Sector in the Circular Flow
Households purchase goods from other countries; these are called imports. Citizens of other
countries purchase our products; these are called exports. A trade deficit requires borrowing
from the rest of the world.
There are three international flows in Figure 15.2 “The Foreign Sector in the Circular Flow”:
1. Exports. Households, firms, and the government in the rest of the world purchase
goods and services produced in the home country.
2. Imports. Households (and also firms and the government) purchase goods and
services produced in the rest of the world.
3. Financial flows. Financial intermediaries in the home country buy and sell financial
assets flows from/to the rest of the world. The net flow can go in either
direction; Figure 15.2 “The Foreign Sector in the Circular Flow” shows the case where
there is a net flow of money into the home country.
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International Spillovers in Financial Markets
One channel through which the crisis of 2008 spread was the holding of US financial assets by
governments, financial institutions, and banks in other countries. Take, for example,
mortgages that were marketed and issued in the United States. These mortgages were usually
not ultimately held by the banks that issued them to homeowners. Instead they were bundled
together with other mortgages and then resold.
These “mortgage-backed securities” were marketed and sold all over the world, not just in the
United States. This means that any risk associated with these assets was shared across
investors in different countries. The spread of this risk across world markets also provided a
way for the crisis to propagate across countries. When it became clear that these assets were
less valuable than investors had previously thought, the reduction in their price reduced the
wealth of investors all over the globe. Moreover, the various financial institutions in the
United States that were either bought out or went bankrupt were partly owned by investors in
other countries. Thus financial links across the world economy provided one avenue for the
spread of the crisis.
Second, the financial flows across countries played a significant role in the spread of the crisis.
Since the early 1970s, the United States has run current account deficits each year. One
consequence of this is that it has been borrowing from abroad to finance these deficits. In
other words, foreigners hold substantial amounts of US assets. These assets include US
government debt and, in many cases, large amounts of mortgage-backed securities.
One way to see the extent of these financial interactions is to look at the behavior of stock
markets around the globe. Figure 15.3 “Stock Markets around the World Crashed
Together” shows the values for six indices around the world: the Dow Jones Industrial
Average (United States), CAC (France), FTSE (United Kingdom), Hang Seng (China), Nikkei
(Japan), and Merval (Argentina). The figure shows that the last six months of 2008 were
problematic for stock markets across many countries.
Figure 15.3 Stock Markets around the World Crashed Together
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Spillovers through the Trade of Goods and Services
Trade is another source of linkage across countries. Because countries sell goods and services
to each other, a recession in one country will naturally spread to others. If the major trading
partners of a country are in a recession, then there will be a reduced demand for the goods
and services produced by that country. So, for example, if the United States enters into a
recession as a consequence of financial market distress, then the demand for goods and
services produced in other countries will decrease. This reduction in aggregate spending in
other countries will then lead to lower economic activity in those countries.
Spillovers through Expectations
The circular flow of income shows two of the three spillovers we have identified: financial
flows and trade flows. The third spillover has to do with people’s perceptions and expectations
about market outcomes. There are two parts to this linkage: (1) expectations matter, and (2)
outcomes in one market can have effects in others. The second of these is termed
a contagion effect.
To the extent that part of the financial distress is due to pessimism, as suggested by the
coordination game we discussed in Section 15.1 “The Financial Crisis in the United States”,
this too is likely to spread across countries. If, day after day, the news from the United States
is that the prices of stock and other assets are decreasing, investors in other countries may
begin to share this pessimism. This will lead them to sell their assets, leading to decreases in
the prices of the assets that they are selling. Decreasing asset prices can feed on themselves
through pessimistic expectations. As an example, consider again the September 2008
bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. [3]
“Everybody is frozen here after Lehman,” said one senior executive from a major
financial institution who was paying visits this week to all the major sovereign funds in
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Asia and the Middle East. His voice was worn from hours spent in conference rooms
trying to explain to clients why Lehman failed and who might be next. “Its just fear.”
In Section 15.1 “The Financial Crisis in the United States”, we gave an equation to explain the
price of an asset—specifically, a house. A key part of that equation is that the value of a house
today depends in part on the price of the house expected in the future. To emphasize this key
point again: if you think that people will pay a lot for a house a year from now, you will be
willing to pay a lot for it today. The logic applies to all other assets as well, so there is a link
between prices expected for the future and prices today. Think about a stock that you might
buy on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock yields a dividend and also has a future price.
The higher the price you expect the stock can sell for in the future, the more you are willing to
pay for the stock today. Expectations matter.
But where do these expectations come from? During normal times, expectations are
disciplined by the usual state of a market. If housing prices have been rising by say 3 percent a
year for the past 20 years, most people will predict that over the next year, housing prices will
again rise by 3 percent. Most of the time that prediction will be roughly right—but not all the
time. Sometimes markets are subject to unpredictable movements in prices. When asset
prices decline rapidly and unexpectedly, this is often referred to as a “bubble bursting.”
All this discussion suggests that asset prices can be somewhat fragile—and this is where
contagion effects can come into play. If you are trading houses in one location and the prices
of houses in other locations are all decreasing quickly, you might get concerned that whatever
is hurting housing values in those markets will affect yours as well. If so, you might be
tempted to try to sell the houses that you own. Of course, others think the same way. As a
consequence, the price of houses in your location decreases as well. This is the contagion
effect: the behavior of prices in other markets influences expectations in your market and
leads to a price reduction in your market. You and the other market participants who feared a
decrease in prices are, in the end, correct. In that sense, contagion effects can be self-fulfilling
prophesies.
The Crisis in the EMU
When the crisis hit in the United States, the secretary of the Treasury and the chairman of the
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System held a joint press conference. By so doing,
they made it clear that, in the United States, monetary and fiscal policy were being used
jointly to resolve the financial crisis. In Europe, the picture was very different. As we have
explained, countries within the EMU have a common central bank but do not have a common
fiscal policy. Fiscal policy is decided at the country level, while the ECB is supposed to target
the overall European inflation rate (as discussed in Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”) and
is not supposed to play any role in bailing out individual governments.
This system may work in normal times. The events of the crisis of 2008 revealed that it did
not work so well in abnormal times; this in turn led to some calls for change.
Sarkozy Calls for “Economic Government” for Eurozone
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Tuesday for “clearly identified economic
government” for the eurozone, working alongside the European Central Bank.
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“It is not possible for the eurozone to continue without clearly identified economic
government” Sarkozy told the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
The European Central Bank, currently the only joint institution overseeing the 15-nation
eurozone, “must be independent,” but the Frankfurt-based monetary body “should be
able to discuss with an economic government,” Sarkozy added. [4]
President Sarkozy’s concern was that there is no centralized entity in the EU that can play the
same role as the Treasury in the United States. Member governments devise their own fiscal
policies to deal with their own country’s problems and do not take account of the effects of
their actions on others in the European Union. This matters because the EU countries are so
closely linked through trade and capital flows.
Governments within the EU did indeed act unilaterally to preserve their individual banking
systems. The French government agreed to a 360 billion euro package of support for the
French banking system and made a statement that no banks would collapse. Other countries
took similar measures to restore confidence in their banking systems. Such measures sound
similar to those taken in the United States, but there is an important difference. For the
United States, such spending could be financed by taxes, government borrowing, or monetary
expansion. But for, say, France, the equation is different. If the rescue package is not financed
by increased taxes, then the French will have to issue more debt. They no longer control their
money supply, so they cannot print currency to finance these bailouts.
Moreover, the Stability and Growth Pact, as we explained, places restrictions on the
permissible magnitude of deficits by member governments. The reason for these restrictions
is that, if many countries in the EMU were to run large deficits, there would be pressure on
the ECB to finance some of this spending through additional money creation. In the aftermath
of the crisis, many countries violated the fiscal restrictions, and how the monetary and fiscal
authorities will ultimately respond to such pressure remains an open question.
One part of the response has been the establishment of additional facilities within Europe to
pool resources to provide assistance to member states. Countries within Europe have been
fulfilling a similar role to that played by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In particular,
the crisis in Greece, and related debt problems in Ireland and Portugal, led to the creation in
May 2010 of the European Financial Stability Facility
(http://www.efsf.europa.eu/about/index.htm) to provide for the stabilization of countries
undergoing financial and debt problems. A June 2011 press release discusses the provision of
funds for Ireland and Portugal under this stabilization fund
(http://www.efsf.europa.eu/mediacentre/news/2011/2011-006-eu-and-efsf-funding-plans-
to-provide-financial-assistance-for-portugal-and-ireland.htm). The funds for Greece are
coming from the EU member states directly.
Within the ECB, the discussion by President Trichet
(http://www.ecb.int/press/key/date/2009/html/sp090427.en.html) summarized the
perspective and policy choices of the central bank, including the provision of liquidity. Given
that the ECB maintains an inflation target, how is this provision of liquidity consistent with
that goal? One answer often given is that without this liquidity, the European economies
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might have fallen into deeper recessions and thus opened up the possibility of deflationary
periods, as witnessed in the Great Depression years in the United States and in Japan during
the 1990s.
Costs and Benefits of a Common Currency
Sarkozy’s discussion of European economic government, and subsequent events in various
countries, brought the debate over monetary integration back to the forefront in Europe. After
the establishment of the European Monetary System, many European leaders thought the
logical next step was a complete monetary union. This dream, embodied in the Maastricht
Treaty, was finally realized in January 1999. [5] During the recent financial turmoil, however,
the monetary ties that bind the European countries have been greatly strained. The costs of
delegating monetary policy to a common central bank became very visible because individual
countries were unable to respond to their own economic situations. In addition, the fiscal
constraints included in the Maastricht Treaty hampered the ability of countries to conduct
their desired fiscal policy. A recent report highlighted these concerns. [6]
Milton Friedman always said that the European Union would not survive a deep
recession. Well, that theory is certainly being put to the test now. As the financial crisis
radiated across the globe this week, the EU fell into disarray as an ugly bout of tit-for-
tat policies helped fuel a rout of European banks.
It began with Ireland’s decision on 30 September to guarantee the deposits of its six
main banks. This was a chance for European leaders to shore up banking confidence
across Europe, says Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. But instead of rallying behind
the decision, German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned it. Yet that didn’t stop
Greece from pledging to guarantee its own banks.
The recent crisis has forced a reevaluation of the costs and benefits of the common currency.
Most of the advantages of a common currency are self-apparent. As explained in Chapter 9
“Money: A User’s Guide”, money acts as a medium of exchange, facilitating transactions
among households and firms. A common currency obviates the need to exchange currencies
when buying goods, services, and assets. Secondly, the monetary union removes the
uncertainty associated with fluctuations in the exchange rate: within a monetary union, there
are, of course, no exchange rate fluctuations at all. Further, unlike in a fixed exchange rate
system, there is no need to buy and sell currencies to support the agreed-on exchange rates.
Finally, because money also acts as a unit of account, a common currency makes it easier to
compare prices across countries. All of these factors encourage countries to benefit from more
efficient flows of goods and capital across borders.
There is another gain from a common currency that is more subtle. In some cases, individual
countries are unable to do a good job of managing their own monetary policy. In Chapter 11
“Inflations Big and Small”, we explained that governments that run large deficits may decide
to pay for these deficits by printing money. We also observed that there are situations where
the monetary authority might be tempted to try unexpectedly expansionary policies when
inflation is low. Such choices, while tempting, are ultimately damaging to an economy. Yet
countries all too frequently indulge in such short-sighted policies. The underlying difficulty is
a commitment problem. Ahead of time, the monetary authority might like to keep
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inflation low, but there is pressure to print money; in the end, countries experience high
inflation caused by excessive money growth.
In the case of the EMU, this was not an especially pressing concern. The ECB was conducting
conservative monetary policy. At the same time, the governments in the euro area ran
reasonably sensible fiscal policies for the most part, so there was no pressure on the ECB to
finance excessive spending. After the 2008 financial crisis, however, the deficit and debt
pictures changed for many countries—particularly Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. The debt
situation has now put enormous pressure on European institutions, including the ECB. So far,
the ECB has remained on the sidelines by not being a direct contributor to bailout packages.
Commitment problems have arisen often in the monetary affairs of other countries. Argentina
adopted a currency board in the 1990s because the monetary authorities could not commit
to low-inflation policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To combat this problem, Argentina
effectively adopted the US dollar as its currency. This monetary system meant that the Central
Bank of Argentina was not able to increase the money supply independently: in effect, it
delegated monetary policy to the United States. The monetary authority in Argentina was able
to commit not to print pesos in response to fiscal pressures.
Some European countries, such as Denmark, elected not to make the euro its common
currency. However, they adopted fixed exchange rates relative to the euro. Others, like the
United Kingdom, did not make the euro its common currency and also elected to have floating
exchange rates. Given all the advantages of a common currency, why did some countries reject
the idea (and, for that matter, why is there not a single world currency)?
The answer is that there are also costs to adopting a common currency. As we have explained,
the EMU entrusted monetary policy to a single central bank that decided monetary policy
across a large number of countries. When these countries have different views about
appropriate monetary policy, the delegation of monetary policy becomes problematic.
Further, the fiscal restrictions imposed on the euro countries further reduced the ability of
countries to respond to their own stabilization needs. In recent years, both Germany and
France have violated the terms of the Stability and Growth Pact and the future of these fiscal
restrictions remains in doubt.
Monetary Policy
Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed” describes in detail the manner in which a central bank
can use tools of monetary policy to influence aggregate economic activity and the price level.
Monetary policy is a critical tool for stabilizing the macroeconomy. After the introduction of
the euro, countries in the common currency area were no longer able to conduct independent
monetary policy. The right to conduct monetary policy was ceded to the ECB.
Suppose that all the countries in the EMU were similar in their macroeconomic fortunes,
meaning that the state of the macroeconomy in Italy was roughly the same as that in France,
Ireland, Portugal, Belgium, and so forth. For example, suppose that when France experiences
a period of recession, all the other countries in the union are in recession as well. In this case,
the monetary policy that each country would have pursued if it had its own currency would
most likely be very similar to the policy pursued by a central bank representing the interests of
all the countries together. Each country, acting individually, would choose to cut interest rates
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to stimulate economic activity. The ECB would have an incentive to stimulate the economies
of EMU member countries exactly as those members would have done with their own
monetary policies. If countries are similar, in other words, the delegation of monetary policy
to a central monetary authority is not that costly.
If countries are very different, it is more costly to move to a common currency. Suppose that
Austria is undergoing a boom at the same time that Belgium is in recession. Belgium would
like to cut interest rates. Austria would like to increase them. The ECB cannot satisfy both
countries and may end up making them both unhappy. The crisis of 2008 did not have an
even impact across all the countries in the euro area. Some countries saw major problems in
their financial institutions, whereas others were less affected. As a result, different countries
in the euro area had different desires in terms of the actions of the ECB.
Monetary policy operates through exchange rates as well as interest rates. By adopting a
common currency, countries also give up the ability to stimulate their economies through
depreciation or devaluation of their currency. Greece, Portugal, and Ireland have been forced
to enact severe austerity measures to bring their debt under control. As a consequence, these
countries have seen major recessions. If, say, Portugal was still using the escudo rather than
the euro, it could have stimulated the economy by decreasing the value of the currency, thus
encouraging net exports. It no longer has this option. It is possible for the real exchange rate
to decrease even if the nominal rate is fixed, but this may require deflation in the domestic
economy.
Fiscal Policy
The adoption of the single currency in Europe did not directly affect fiscal policy. In principle,
it could have been adopted without any reference to fiscal policy. In practice, however, the
single currency was accompanied by the fiscal limitations enshrined in the Stability and
Growth Pact. In particular, the Stability and Growth Pact said that member countries were not
allowed to run a government deficit that exceeded 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
The idea was that member countries were permitted to run deficits in periods of low economic
activity but were encouraged to avoid large and sustained budget deficits.
As with the monetary agreement, there are costs and benefits to such fiscal restrictions. It is
possible that a member country experiencing a period of low economic activity (a recession)
would find itself unable to increase its government deficit, even if it wanted to stimulate
economic activity. Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget” explained that there are sometimes
gains to running deficits. One cost of the Stability and Growth Pact is that it reduces the ability
of countries to use deficits for macroeconomic stabilization.
Fiscal restrictions are common within monetary unions. Within the United States, there are
restrictions, largely imposed on the states by themselves, which limit budget deficits at the
state level. The idea is that large deficits at the level of a European country or a US state might
create an incentive for the central bank to print money and thus bail out the delinquent
government. This would occur if the monetary authority lacks the ability to say “no” to a state
or a country in financial distress. By limiting deficits in the first place, such bailouts need not
occur. This is a gain for all the countries within the EMU.
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The Crisis in the United Kingdom
So far we have looked at two large economies: the United States and the euro area. We now
turn to the experience of some smaller economies, beginning with the United Kingdom. The
United Kingdom is part of the EU but it is not in the euro area. It retained its own currency
(the pound sterling) rather than adopting the euro. This meant, of course, that it also retained
its own central bank. The Bank of England is known as a very independent monetary
authority, and operates under very strict rules of inflation targeting. Yet it, too, responded to
the crisis.
The United Kingdom was one of the first countries to face serious implications of the financial
crisis when, in September 2007, there was a run on a lending institution called Northern
Rock. The Bank of England evidently could have—but chose not to—take action early in the
crisis to avoid the run on Northern Rock. Once the run commenced, however, the Bank of
England injected liquidity into the system.
In October 2008, the Bank of England was, along with other central banks, cutting interest
rates. However, the cuts it enacted were modest relative to the action taken in the United
States and other countries. More significantly, the United Kingdom partially nationalized
some of its banks over this period under a 400-billion-pound bailout plan. Just as in the US
plan, the aim was to provide liquidity directly to these banks and thus open up the market for
loans among banks. But, according to contemporary reports, UK banks were still not making
new commitments weeks after this bailout plan was enacted.
The Crisis in Iceland
Iceland is a relatively small, very open economy. It has close links to the EU but retains its
own currency: the krona. It was particularly hard hit by the financial crisis, in part because
Icelandic banks had been borrowing extensively from abroad in the years prior to the financial
crisis. According to one estimate, banks held foreign assets and liabilities worth about 10
times Iceland’s entire GDP. [7]
The sheer size of asset holdings meant that if there was a substantial decrease in asset values,
it was simply not possible for the Icelandic central bank or fiscal authorities to bail out
domestic banks. Any attempt to bail out the banks would simply have bankrupted the
government. You also might wonder why, as a last resort, Iceland could not generate print
money to get itself out of trouble, financing a bailout through an inflation tax. We explained
earlier that this would be a possibility in the United States, for example. The difference is that
most of the liabilities of US financial institutions are denominated in US dollars, so inflation
would reduce the real value of these liabilities. But much of the debt of Icelandic banks was
not denominated in krona; it was denominated in euros, US dollars, or other currencies.
Inflation in Iceland would simply lead to a depreciation of the currency and would not reduce
the real value of the debt.
Based on estimates from the IMF, the financial and exchange rate problems of Iceland led to a
contraction in real GDP of around 3 percent in 2009. In late October 2008, Iceland negotiated
a $2.1 billion dollar loan from the IMF
(http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2008/pr08256.htm) for emergency funding to help
stabilize its economy. To put this in perspective, Iceland’s GDP is only $12 billion, and the
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loan was equivalent to almost $7,000 per person. Meanwhile, there was a precipitous decline
in the value of the krona: between January and October 2008, the krona lost nearly half of its
value.
Iceland’s banking system was effectively nationalized in 2008. The government took over
three of the biggest banks. During late October, the government tried to peg the krona at
about 131 per euro. Their attempt failed, and the government was forced to allow the krona to
decrease in response to market forces. There was a report of a trade at 340 krona per euro, far
from the government’s attempted peg. [8] One way to think about the decline in the value of
the krona is through the government budget constraint. Once the government took over the
banks, what had been a private liability became a government liability to depositors. One way
to meet this obligation is through higher taxes; another is through the creation of more
currency. The rapid depreciation of the krona indicates that market participants were
anticipating more inflation in Iceland, so the value of the currency decreased.
Iceland was merely the first country that ran into considerable distress as a result of the crisis
of 2008. It was followed a few days later by Ukraine, which agreed to a $16.5 billion loan from
the IMF. Countries such as Greece and Spain also faced problems as investors started to worry
that their governments might default on their debt.
The Crisis in China
The financial crisis had an impact on China largely through trade linkages. China exports a lot
of goods to western economies. As the level of economic activity in these economies slowed,
the demand for goods and services produced in China decreased as well. This led to lower real
GDP in China. As shown in the circular flow of income (Figure 15.2 “The Foreign Sector in the
Circular Flow”), the reduction in exports by China led to reduced output from Chinese firms,
reduced income for Chinese households, and lower spending through the multiplier process.
Even though China owned many US assets, most were not directly linked to mortgage-backed
securities. Instead, the Chinese were holding about $900 billion of US Treasury
securities. [9] Although the value of these securities changed with the financial situation, this
simply led to changes in the value of portfolios and did not lead to bankruptcy of financial
institutions.
China differs from the United States and Europe because many of the banks operating in
China are owned by the government. The top four state-owned banks had about 66 percent of
China’s deposit market in 2007. So if the assets of those banks decrease in value, this loss is
ultimately reflected in the budget of the government. Whereas the governments of England,
the United States, and other countries attacked the crisis of 2008 by partial nationalization—
that is, the purchase of bank shares by the government—this was unnecessary in China
because the government already had a substantial ownership share in the banks.
Deposit insurance is also rather different in China. In the case of publicly owned banks, the
government directly guarantees deposits so banks will not go bankrupt. There is no explicit
deposit insurance for private banks, but the lack of explicit deposit insurance does not mean
the Chinese government would not bail out a bank that was under attack. The Law of the
People’s Republic of China on Commercial Banks Article 64 reads as follows:
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When a commercial bank has suffered or will possibly suffer, credit crisis, thereby
seriously affecting the interests of the depositors, the banking regulatory authority
under the State Council may assume control over the bank.
The purposes of assumption of control are, through taking such measures as are
necessary in respect of the commercial bank over which control is assumed, to protect
the interests of the depositors and to enable the commercial bank to resume normal
business. The debtor-creditor relationship with regard to a commercial bank over which
control is assumed shall not change as a result of the assumption of control. [10]
The Crisis in Argentina
What about the experience in Latin America during the crisis of 2008? Many countries,
notably Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, experienced their own financial and currency crises in
recent decades. Those crises were “homegrown” because they were largely caused by domestic
economic policies.
But the upheavals of recent years were not created in these countries. The linkages we
explained earlier also caused these countries to be affected by the financial events that
afflicted the United States and Europe. Figure 15.3 “Stock Markets around the World Crashed
Together” shows that the stock market in Argentina had similar volatility and losses to those
experienced in other countries. This volatility, along with other financial upheavals, created
an interesting response within Argentina: the government announced the nationalization of
private pension plans.
What is the connection here? The government announced it was taking over private pensions
to protect households who faced added financial risks. Instead of facing the risks of private
asset markets, households were now shielded from that risk through a national pension
system. Skeptics have argued that this was simply an opportunity for the government of
Argentina to obtain some additional resources. Promises of future compensation for the lost
pensions were not viewed as credible.
The Crisis in Australia
Finally, not every country in the world was badly hit by the crisis of 2008. Australia, for
example, saw a significant stock market decrease but otherwise went through the crisis years
with little more than a minor slowdown in economic growth. There are several reasons for
this. Australia, like other countries, used both monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate the
economy. On the fiscal side, it cut taxes and increased government purchases; on the
monetary side, the Reserve Bank of Australia decreased interest rates (although not by as
much as many other countries). Australia has historically kept its government debt very close
to zero, so there were no concerns about default on Australian debt.
Australia made a very well-publicized cash transfer of about $1,000 to about half the
population. Even though much of those transfers were probably saved rather than spent, they
are credited with helping to support confidence and limit contagion effects in Australia.
Finally, Australia has benefitted from a major resources boom, so demand for net exports was
a robust component of aggregate expenditures during the crisis period.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. The United States and the rest of the world are linked through many channels. Key
channels that allowed the crisis to spread were financial links due to both holdings of
assets across borders and the spread of pessimism across markets. In addition, links
across countries due to trade flows meant that as income decreased in some
countries, exports and thus real GDP decreased in others.
2. Within the EMU, individual countries were limited in fiscal policy responses due to
restrictions on outstanding debt. Further, the ECB follows an inflation target rule and
thus is not able to directly intervene to stabilize European economies. In the end,
countries did take fiscal actions, and the ECB ultimately provided the needed liquidity
to Europe. But this experience highlighted some of the costs of a monetary union.
Checking Your Understanding
1. During the crisis of 2008, what happened to stock markets across the world?
2. To avoid spillovers from a financial crisis, what would a country have to do?
3. Why do other countries hold US government debt?
[1] James G. Neuger and Stephanie Bodoni, “Bailout Bid for Greece Falters as Europe Insists
Papandreou Cut Budget Gap,” June 20, 2011, accessed July 26,
2011,http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-20/europe-fails-to-agree-on-greek-aid-
payout-pressing-papandreou-to-cut-debt.html; Karen Kissane, “EU puts brakes on loan to
Greece,”Sydney Morning Herald, June 21, 2011, accessed July 26,
2011,http://www.smh.com.au/world/eu-puts-brakes-on-loan-to-greece-20110620-
1gbxw.html; James Neuger and Stephanie Bodoni, “Europe Fails to Agree on Greek Aid
Payout,” June 20, 2011, accessed September 20,
2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-20/europe-fails-to-agree-on-greek-aid-
payout-pressing-papandreou-to-cut-debt.html.
[2] For a discussion of the history and content of the Stability and Growth Pact, see “Stability
and Growth Pact,” European Commission Economic and Financial Affairs, accessed
September 20, 2011, http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/sgp/index_en.htm.
[3] Landon Thomas Jr., “Examining the Ripple Effect of the Lehman Bankruptcy, New York
Times, September 15, 2008, accessed July 26,
2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/business/worldbusiness/15iht-
lehman.4.16176487.html.
[4] See “Sarkozy Calls for ‘Economic Government’ for Eurozone,” The Economic Times,
October 21, 2008, accessed July 25,
2011, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2008-10-
21/news/28393734_1_eurozone-french-president-nicolas-sarkozy-economic-government.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-20/europe-fails-to-agree-on-greek-aid-payout-pressing-papandreou-to-cut-debt.html
http://www.smh.com.au/world/eu-puts-brakes-on-loan-to-greece-20110620-1gbxw.html
http://www.smh.com.au/world/eu-puts-brakes-on-loan-to-greece-20110620-1gbxw.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-20/europe-fails-to-agree-on-greek-aid-payout-pressing-papandreou-to-cut-debt.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-20/europe-fails-to-agree-on-greek-aid-payout-pressing-papandreou-to-cut-debt.html
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/sgp/index_en.htm
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2008-10-21/news/28393734_1_eurozone-french-president-nicolas-sarkozy-economic-government
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[5] A concise history of the steps to the Economic and Monetary Union is available at
“Economic and Monetary Union (EMU),” European Central Bank, accessed July 20,
2011,http://www.ecb.int/ecb/history/emu/html/index.en.html.
[6] See “Crisis Puts European Unity to the Test,” MoneyWeek, October 10, 2008, accessed
July 26, 2011, http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/crisis-puts-
european-unity-to-the-test-13811.aspx.
[7] This is partly based on a BBC article about Iceland: Jon Danielsson, “Why Raising Interest
Rates Won’t Work,” BBC News, October 28, 2008, accessed July 26,
2011,http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7658908.stm.
[8] See Bo Nielsen, “Iceland’s Krona Currency Trading Halts as Kaupthing Taken Over,”
October 9, 2008, accessed July 26,
2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&refer=europe&sid=aiz5QIq94
nrw.
[9] Data on foreign holdings of US government securities is available at “Major Foreign
Holders of Treasury Securities, ” US Department of the Treasury, September 16, 2011,
accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.ustreas.gov/tic/mfh.txt.
[10] “Article 64,” Law of the People’s Republic of China on Commercial Banks, May 10, 1995,
accessed July 26, 2011, http://www.china.org.cn/english/DAT/214824.htm.
15.4 Currency Crises
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After you have read this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. What are the causes of a currency crisis?
2. How are currency crises and financial crises related?
In some countries, the financial crisis of 2008 led to a currency crisis. A currency crisis is a
sudden and unexpected rapid decrease in the value of a currency. Currency crises are
particularly severe in the case of a fixed exchange rate because such crises typically force a
monetary authority to abandon the fixed rate. In the case of flexible exchange rates, a
currency crisis occurs when the value of the currency decreases substantially in a short period
of time. Such rapid depreciation is not as disruptive as the collapse of a fixed exchange rate,
but it can still cause significant turmoil in an economy.
Exchange Rates in the Current Crisis
If you look at exchange rate data for September and October 2008, you can see that the dollar
appreciated relative to the euro at that time. In other words, the dollar price of a euro
decreased. Over the 10 days ending October 24, 2008, the dollar price of a euro decreased
from about $1.35 to $1.25. More generally, several currencies experienced rapid depreciations
during the financial crisis. Though there were no runs on these currencies, they nonetheless
lost considerable value.
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The dollar value of the British pound decreased to $1.62, its lowest level in 5 years, after the
October 21, 2008, announcement that the UK economy was on the brink of a recession. There
was a drop in value of about 7 percent over the previous week alone. The pound also
decreased against the euro.
Currency Crises under Flexible Exchange Rates
A currency crisis can arise from a change in expectations, in ways that are similar to some of
our earlier examples. Remember, for instance, how the current value of a house decreases
when people expect that its future value will decrease. If you think that the value of Argentine
pesos will decline (so each peso will be worth less in dollars), you may respond by selling
pesos that you currently own. If everyone in the market shares your beliefs, then everyone will
sell, and the value of the peso will decrease now.
Currency Crises under Fixed Exchange Rates
If everyone believes that a monetary authority can and will maintain the exchange rate, then
people are happy to hold onto a currency. But if people believe that the fixed exchange rate is
not sustainable, then there will be a run on the currency. Consider, for example, Brazil trying
to stabilize its currency—the real. The monetary authority sets a fixed exchange rate, meaning
that it stands ready to exchange Brazilian real for US dollars at a set price. If a fixed exchange
rate is set too high, then the Brazilian central bank can maintain this value for a while by
buying real with its own stocks of dollars.
But the central bank does not possess unlimited reserves of dollars. If the low demand for the
real persists, then eventually the central bank will run out of reserves and thus no longer be
able to support the currency. When that happens, the value of the real will have to decrease. A
decrease in a fixed exchange rate is called devaluation.
In fact, the decrease in the value of the real would occur well before the central bank runs out
of reserves. If you believe that the monetary authority will be forced to abandon the fixed rate,
you will take your real and exchange them for dollars—and you will want to do this sooner
rather than later to ensure you make the exchange before the real decreases in value. When
lots of investors do this, the supply curve for real shifts outward. This makes the problem of
maintaining the fixed exchange rate even more difficult for the central bank, so the
devaluation of the currency will happen even sooner. If everyone does this, then the monetary
authority will not have enough dollars on hand and will have to give up the fixed rate. The risk
of such currency crises is the biggest potential problem with fixed exchange rates. History has
given us many examples of such crises, and shows that they are very disruptive for the
economy—and sometimes even for the world as a whole.
You may have noticed that a currency crisis looks a lot like a bank run. In both cases,
pessimistic expectations of investors (about the future of a bank in one case and the future
value of a currency in the other) lead them to all behave in a way that makes the pessimism
self-fulfilling. In the case of a bank run, if all depositors are worried about their deposits and
take their money out of the bank, then the bank fails and the depositors’ pessimism was
warranted. Likewise, if investors believe the devaluation of a currency is likely, they will all
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want to sell their currency. This drives down the price and makes the devaluation much more
likely to occur. A currency crisis, like a bank run, is an example of a coordination game.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. A currency crisis can occur for several reasons, including being a consequence of a
financial crisis or a fiscal crisis, or, in some cases, just driven by expectations like a
bank run.
2. A financial crisis can lead to a currency crisis if depositors in one country, seeing the
collapse of a financial system, rush to convert a home currency into foreign
currencies.
Checking Your Understanding
1. What is the difference between a fixed exchange rate system and a flexible exchange rate
system?
2. What is the difference between a currency crisis and a devaluation?
15.5 End-of-Chapter Material
In Conclusion
Five or six years ago, economists studied a period that they named “the Great Moderation.” In
the period after World War II, and even more specifically from the mid 1980s to the mid
2000s, economic performance in the United States, Europe, and many countries had been
relatively placid. These countries enjoyed respectable levels of long-run growth, experienced
only mild recessions, and enjoyed low and stable inflation. Many observers felt that this
performance was in large measure due to the fact that economists and policymakers had
learned how to conduct effective monetary and fiscal policies. We learned from the mistakes
of the Great Depression and knew how to prevent serious economic downturns. We also
learned from the mistakes made in the 1970s and knew how to avoid inflationary policies.
To be sure, other countries still experienced their share of economic problems. Many
countries in Latin America experienced currency crises and debt crises in the 1980s. Many
countries in Southeast Asia suffered through painful exchange rate crises in the 1990s. Japan
suffered a protracted period of low growth. Some countries saw hyperinflation, while others
experienced economic decline. Still, for the most part, mature and developed economies
experienced very good economic performance. Macroeconomics was becoming less about
diagnosing failure and more about explaining success.
The last few years shook that worldview. The crisis of 2008 showed that a major economic
catastrophe was not as unthinkable as economists and others hoped. The world experienced
the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, and there was a period where
it seemed possible that the crisis could even be on the same scale as the Great Depression.
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Countries like the United States and the United Kingdom faced protracted recessions.
Countries such as Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Iceland found themselves mired in debt
crises. Spillovers and interconnections—real, financial, and psychological—meant that events
like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers reverberated throughout the economies of the world.
Because it resurrected old problems, the crisis of 2008 also resurrected old areas of study in
macroeconomics. The events in Europe have prompted economists to review the debate over
common currencies and the conduct of monetary policy. There has been increased
investigation of the size of fiscal policy multipliers. At the same time, macroeconomists are
devoting much attention to topics such as the connection between financial markets and the
real economy. But this difficult period for the world economy has also been an exciting time
for macroeconomists. The study of macroeconomics has become more vital than ever—more
alive and more essential.
Key Links
International Monetary Fund forum on common
currency:http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ecforums/110800.htm
Economic and Monetary
Union:http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/emu/index_en.htm.
European Central Bank: http://www.ecb.int/home/html/index.en.html
CBO analysis of Obama
package:http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10682/Frontmatter.2.2.shtml
EXERCISES
1. Consider the bank run game. If a government is supposed to provide deposit
insurance but depositors doubt the word of the government, might there still be a
bank run?
2. Comparing the Great Depression to the financial crisis starting in 2008, what were
the differences in the response of fiscal and monetary policy between these two
episodes?
3. We explained in Section 15.1 “The Financial Crisis in the United States” that an
increase in the expected future price of houses leads to an increase in the current
price. Draw a supply-and-demand diagram to illustrate this idea.
4. Consider the crisis from the perspective of China. United States imports from China
are roughly $300 billion each year. Due to the recession in the United States, imports
from China decreased about 10 percent. If the marginal propensity to spend is 0.5 in
China, what is the change in Chinese output predicted by the aggregate expenditure
model? How much must government spending increase to offset this reduction in
exports?
5. In the CBO assessment of ARRA, the multiplier from government purchases was
assumed to be larger than the multiplier from tax cuts. How would you explain the
differences in these multipliers?
6. If countries within the EMU are supposed to limit their deficits, what must happen to
government spending during a recession when tax revenues decrease?
7. (Advanced) We argued that the provision of deposit insurance prevents bank runs. Is
there an analogous policy to prevent currency crises?
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Economics Detective
1. What has been the ECB’s role in the European Financial Stability Facility and in the
bailout packages for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal?
2. Find the details of the recent rescue package for Greece. What were the different
views of Germany and France about this bailout? How was the IMF involved?
3. What predictions were made about job creation under the Obama administration’s
stimulus package? What happened to job creation rates in the 2008–10 period?
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Chapter 16
Macroeconomics Toolkit
In this chapter, we present the key tools used in the macroeconomics part of this textbook.
This toolkit serves two main functions:
1. Because these tools appear in multiple chapters, the toolkit serves as a reference. When
using a tool in one chapter, you can refer back to the toolkit to find a more concise
description of the tool as well as links to other parts of the book where the tool is used.
2. You can use the toolkit as a study guide. Once you have worked through the material in
the chapters, you can review the tools using this toolkit.
The chart below shows the main uses of each tool in green, and the secondary uses are in
orange.
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16.1 The Labor Market
The labor market is the market in which labor services are traded. Individual labor
supply comes from the choices of individuals or households about how to allocate their time.
As the real wage (the nominal wage divided by the price level) increases, households supply
more hours to the market, and more households decide to participate in the labor market.
Thus the quantity of labor supplied increases. The labor supply curve of a household is shifted
by changes in wealth. A wealthier household supplies less labor at a given real wage.
Labor demand comes from firms. As the real wage increases, the marginal cost of hiring more
labor increases, so each firm demands fewer hours of labor input—that is, a firm’s labor
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demand curve is downward sloping. The labor demand curve of a firm is shifted by changes in
productivity. If labor becomes more productive, then the labor demand curve of a firm shifts
rightward: the quantity of labor demanded is higher at a given real wage.
The labor market equilibrium is shown in Figure 16.1 “Labor Market Equilibrium”. The real
wage and the equilibrium quantity of labor traded are determined by the intersection of labor
supply and labor demand. At the equilibrium real wage, the quantity of labor supplied equals
the quantity of labor demanded.
Figure 16.1 Labor Market Equilibrium
Key Insights
Labor supply and labor demand depend on the real wage.
Labor supply is upward sloping: as the real wage increases, households supply more hours
to the market.
Labor demand is downward sloping: as the real wage increases, firms demand fewer hours
of work.
A market equilibrium is a real wage and a quantity of hours such that the quantity
demanded equals the quantity supplied.
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The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”
Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”
Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”
16.2 Choices over Time
Individuals make decisions that unfold over time. Because individuals choose how to spend
income earned over many periods on consumption goods over many periods, they sometimes
wish to save or borrow rather than spend all their income in every period.
Figure 16.2 “Choices over Time” shows examples of these choices over a two-year horizon. The
individual earns income this year and next. The combinations of consumption that are
affordable and that exhaust all of an individual’s income are shown on the budget line, which
in this case is called an intertemporal budget constraint. The slope of the budget line is equal
to (1 + real interest rate), which is equivalent to the real interest factor. The slope is the
amount of consumption that can be obtained tomorrow by giving up a unit of consumption
today.
The preferred point is also indicated; it is the combination of consumption this year and
consumption next year that the individual prefers to all the points on the budget line. The
individual in part (a) of Figure 16.2 “Choices over Time” is consuming less this year than she
is earning: she is saving. Next year she can use her savings to consume more than her income.
The individual in part (b) of Figure 16.2 “Choices over Time” is consuming more this year than
he is earning: he is borrowing. Next year, his consumption will be less than his income
because he must repay the amount borrowed this year.
When the real interest rate increases, individuals will borrow less and (usually) save more (the
effect of interest rate changes on saving is unclear as a matter of theory because income
effects and substitution effects act in opposite directions). Thus individual loan
supply slopes upward.
Of course, individuals live for many periods and make frequent decisions on consumption and
saving. The lifetime budget constraint is obtained using the idea of discounted present
value:
discounted present value of lifetime income = discounted present value of lifetime
consumption.
The left side is a measure of all the disposable income the individual will receive over his
lifetime (disposable means after taking into account taxes paid to the government and
transfers received from the government). The right side calculates the value of consumption of
all goods and services over an individual’s lifetime.
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Key Insights
Over a lifetime, an individual’s discounted present value of consumption will equal the
discounted present value of income.
Individuals can borrow or lend to obtain their preferred consumption bundle over their
lifetimes.
The price of borrowing is the real interest rate.
Figure 16.2 Choices over Time
The Main Use of This Tool
Chapter 13 “Social Security”
16.3 Discounted Present Value
Discounted present value is a technique used to add dollar amounts over time. We need
this technique because a dollar today has a different value from a dollar in the future.
The discounted present value this year of $1.00 that you will receive next year is as follows:
$1
nominal interest factor
=
$1
1 + nominal interest rate
.
If the nominal interest rate is 10 percent, then the nominal interest factor is 1.1, so $1
next year is worth $1/1.1 = $0.91 this year. As the interest rate increases, the discounted
present value decreases.
More generally, we can compute the value of an asset this year from the following formula:
value of asset this year =
flow benefit from asset this year+price of asset next year
nominal interest factor
.
The flow benefit depends on the asset. For a bond, the flow benefit is a coupon payment. For a
stock, the flow benefit is a dividend payment. For a fruit tree, the flow benefit is the yield of a
crop.
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If an asset (such as a bond) yields a payment next year of $10 and has a price next year of $90,
then the “flow benefit from asset + price of the asset next year” is $100. The value of the asset
this year is then
$100
nominal interest factor
. If the nominal interest rate is 20 percent, then the value of the
asset is $100/1.2 = 83.33.
We discount nominal flows using a nominal interest factor. We discount real flows (that is,
flows already corrected for inflation) using a real interest factor, which is equal to (1 + real
interest rate).
Key Insights
If the interest rate is positive, then the discounted present value is less than the direct sum
of flows.
If the interest rate increases, the discounted present value will decrease.
More Formally
Denote the dividend on an asset in period t as Dt. Define Rt as the cumulative effect of
interest rates up to period t. For example, R2 = (1 + r1)(1 + r2). Then the value of an asset that
yields Dt dollars in every year up to year T is given by
asset value =
D1
R1
+
D2
R2
+
D3
R3
+ … +
DT
RT
.
If the interest rate is constant (equal to r), then the one period interest factor is R = 1 + r,
and Rt = Rt.
The discounted present value tool is illustrated in Table 16.1 “Discounted Present Value with
Different Interest Rates”. The number of years (T) is set equal to 5. The table gives the value of
the dividends in each year and computes the discounted present values for two different
interest rates. For this example, the annual interest rates are constant over time.
Table 16.1 Discounted Present Value with Different Interest Rates
Year Dividend
($)
Discounted
Present Value
with R = 1.05 ($)
Discounted Present
Value with R = 1.10
($)
1 100 100 100
2 100 95.24 90.91
3 90 81.63 74.38
4 120 103.66 90.16
5 400 329.08 273.20
Discounted
present
value
709.61 628.65
The Main Uses of This Tool
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Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy”
Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”
Chapter 13 “Social Security”
Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”
Chapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”
16.4 The Credit (Loan) Market (Macro)
Consider a simple example of a loan. Imagine you go to your bank to inquire about a loan of
$1,000, to be repaid in one year’s time. A loan is a contract that specifies three things:
1. The amount being borrowed (in this example, $1,000)
2. The date(s) at which repayment must be made (in this example, one year from now)
3. The amount that must be repaid
What determines the amount of the repayment? The lender—the bank—is a supplier of credit,
and the borrower—you—is a demander of credit. We use the terms credit and loans
interchangeably. The higher the repayment amount, the more attractive this loan contract will
look to the bank. Conversely, the lower the repayment amount, the more attractive this
contract is to you.
If there are lots of banks that are willing to supply such loans, and lots of people like you who
demand such loans, then we can draw supply and demand curves in the credit (loan) market.
The equilibrium price of this loan is the interest rate at which supply equals demand.
In macroeconomics, we look at not only individual markets like this but also the credit (loan)
market for an entire economy. This market brings together suppliers of loans, such as
households that are saving, and demanders of loans, such as businesses and households that
need to borrow. The real interest rate is the “price” that brings demand and supply into
balance.
The supply of loans in the domestic loans market comes from three different sources:
1. The private saving of households and firms
2. The saving of governments (in the case of a government surplus)
3. The saving of foreigners (when there is a flow of capital into the domestic economy)
Households will generally respond to an increase in the real interest rate by reducing current
consumption relative to future consumption. Households that are saving will save more;
households that are borrowing will borrow less. Higher interest rates also encourage
foreigners to send funds to the domestic economy. Government saving or borrowing is little
affected by interest rates.
The demand for loans comes from three different sources:
1. The borrowing of households and firms to finance purchases, such as housing, durable
goods, and investment goods
2. The borrowing of governments (in the case of a government deficit)
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3. The borrowing of foreigners (when there is a flow of capital from the domestic
economy)
As the real interest rate increases, investment and durable goods spending decrease. For
firms, a high interest rate represents a high cost of funding investment expenditures. This is
an application of discounted present value and is evident if a firm borrows to purchase capital.
It is also true if it uses internal funds (retained earnings) to finance investment because the
firm could always put those funds into an interest-bearing asset instead. For households,
higher interest rates likewise make it more costly to borrow to purchase housing and durable
goods. The demand for credit decreases as the interest rate rises. When it is expensive to
borrow, households and firms will borrow less.
Equilibrium in the market for loans is shown in Figure 16.3 “The Credit Market”. On the
horizontal axis is the total quantity of loans in equilibrium. The demand curve for loans is
downward sloping, whereas the supply curve has a positive slope. Loan market equilibrium
occurs at the real interest rate where the quantity of loans supplied equals the quantity of
loans demanded. At this equilibrium real interest rate, lenders lend as much as they wish, and
borrowers can borrow as much as they wish. Equilibrium in the aggregate credit market is
what ensures the balance of flows into and out of the financial sector in the circular flow
diagram.
Key Insights
As the real interest rate increases, more loans are supplied, and fewer loans are demanded.
Adjustment of the real interest rate ensures that, in the circular flow diagram, the flows
into the financial sector equal the flows from the sector.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”
Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”
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Figure 16.3 The Credit Market
16.5 Correcting for Inflation
If you have some data expressed in nominal terms (for example, in dollars), and you want to
convert them to real terms, you should use the following four steps.
1. Select your deflator. In most cases, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the best deflator
to use. You can find data on the CPI (for the United States) at the Bureau of Labor
Statistics website (http://www.bls.gov).
2. Select your base year. Find the value of the index in that base year.
3. For all years (including the base year), divide the value of the index in that year by the
value in the base year. The value for the base year is 1.
4. For each year, divide the value in the nominal data series by the number you calculated
in step 3. This gives you the value in “base year dollars.”
Table 16.2 “Correcting Nominal Sales for Inflation” shows an example. We have data on the
CPI for three years, as listed in the second column. The price index is created using the year
2000 as a base year, following steps 1–3. Sales measured in millions of dollars are given in the
fourth column. To correct for inflation, we divide sales in each year by the value of the price
index for that year. The results are shown in the fifth column. Because there was inflation
each year (the price index is increasing over time), real sales do not increase as rapidly as
nominal sales.
Table 16.2 Correcting Nominal Sales for Inflation
Year CPI Price Index
(2000 Base)
Sales
(Millions)
Real Sales (Millions of
Year 2000 Dollars)
2000 172.2 1.0 21.0 21.0
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2001 177.1 1.03 22.3 21.7
2002 179.9 1.04 22.9 21.9
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Consumer Price Index
This calculation uses the CPI, which is an example of a price index. To see how a price index
like the CPI is constructed, consider Table 16.3 “Constructing a Price Index”, which shows a
very simple economy with three goods: T-shirts, music downloads, and meals. The prices and
quantities purchased in the economy in 2012 and 2013 are summarized in the table.
Table 16.3 Constructing a Price Index
Year T-shirts Music
Downloads
Meals Cost of
2013
Basket
Price
Index
Price ($) Quantity Price ($) Quantity Price ($) Quantity Price ($)
2012 20 10 1 50 25 6 425 1.00
2013 22 12 0.80 60 26 5 442 1.04
To construct a price index, you must choose a fixed basket of goods. For example, we could
use the goods purchased in 2013 (12 T-shirts, 60 downloads, and 5 meals). This fixed basket is
then priced in different years. To construct the cost of the 2013 basket at 2013 prices, the
product of the price and the quantity purchased for each good in 2013 is added together. The
basket costs $442. Then we calculate the cost of the 2013 basket at 2012 prices: that is, we use
the prices of each good in 2012 and the quantities purchased in 2013. The sum is $425. The
price index is constructed using 2012 as a base year. The value of the price index for 2013 is
the cost of the basket in 2013 divided by its cost in the base year (2012).
When the price index is based on a bundle of goods that represents total output in an
economy, it is called the price level. The CPI and gross domestic product (GDP) deflator are
examples of measures of the price level (they differ in terms of exactly which goods are
included in the bundle). The growth rate of the price level (its percentage change from one
year to the next) is called the inflation rate.
We also correct interest rates for inflation. The interest rates you typically see quoted are in
nominal terms: they tell you how many dollars you will have to repay for each dollar you
borrow. This is called a nominal interest rate. The real interest rate tells you how much
you will get next year, in terms of goods and services, if you give up a unit of goods and
services this year. To correct interest rates for inflation, we use the Fisher equation:
real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − inflation rate.
For more details, see Section 16.14 “The Fisher Equation: Nominal and Real Interest
Rates” on the Fisher equation.
Key Insights
Divide nominal values by the price index to create real values.
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Create the price index by calculating the cost of buying a fixed basket in different years.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy”
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”
Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”
16.6 Supply and Demand
The supply-and-demand framework is the most fundamental framework in economics. It
explains both the price of a good or a service and the quantity produced and purchased.
The market supply curve comes from adding together the individual supply curves of
firms in a particular market. A competitive firm, taking prices as given, will produce at a level
such that
price = marginal cost.
Marginal cost usually increases as a firm produces more output. Thus an increase in the price
of a product creates an incentive for firms to produce more—that is, the supply curve of a firm
is upward sloping. The market supply curve slopes upward as well: if the price increases, all
firms in a market will produce more output, and some new firms may also enter the market.
A firm’s supply curve shifts if there are changes in input prices or the state of technology. The
market supply curve is shifted by changes in input prices and changes in technology that affect
a significant number of the firms in a market.
The market demand curve comes from adding together the individual demand
curves of all households in a particular market. Households, taking the prices of all goods
and services as given, distribute their income in a manner that makes them as well off as
possible. This means that they choose a combination of goods and services preferred to any
other combination of goods and services they can afford. They choose each good or service
such that
price = marginal valuation.
Marginal valuation usually decreases as a household consumes more of a product. If the price
of a good or a service decreases, a household will substitute away from other goods and
services and toward the product that has become cheaper—that is, the demand curve of a
household is downward sloping. The market demand curve slopes downward as well: if the
price decreases, all households will demand more.
The household demand curve shifts if there are changes in income, prices of other goods and
services, or tastes. The market demand curve is shifted by changes in these factors that are
common across a significant number of households.
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A market equilibrium is a price and a quantity such that the quantity supplied equals the
quantity demanded at the equilibrium price (Figure 16.4 “Market Equilibrium”). Because
market supply is upward sloping and market demand is downward sloping, there is a unique
equilibrium price. We say we have a competitive market if the following are true:
The product being sold is homogeneous.
There are many households, each taking the price as given.
There are many firms, each taking the price as given.
A competitive market is typically characterized by an absence of barriers to entry, so new
firms can readily enter the market if it is profitable, and existing firms can easily leave the
market if it is not profitable.
Key Insights
Market supply is upward sloping: as the price increases, all firms will supply more.
Market demand is downward sloping: as the price increases, all households will demand
less.
A market equilibrium is a price and a quantity such that the quantity demanded equals the
quantity supplied.
Figure 16.4 Market Equilibrium
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Figure 16.4 “Market Equilibrium” shows equilibrium in the market for chocolate bars. The
equilibrium price is determined at the intersection of the market supply and market demand
curves.
More Formally
If we let p denote the price, qd the quantity demanded, and I the level of income, then the
market demand curve is given by
qd = a − bp + cI,
where a, b, and c are constants. By the law of demand, b > 0. For a normal good, the quantity
demanded increases with income: c > 0.
If we let qs denote the quantity supplied and t the level of technology, the market supply curve
is given by
qs = d + ep + ft,
where d, e, and f are constants. Because the supply curve slopes upward, e > 0. Because the
quantity supplied increases when technology improves, f > 0.
In equilibrium, the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded. Set qs = qd = q* and
set p = p* in both equations. The market clearing price (p*) and quantity (q*) are as follows:
p∗ =
(a+ cl)−(d+ ft)
b+ e
.
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and
q* = d + ep* + ft.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”
16.7 Comparative Advantage
Comparative advantage explains why individuals and countries trade with each other.
Trade is at the heart of modern economies: individuals specialize in production and generalize
in consumption. To consume many goods while producing relatively few, individuals must sell
what they produce in exchange for the output of others. Countries likewise specialize in
certain goods and services and import others. By so doing, they obtain gains from trade.
Table 16.4 “Hours of Labor Required” shows the productivity of two different countries in the
production of two different goods. It shows the number of labor hours required to produce
two goods—tomatoes and beer—in two countries: Guatemala and Mexico. From these data,
Mexico has an absolute advantage in the production of both goods. Workers in Mexico are
more productive at producing both tomatoes and beer in comparison to workers in
Guatemala.
Table 16.4 Hours of Labor Required
Tomatoes (1
Kilogram)
Beer (1
Liter)
Guatemala 6 3
Mexico 2 2
In Guatemala, the opportunity cost of 1 kilogram of tomatoes is 2 liters of beer. To produce
an extra kilogram of tomatoes in Guatemala, 6 hours of labor time must be taken away from
beer production; 6 hours of labor time is the equivalent of 2 liters of beer. In Mexico, the
opportunity cost of 1 kilogram of tomatoes is 1 liter of beer. Thus the opportunity cost of
producing tomatoes is lower in Mexico than in Guatemala. This means that Mexico has a
comparative advantage in the production of tomatoes. By a similar logic, Guatemala has a
comparative advantage in the production of beer.
Guatemala and Mexico can have higher levels of consumption of both beer and tomatoes if
they trade rather than produce in isolation; each country should specialize (either partially or
completely) in the good in which it has a comparative advantage. It is never efficient to have
both countries produce both goods.
Key Insights
Comparative advantage helps predict the patterns of trade between individuals and/or
countries.
A country has a comparative advantage in the production of a good if the opportunity cost
of producing that good is lower in that country.
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Even if one country has an absolute advantage in all goods, it will still gain from trading
with another country.
Although this example is cast in terms of countries, the same logic is also used to explain
production patterns between two individuals.
The Main Use of This Tool
Chapter 8 “Jobs in the Macroeconomy”
16.8 Comparative Statics
Comparative statics is a tool used to predict the effects of exogenous variables on market
outcomes. Exogenous variables shift either the market demand curve (for example, news
about the health effects of consuming a product) or the market supply curve (for example,
weather effects on a crop).
By market outcomes, we mean the equilibrium price and the equilibrium quantity in a
market. Comparative statics is a comparison of the market equilibrium before and after a
change in an exogenous variable.
A comparative statics exercise consists of a sequence of five steps:
1. Begin at an equilibrium point where the quantity supplied equals the quantity
demanded.
2. Based on a description of the event, determine whether the change in the exogenous
variable shifts the market supply curve or the market demand curve.
3. Determine the direction of this shift.
4. After shifting the curve, find the new equilibrium point.
5. Compare the new and old equilibrium points to predict how the exogenous event
affects the market.
Figure 16.5 “A Shift in the Demand Curve” and Figure 16.6 “A Shift in the Supply Curve”show
comparative statics in action in the market for Curtis Granderson replica shirts and the
market for beer. In Figure 16.5 “A Shift in the Demand Curve”, the market demand curve has
shifted leftward. The consequence is that the equilibrium price and the equilibrium quantity
both decrease. The demand curve shifts along a fixed supply curve. In Figure 16.6 “A Shift in
the Supply Curve”, the market supply curve has shifted leftward. The consequence is that the
equilibrium price increases and the equilibrium quantity decreases. The supply curve shifts
along a fixed demand curve.
Key Insights
Comparative statics is used to determine the market outcome when the market supply and
demand curves are shifting.
Comparative statics is a comparison of equilibrium points.
If the market demand curve shifts, then the new and old equilibrium points lie on a fixed
market supply curve.
If the market supply curve shifts, then the new and old equilibrium points lie on a fixed
market demand curve.
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Figure 16.5 A Shift in the Demand Curve
Figure 16.6 A Shift in the Supply Curve
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The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
16.9 Nash Equilibrium
A Nash equilibrium is used to predict the outcome of a game. By a game, we mean the
interaction of a few individuals, called players. Each player chooses an action and receives
a payoff that depends on the actions chosen by everyone in the game.
A Nash equilibrium is an action for each player that satisfies two conditions:
1. The action yields the highest payoff for that player given her predictions about the
other players’ actions.
2. The player’s predictions of others’ actions are correct.
Thus a Nash equilibrium has two dimensions. Players make decisions that are in their own
self-interests, and players make accurate predictions about the actions of others.
Consider the games in Table 16.5 “Prisoners’ Dilemma”, Table 16.6 “Dictator Game”,Table
16.7 “Ultimatum Game”, and Table 16.8 “Coordination Game”. The numbers in the tables give
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the payoff to each player from the actions that can be taken, with the payoff of the row player
listed first.
Table 16.5 Prisoners’ Dilemma
Left Right
Up 5, 5 0, 10
Down 10, 0 2, 2
Table 16.6 Dictator Game
Number of
dollars (x)
100 − x, x
Table 16.7 Ultimatum Game
Accept Reject
Number of dollars (x) 100
− x, x
0, 0
Table 16.8 Coordination Game
Left Right
Up 5, 5 0, 1
Down 1, 0 4, 4
Prisoners’ dilemma. The row player chooses between the action labeled Up and the
one labeled Down. The column player chooses between the action labeled Leftand the
one labeled Right. For example, if row chooses Up and column choosesRight, then the
row player has a payoff of 0, and the column player has a payoff of 10. If the row player
predicts that the column player will choose Left, then the row player should
choose Down (that is, down for the row player is her best response to left by the
column player). From the column player’s perspective, if he predicts that the row
player will choose Up, then the column player should choose Right. The Nash
equilibrium occurs when the row player chooses Down and the column player
chooses Right. Our two conditions for a Nash equilibrium of making optimal choices
and predictions being right both hold.
Social dilemma. This is a version of the prisoners’ dilemma in which there are a large
number of players, all of whom face the same payoffs.
Dictator game. The row player is called the dictator. She is given $100 and is asked
to choose how many dollars (x) to give to the column player. Then the game ends.
Because the column player does not move in this game, the dictator game is simple to
analyze: if the dictator is interested in maximizing her payoff, she should offer nothing
(x = 0).
Ultimatum game. This is like the dictator game except there is a second stage. In the
first stage, the row player is given $100 and told to choose how much to give to the
column player. In the second stage, the column player accepts or rejects the offer. If the
column player rejects the offer, neither player receives any money. The best choice of
the row player is then to offer a penny (the smallest amount of money there is). The
best choice of the column player is to accept. This is the Nash equilibrium.
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Coordination game. The coordination game has two Nash equilibria. If the column
player plays Left, then the row player plays Up; if the row player plays Up, then the
column player plays Left. This is an equilibrium. But Down/Right is also a Nash
equilibrium. Both players prefer Up/Left, but it is possible to get stuck in a bad
equilibrium.
Key Insights
A Nash equilibrium is used to predict the outcome of games.
In real life, payoffs may be more complicated than these games suggest. Players may be
motivated by fairness or spite.
More Formally
We describe a game with three players (1, 2, 3), but the idea generalizes straightforwardly to
situations with any number of players. Each player chooses a strategy (s1, s2, s3). Suppose
σ1(s1, s2, s3) is the payoff to player 1 if (s1, s2, s3) is the list of strategies chosen by the players
(and similarly for players 2 and 3). We put an asterisk (*) to denote the best strategy chosen
by a player. Then a list of strategies (s*1, s*2, s*3) is a Nash equilibrium if the following
statements are true:
σ1(s*1, s*2, s*3) ≥ σ1(s1, s*2, s*3)
σ2(s*1, s*2, s*3) ≥ σ2(s*1, s2, s*3)
σ3(s*1, s*2, s*3) ≥ σ3(s*1, s*2, s3)
In words, the first condition says that, given that players 2 and 3 are choosing their best
strategies (s*2, s*3), then player 1 can do no better than to choose strategy s*1. If a similar
condition holds for every player, then we have a Nash equilibrium.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
Chapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”
16.10 Foreign Exchange Market
A foreign exchange market is where one currency is traded for another. There is a demand
for each currency and a supply of each currency. In these markets, one currency is bought
using another. The price of one currency in terms of another (for example, how many dollars
it costs to buy one Mexican peso) is called the exchange rate.
Foreign currencies are demanded by domestic households, firms, and governments that wish
to purchase goods, services, or financial assets denominated in the currency of another
economy. For example, if a US auto importer wants to buy a German car, the importer must
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buy euros. The law of demand holds: as the price of a foreign currency increases, the quantity
of that currency demanded will decrease.
Foreign currencies are supplied by foreign households, firms, and governments that wish to
purchase goods, services, or financial assets denominated in the domestic currency. For
example, if a Canadian bank wants to buy a US government bond, the bank must sell
Canadian dollars. As the price of a foreign currency increases, the quantity supplied of that
currency increases.
Exchange rates are determined just like other prices—by the interaction of supply and
demand. At the equilibrium exchange rate, the supply and demand for a currency are equal.
Shifts in the supply or the demand for a currency lead to changes in the exchange rate.
Because one currency is exchanged for another in a foreign exchange market, the demand for
one currency entails the supply of another. Thus the dollar market for euros (where the price
is dollars per euro and the quantity is euros) is the mirror image of the euro market for dollars
(where the price is euros per dollar and the quantity is dollars).
To be concrete, consider the demand for and the supply of euros. The supply of euros comes
from the following:
European households and firms that wish to buy goods and services from countries
that do not have the euro as their currency
European investors who wish to buy assets (government debt, stocks, bonds, etc.) that
are denominated in currencies other than the euro
The demand for euros comes from the following:
Households and firms in noneuro countries that wish to buy goods and services from
Europe
Investors in noneuro countries that wish to buy assets (government debt, stocks,
bonds, etc.) that are denominated in euros
Figure 16.7 “The Foreign Exchange Market” shows the dollar market for euros. On the
horizontal axis is the quantity of euros traded. On the vertical axis is the price in terms of
dollars. The intersection of the supply and demand curves determines the equilibrium
exchange rate.
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Figure 16.7 The Foreign Exchange Market
The foreign exchange market can be used as a basis for comparative statics exercises. We can
study how changes in an economy affect the exchange rate. For example, suppose there is an
increase in the level of economic activity in the United States. This leads to an increase in the
demand for European goods and services. To make these purchases, US households and firms
will demand more euros. This causes an outward shift in the demand curve and an increase in
the dollar price of euros.
When the dollar price of a euro increases, we say that the dollar has depreciated relative to the
euro. From the perspective of the euro, the depreciation of the dollar represents an
appreciation of the euro.
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Key Insight
As the exchange rate increases (so a currency becomes more valuable), a greater
quantity of the currency is supplied to the market and a smaller quantity is demanded.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”
Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”
16.11 Growth Rates
If some variable x (for example, the number of gallons of gasoline sold in a week) changes
from x1 to x2, then we can define the change in that variable as Δx = x2 − x1. But there are
difficulties with this simple definition. The number that we calculate will change, depending
on the units in which we measure x. If we measure in millions of gallons, x will be a much
smaller number than if we measure in gallons. If we measuredx in liters rather than gallons
(as it is measured in most countries), it would be a bigger number. So the number we calculate
depends on the units we choose. To avoid these problems, we look at percentage changes and
express the change as a fraction of the individual value. In what follows, we use the notation
%Δx to mean the percentage change in x and define it as follows: %Δx = (x2 − x1)/x1. A
percentage change equal to 0.1 means that gasoline consumption increased by 10 percent.
Why? Because 10 percent means 10 “per hundred,” so 10 percent = 10/100 = 0.1.
Very often in economics, we are interested in changes that take place over time. Thus we
might want to compare gross domestic product (GDP) between 2012 and 2013. Suppose we
know that GDP in the United States in 2012 was $14 trillion and that GDP in 2013 was $14.7
trillion. Using the letter Y to denote GDP measured in trillions, we write Y2012= 14.0
and Y2013 = 14.7. If we want to talk about GDP at different points in time without specifying a
particular year, we use the notation Yt. We express the change in a variable over time in the
form of a growth rate, which is just an example of a percentage change. Thus the growth rate
of GDP in 2013 is calculated as follows:
%ΔY2013 = (Y2013 − Y2012)/Y2012 = (14.7 − 14)/14 = 0.05.
The growth rate equals 5 percent. In general, we write %ΔYt+1 = (Yt+1 − Yt)/Yt. Occasionally,
we use the gross growth rate, which simply equals 1 + the growth rate. So, for example, the
gross growth rate of GDP equals Y2013/Y2012, or 1.05.
There are some useful rules that describe the behavior of percentage changes and growth
rates.
The Product Rule. Suppose we have three variables, x, y, and z, and suppose
x = yz.
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Then
%Δx = %Δy + %Δz.
In other words, the growth rate of a product of two variables equals the sum of the growth
rates of the individual variables.
The Quotient Rule. Now suppose we rearrange our original equation by dividing both sides
by z to obtain
y=
x
z
.
If we take the product rule and subtract %Δz from both sides, we get the following:
%Δy = %Δx − %Δz.
The Power Rule. There is one more rule of growth rates that we make use of in some
advanced topics, such as growth accounting. Suppose that
y = x
a
.
Then
%Δy = a(%Δx).
For example, if y = x2, then the growth rate of y is twice the growth rate of x. If y=x√,then the
growth rate of y is half the growth rate of x (remembering that a square root is the same as a
power of ½).
More Formally
Growth rates compound over time: if the growth rate of a variable is constant, then the change
in the variable increases over time. For example, suppose GDP in 2020 is 20.0, and it grows at
10 percent per year. Then in 2021, GDP is 22.0 (an increase of 2.0), but in 2022, GDP is 24.2
(an increase of 2.2). If this compounding takes place every instant, then we say that we
have exponential growth. Formally, we write exponential growth using the number e =
2.71828.… If the value of Y at time 0 equals Y0 and if Y grows at the constant
rate g (where g is an “annualized” or per year growth rate), then at time t(measured in years),
Yt =
egtY0
.
A version of this formula can also be used to calculate the average growth rate of a variable if
we know its value at two different times. We can write the formula as
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e
gt
= Yt/Y0,
which also means
gt = ln(Yt/Y0),
where ln() is the natural logarithm. You do not need to know exactly what this means; you can
simply calculate a logarithm using a
scientific calculator or a spreadsheet. Dividing by t we get the average growth rate
g = ln(Yt/Y0)/t.
For example, suppose GDP in 2020 is 20.0 and GDP in 2030 is 28.0. Then Y2030/Y2020=
28/20 = 1.4. Using a calculator, we can find ln(1.4) = 0.3364. Dividing by 10 (since the two
dates are 10 years apart), we get an average growth rate of 0.034, or 3.4 percent per year.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy”
Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”
Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty”
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
16.12 Mean and Variance
To start our presentation of descriptive statistics, we construct a data set using a spreadsheet
program. The idea is to simulate the flipping of a two-sided coin. Although you might think it
would be easier just to flip a coin, doing this on a spreadsheet gives you a full range of tools
embedded in that program. To generate the data set, we drew 10 random numbers using the
spreadsheet program. In the program we used, the function was called RAND and this
generated the choice of a number between zero and one. Those choices are listed in the second
column of Table 16.9.
The third column creates the two events of heads and tails that we normally associate with a
coin flip. To generate this last column, we adopted a rule: if the random number was less than
0.5, we termed this a “tail” and assigned a 0 to the draw; otherwise we termed it a “head” and
assigned a 1 to the draw. The choice of 0.5 as the cutoff for heads reflects the fact that we are
considering the flips of a fair coin in which each side has the same probability: 0.5.
Table 16.9
Draw Random
Number
Heads (1) or
Tails (0)
1 0.94 1
2 0.84 1
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3 0.26 0
4 0.04 0
5 0.01 0
6 0.57 1
7 0.74 1
8 0.81 1
9 0.64 1
10 0.25 0
Keep in mind that the realization of the random number in draw i is independent of the
realizations of the random numbers in both past and future draws. Whether a coin comes up
heads or tails on any particular flip does not depend on other outcomes.
There are many ways to summarize the information contained in a sample of data. Even
before you start to compute some complicated statistics, having a way to present the data is
important. One possibility is a bar graph in which the fraction of observations of each
outcome is easily shown. Alternatively, a pie chart is often used to display this fraction. Both
the pie chart and the bar diagram are commonly found in spreadsheet programs.
Economists and statisticians often want to describe data in terms of numbers rather than
figures. We use the data from the table to define and illustrate two statistics that are
commonly used in economics discussions. The first is the mean (or average) and is a measure
of central tendency. Before you read any further, ask, “What do you think the average ought
to be from the coin flipping exercise?” It is natural to say 0.5, since half the time the outcome
will be a head and thus have a value of zero, whereas the remainder of the time the outcome
will be a tail and thus have a value of one.
Whether or not that guess holds can be checked by looking at Table 16.9 and calculating the
mean of the outcome. We let ki be the outcome of draw i. For example, from the table,k1 = 1
and k5 = 0. Then the formula for the mean if there are N draws is μ = Σiki/N. Here Σiki means
the sum of the ki outcomes. In words, the mean, denoted by μ, is calculated by adding
together the draws and dividing by the number of draws (N). In the table, N = 10, and the sum
of the draws of random numbers is about 51.0. Thus the mean of the 10 draws is about 0.51.
We can also calculate the mean of the heads/tails column, which is 0.6 since heads came up 6
times in our experiment. This calculation of the mean differs from the mean of the draws
since the numbers in the two columns differ with the third column being a very discrete way
to represent the information in the second column.
A second commonly used statistic is a measure of dispersion of the data called the variance.
The variance, denoted σ2, is calculated as σ2 = Σi(ki − μ)2/(N). From this formula, if all the
draws were the same (thus equal to the mean), then the variance would be zero. As the draws
spread out from the mean (both above and below), the variance increases. Since some
observations are above the mean and others below, we square the difference between a single
observation (ki) and the mean (μ) when calculating the variance. This means that values
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above and below the mean both contribute a positive amount to the variance. Squaring also
means that values that are a long way away from the mean have a big effect on the variance.
For the data given in the table, the mean of the 10 draws was given as μ = 0.51. So to calculate
the variance, we would subtract the mean from each draw, square the difference, and then add
together the squared differences. This yields a variance of 0.118 for this draw. A closely related
concept is that of the standard deviation, which is the square root of the variance. For our
example, the standard deviation is 0.34. The standard deviation is greater than the variance
since the variance is less than 1.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
16.13 Correlation and Causality
Correlation is a statistical measure describing how two variables move together. In contrast,
causality (or causation) goes deeper into the relationship between two variables by looking for
cause and effect.
Correlation is a statistical property that summarizes the way in which two variables move
either over time or across people (firms, governments, etc.). The concept of correlation is
quite natural to us, as we often take note of how two variables interrelate. If you think back to
high school, you probably have a sense of how your classmates did in terms of two measures
of performance: grade point average (GPA) and the results on a standardized college entrance
exam (SAT or ACT). It is likely that classmates with high GPAs also had high scores on the
SAT or ACT exam. In this instance, we would say that the GPA and SAT/ACT scores were
positively correlated: looking across your classmates, when a person’s GPA is higher than
average, that person’s SAT or ACT score is likely to be higher than average as well.
As another example, consider the relationship between a household’s income and its
expenditures on housing. If you conducted a survey across households, it is likely that you
would find that richer households spend more on most goods and services, including housing.
In this case, we would conclude that income and expenditures on housing are positively
correlated.
When economists look at data for a whole economy, they often focus on a measure of how
much is produced, which we call real gross domestic product (real GDP), and the fraction of
workers without jobs, called the unemployment rate. Over long periods of time, when GDP is
above average (the economy is doing well), the unemployment rate is below average. In this
case, GDP and the unemployment rate are negatively correlated, as they tend to move in
opposite directions.
The fact that one variable is correlated with another does not inform us about whether one
variable causes the other. Imagine yourself on an airplane in a relaxed mood, reading or
listening to music. Suddenly, the pilot comes on the public address system and requests that
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you buckle your seat belts. Usually, such a request is followed by turbulence. This is a
correlation: the announcement by the pilot is positively correlated with air turbulence. The
correlation is of course not perfect because sometimes you hit some bumps without warning,
and sometimes the pilot’s announcement is not followed by turbulence.
But—obviously—this does not mean that we could solve the turbulence problem by turning off
the public address system. The pilot’s announcement does not cause the turbulence. The
turbulence is there whether the pilot announces it or not. In fact, the causality runs the other
way. The turbulence causes the pilot’s announcement.
We noted earlier that real GDP and unemployment are negatively correlated. When real GDP
is below average, as it is during a recession, the unemployment rate is typically above average.
But what is the causality here? If unemployment caused recessions, we might be tempted to
adopt a policy that makes unemployment illegal. For example, the government could fine
firms if they lay off workers. This is not a good policy because we do not think that low
unemployment causes high real GDP. Neither do we necessarily think that high real GDP
causes low unemployment. Instead, based on economic theory, there are other influences that
affect both real GDP and unemployment.
More Formally
Suppose you have N observations of two variables, x and y, where xi and yi are the values of
these variables in observation i = 1, 2,…, N. The mean of x, denoted μx, is the sum over the
values of x in the sample is divided by N; the scenario applies for y.
μx =
x1+ x2+ …+ xN
N
.
and
μy =
y1 + y2 + … + yN
N
.
We can also calculate the variance and standard deviations of x and y. The calculation for the
variance of x, denoted σ2x, is as follows:
σ2 =
(x1 − μx) 2 + (x2 − μx) 2 + … (xN − μx)2
N
.
The standard deviation of x is the square root of σ2x:
σx = √(x1−μx)2+ (x2−μx)2+ … (xN −μx)2
N
.
With these ingredients, the correlation of (x,y), denoted corr(x,y), is given by
corr(x,y) =
(x1− μx)(y1− μy)+ (x2−μx)(y2−μy)+ … (xN−μx)( yN− μy )
Nσxσy
.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”
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16.14 The Fisher Equation: Nominal and Real Interest Rates
When you borrow or lend, you normally do so in dollar terms. If you take out a loan, the loan
is denominated in dollars, and your promised payments are denominated in dollars. These
dollar flows must be corrected for inflation to calculate the repayment in real terms. A similar
point holds if you are a lender: you need to calculate the interest you earn on saving by
correcting for inflation.
The Fisher equation provides the link between nominal and real interest rates. To convert
from nominal interest rates to real interest rates, we use the following formula:
real interest rate ≈ nominal interest rate − inflation rate.
To find the real interest rate, we take the nominal interest rate and subtract the inflation rate.
For example, if a loan has a 12 percent interest rate and the inflation rate is 8 percent, then
the real return on that loan is 4 percent.
In calculating the real interest rate, we used the actual inflation rate. This is appropriate when
you wish to understand the real interest rate actually paid under a loan contract. But at the
time a loan agreement is made, the inflation rate that will occur in the future is not known
with certainty. Instead, the borrower and lender use their expectations of future inflation to
determine the interest rate on a loan. From that perspective, we use the following formula:
contracted nominal interest rate ≈ real interest rate + expected inflation rate.
We use the term contracted nominal interest rate to make clear that this is the rate set at the
time of a loan agreement, not the realized real interest rate.
Key Insight
To correct a nominal interest rate for inflation, subtract the inflation rate from the
nominal interest rate.
More Formally
Imagine two individuals write a loan contract to borrow P dollars at a nominal interest rate
of i. This means that next year the amount to be repaid will be P × (1 + i). This is a standard
loan contract with a nominal interest rate of i.
Now imagine that the individuals decided to write a loan contract to guarantee a constant real
return (in terms of goods not dollars) denoted r. So the contract provides P this year in return
for being repaid (enough dollars to buy) (1 + r) units of real gross domestic product (real
GDP) next year. To repay this loan, the borrower gives the lender enough money to buy (1 + r)
units of real GDP for each unit of real GDP that is lent. So if the inflation rate is π, then the
price level has risen to P × (1 + π), so the repayment in dollars for a loan of P dollars would
be P(1 + r) × (1 + π).
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Here (1 + π) is one plus the inflation rate. The inflation rate πt+1 is defined—as usual—as the
percentage change in the price level from period t to period t + 1.
πt+1 = (Pt+1 − Pt)/Pt.
If a period is one year, then the price level next year is equal to the price this year multiplied
by (1 + π):
Pt+1 = (1 + πt) × Pt.
The Fisher equation says that these two contracts should be equivalent:
(1 + i) = (1 + r) × (1 + π).
As an approximation, this equation implies
i ≈ r + π.
To see this, multiply out the right-hand side and subtract 1 from each side to obtain
i = r + π + rπ.
If r and π are small numbers, then rπ is a very small number and can safely be ignored. For
example, if r = 0.02 and π = 0.03, then rπ = 0.0006, and our approximation is about 99
percent accurate.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”
Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
16.15 The Aggregate Production Function
The aggregate production function describes how total real gross domestic product (real GDP)
in an economy depends on available inputs. Aggregate output (real GDP) depends on the
following:
Physical capital—machines, production facilities, and so forth that are used in
production
Labor—the number of hours that are worked in the entire economy
Human capital—skills and education embodied in the workforce of the economy
Knowledge—basic scientific knowledge, and blueprints that describe the available
production processes
Social infrastructure—the general business, legal and cultural environment
The amount of natural resources available in an economy
Anything else that we have not yet included
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We group the inputs other than labor, physical, and human capital together, and call them
technology.
The aggregate production function has several key properties. First, output increases when
there are increases in physical capital, labor, and natural resources. In other words, the
marginal products of these inputs are all positive.
Second, the increase in output from adding more inputs is lower when we have more of a
factor. This is called diminishing marginal product. That is,
The more capital we have, the less additional output we obtain from additional capital.
The more labor we have, the less additional output we obtain from additional labor.
The more natural resources we have, the less additional output we obtain from
additional resources.
In addition, increases in output can also come from increases in human capital, knowledge,
and social infrastructure. In contrast to capital and labor, we do not assume that there are
diminishing returns to human capital and technology. One reason is that we do not have a
natural or an obvious measure for human capital, knowledge, or social infrastructure, whereas
we do for labor and capital (hours of work and hours of capital usage).
Figure 16.8 shows the relationship between output and capital, holding fixed the level of other
inputs. This figure shows two properties of the aggregate production function. As capital input
is increased, output increases as well. But the change in output obtained by increasing the
capital stock is lower when the capital stock is higher: this is the diminishing marginal
product of capital.
Figure 16.8
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In many applications, we want to understand how the aggregate production function responds
to variations in the technology or other inputs. This is illustrated in Figure 16.9. An increase
in, say, technology means that for a given level of the capital stock, more output is produced:
the production function shifts upward as technology increases. Further, as technology
increases, the production function is steeper: the increase in technology increases the
marginal product of capital.
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Figure 16.9
Key Insight
The aggregate production function allows us to determine the output of an economy
given inputs of capital, labor, human capital, and technology.
More Formally
Specific Forms for the Production Function
We can write the production function in mathematical form. We use Y to represent real
GDP, K to represent the physical capital stock, L to represent labor, H to represent human
capital, and A to represent technology (including natural resources). If we want to speak about
production completely generally, then we can write Y = F(K,L,H,A). Here F() means “some
function of.”
A lot of the time, economists work with a production function that has a specific mathematical
form, yet is still reasonably simple:
Y = A × Ka × (L × H)(1 − a),
where a is just a number. This is called a Cobb-Douglas production function. It turns out
that this production function does a remarkably good job of summarizing aggregate
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production in the economy. In fact, we also know that we can describe production in actual
economies quite well if we suppose that a = 1/3.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”
Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty”
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
16.16 The Circular Flow of Income
The circular flow of income describes the flows of money among the five main sectors of an
economy. As individuals and firms buy and sell goods and services, money flows among the
different sectors of an economy. The circular flow of income describes these flows of dollars
(pesos, euros, or whatever). From a simple version of the circular flow, we learn that—as a
matter of accounting—
gross domestic product (GDP) = income = production = spending.
This relationship lies at the heart of macroeconomic analysis.
There are two sides to every transaction. Corresponding to the flows of money in the circular
flow, there are flows of goods and services among these sectors. For example, the wage income
received by consumers is in return for labor services that flow from households to firms. The
consumption spending of households is in return for the goods and services that flow from
firms to households.
A complete version of the circular flow is presented in Figure 16.10. (Chapter 3 “The State of
the Economy” contains a discussion of a simpler version of the circular flow with only two
sectors: households and firms.)
Figure 16.10
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The complete circular flow has five sectors: a household sector, a firm sector, a government
sector, a foreign sector, and a financial sector. Different chapters of the book emphasize
different pieces of the circular flow, and Figure 16.10 shows us how everything fits together. In
the following subsections, we look at the flows into and from each sector in turn. In each case,
the balance of the flows into and from each sector underlies a useful economic relationship.
The Firm Sector
Figure 16.10 includes the component of the circular flow associated with the flows into and
from the firm sector of an economy. We know that the total flow of dollars from the firm
sector measures the total value of production in an economy. The total flow of dollars into the
firm sector equals total expenditures on GDP. We therefore know that
production = consumption + investment + government purchases + net exports.
This equation is called the national income identity and is the most fundamental
relationship in the national accounts.
By consumption we mean total consumption expenditures by households on final goods and
services. Investment refers to the purchase of goods and services that, in one way or another,
help to produce more output in the future. Government purchases include all purchases of
goods and services by the government. Net exports, which equal exports minus imports,
measure the expenditure flows associated with the rest of the world.
The Household Sector
The household sector summarizes the behavior of private individuals in their roles as
consumers/savers and suppliers of labor. The balance of flows into and from this sector is the
basis of the household budget constraint. Households receive income from firms, in the form
of wages and in the form of dividends resulting from their ownership of firms. The income
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that households have available to them after all taxes have been paid to the government and
all transfers received is called disposable income. Households spend some of their disposable
income and save the rest. In other words,
disposable income = consumption + household savings.
This is the household budget constraint. In Figure 16.10, this equation corresponds to the
fact that the flows into and from the household sector must balance.
The Government Sector
The government sector summarizes the actions of all levels of government in an economy.
Governments tax their citizens, pay transfers to them, and purchase goods from the firm
sector of the economy. Governments also borrow from or lend to the financial sector. The
amount that the government collects in taxes need not equal the amount that it pays out for
government purchases and transfers. If the government spends more than it gathers in taxes,
then it must borrow from the financial markets to make up the shortfall.
The circular flow figure shows two flows into the government sector and two flows out. Since
the flows into and from the government sector must balance, we know that
government purchases + transfers = tax revenues + government borrowing.
Government borrowing is sometimes referred to as the government budget deficit. This
equation is the government budget constraint.
Some of the flows in the circular flow can go in either direction. When the government is
running a deficit, there is a flow of dollars to the government sector from the financial
markets. Alternatively, the government may run a surplus, meaning that its revenues from
taxation are greater than its spending on purchases and transfers. In this case, the
government is saving rather than borrowing, and there is a flow of dollars to the financial
markets from the government sector.
The Foreign Sector
The circular flow includes a country’s dealings with the rest of the world. These flows include
exports, imports, and borrowing from other countries. Exports are goods and services
produced in one country and purchased by households, firms, and governments of another
country. Imports are goods and services purchased by households, firms, and governments in
one country but produced in another country. Net exports are exports minus imports. When
net exports are positive, a country is running a trade surplus: exports exceed imports. When
net exports are negative, a country is running a trade deficit: imports exceed exports. The
third flow between countries is borrowing and lending. Governments, individuals, and firms
in one country may borrow from or lend to another country.
Net exports and borrowing are linked. If a country runs a trade deficit, it borrows from other
countries to finance that deficit. If we look at the flows into and from the foreign sector, we see
that
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borrowing from other countries + exports = imports.
Subtracting exports from both sides, we obtain
borrowing from other countries = imports − exports = trade deficit.
Whenever our economy runs a trade deficit, we are borrowing from other countries. If our
economy runs a trade surplus, then we are lending to other countries.
This analysis has omitted one detail. When we lend to other countries, we acquire their assets,
so each year we get income from those assets. When we borrow from other countries, they
acquire our assets, so we pay them income on those assets. Those income flows are added to
the trade surplus/deficit to give the current account of the economy. It is the current account
that must be matched by borrowing from or lending to other countries. A positive current
account means that net exports plus net income flows from the rest of the world are positive.
In this case, our economy is lending to the rest of the world and acquiring more assets.
The Financial Sector
The financial sector of an economy summarizes the behavior of banks and other financial
institutions. The balance of flows into and from the financial sector tell us that investment is
financed by national savings and borrowing from abroad. The financial sector is at the heart of
the circular flow. The figure shows four flows into and from the financial sector.
1. Households divide their after-tax income between consumption and savings. Thus any
income that they receive today but wish to put aside for the future is sent to the
financial markets. The household sector as a whole saves so, on net, there is a flow of
dollars from the household sector into the financial markets.
2. The flow of money from the financial sector into the firm sector provides the funds that
are available to firms for investment purposes.
3. The flow of dollars between the financial sector and the government sector reflects the
borrowing (or lending) of governments. The flow can go in either direction. When
government expenditures exceed government revenues, the government must borrow
from the private sector, and there is a flow of dollars from the financial sector to the
government. This is the case of a government deficit. When the government’s revenues
are greater than its expenditures, by contrast, there is a government surplus and a flow
of dollars into the financial sector.
4. The flow of dollars between the financial sector and the foreign sector can also go in
either direction. An economy with positive net exports is lending to other countries:
there is a flow of money from an economy. An economy with negative net exports (a
trade deficit) is borrowing from other countries.
The national savings of the economy is the savings carried out by the private and
government sectors taken together. When the government is running a deficit, some of the
savings of households and firms must be used to fund that deficit, so there is less left over to
finance investment. National savings is then equal to private savings minus the government
deficit—that is, private savings minus government borrowing:
national savings = private savings − government borrowing.
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If the government is running a surplus, then
national savings = private savings + government surplus.
National savings is therefore the amount that an economy as a whole saves. It is equal to what
is left over after we subtract consumption and government spending from GDP. To see this,
notice that
private savings − government borrowing = income − taxes + transfers − consumption −
(government purchases + transfers − taxes)= income − consumption − government
purchases.
This is the domestic money that is available for investment.
If we are borrowing from other countries, there is another source of funds for investment. The
flows into and from the financial sector must balance, so
investment = national savings + borrowing from other countries.
Conversely, if we are lending to other countries, then our national savings is divided between
investment and lending to other countries:
national savings = investment + lending to other countries.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 3 “The State of the Economy”
Chapter 4 “The Interconnected Economy”
Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty”
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 9 “Money: A User’s Guide”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”
Chapter 14 “Balancing the Budget”
Chapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”
16.17 Growth Accounting
Growth accounting is a tool that tells us how changes in real gross domestic product (real
GDP) in an economy are due to changes in available capital, labor, human capital, and
technology. Economists have shown that, under reasonably general circumstances, the change
in output in an economy can be written as follows:
output growth rate = a × capital stock growth rate + [(1 − a) × labor hours growth rate]+ [(1
− a) × human capital growth rate] + technology growth rate.
In this equation, a is just a number. For example, if a = 1/3, the growth in output is as follows:
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output growth rate = (1/3 × capital stock growth rate) + (2/3 × labor hours growth rate)+ (2/3
× human capital growth rate) + technology growth rate.
Growth rates can be positive or negative, so we can use this equation to analyze decreases in
GDP as well as increases. This expression for the growth rate of output, by the way, is
obtained by applying the rules of growth rates (discussed in Section 16.11 “Growth Rates”) to
the Cobb-Douglas aggregate production function (discussed in Section 16.15 “The Aggregate
Production Function”).
What can we measure in this expression? We can measure the growth in output, the growth in
the capital stock, and the growth in labor hours. Human capital is more difficult to measure,
but we can use information on schooling, literacy rates, and so forth. We cannot, however,
measure the growth rate of technology. So we use the growth accounting equation to infer the
growth in technology from the things we can measure. Rearranging the growth accounting
equation,
technology growth rate = output growth rate − (a × capital stock growth rate)− [(1 −a) × labor
hours growth rate] − [(1 − a) × human capital growth rate].
So if we know the number a, we are done—we can use measures of the growth in output,
labor, capital stock, and human capital to solve for the technology growth rate. In fact, we do
have a way of measuring a. The technical details are not important here, but a good measure
of (1 − a) is simply the total payments to labor in the economy (that is, the total of wages and
other compensation) as a fraction of overall GDP. For most economies, a is in the range of
about 1/3 to 1/2.
Key Insight
The growth accounting tool allows us to determine the contributions of the various
factors of economic growth.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”
Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty”
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
16.18 The Solow Growth Model
The analysis in Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty” is (implicitly) based on a
theory of economic growth known as the Solow growth model. Here we present two formal
versions of the mathematics of the model. The first takes as its focus the capital accumulation
equation and explains how the capital stock evolves in the economy. This version ignores the
role of human capital and ignores the long-run growth path of the economy. The second
follows the exposition of the chapter and is based around the derivation of the balanced
growth path. They are, however, simply two different ways of approaching the same problem.
Presentation 1
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There are three components of this presentation of the model: technology, capital
accumulation, and saving. The first component of the Solow growth model is the specification
of technology and comes from the aggregate production function. We express output per
worker (y) as a function of capital per worker (k) and technology (A). A mathematical
expression of this relationship is
y = Af(k),
where f(k) means that output per worker depends on capital per worker. As in our
presentation of production functions, output increases with technology. We assume thatf()
has the properties that more capital leads to more output per capita at a diminishing rate. As
an example, suppose
y = Ak1/3.
In this case the marginal product of capital is positive but diminishing.
The second component is capital accumulation. If we let kt be the amount of capital per capita
at the start of year t, then we know that
kt+1 = kt(1 − δ) + it.
This expression shows how the capital stock changes over time. Here δ is the rate of physical
depreciation so that between year t and year t +1, δkt units of capital are lost from
depreciation. But during year t, there is investment (it) that yields new capital in the following
year.
The final component of the Solow growth model is saving. In a closed economy, saving is the
same as investment. Thus we link it in the accumulation equation to saving. Assume that
saving per capita (st) is given by
st = s × yt.
Here s is a constant between zero and one, so only a fraction of total output is saved.
Using the fact that savings equals investment, along with the per capita production function,
we can relate investment to the level of capital:
it = sAf(kt).
We can then write the equation for the evolution of the capital stock as follows:
kt+1 = kt(1 − δ) + sAf(kt).
Once we have specified the function f(), we can follow the evolution of the capital stock over
time. Generally, the path of the capital stock over time has two important properties:
1. Steady state. There is a particular level of the capital stock such that if the economy
accumulates that amount of capital, it stays at that level of capital. We call this the
steady state level of capital, denoted k*.
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2. Stability. The economy will tend toward the per capita capital stock k*.
To be more specific, the steady state level of capital solves the following equation:
k* = k*(1 − δ) + sAf(k*).
At the steady state, the amount of capital lost by depreciation is exactly offset by saving. This
means that at the steady state, net investment is exactly zero. The property of stability means
that if the current capital stock is below k*, the economy will accumulate capital so
that kt+1 > kt. And if the current capital stock is above k*, the economy will decumulate
capital so that kt+1 < kt.
If two countries share the same technology (A) and the same production function [f(k)], then
over time these two countries will eventually have the same stock of capital per worker. If
there are differences in the technology or the production function, then there is no reason for
the two countries to converge to the same level of capital stock per worker.
Presentation 2
In this presentation, we explain the balanced-growth path of the economy and prove some of
the claims made in the text. The model takes as given (exogenous) the investment rate; the
depreciation rate; and the growth rates of the workforce, human capital, and technology. The
endogenous variables are output and physical capital stock.
The notation for the presentation is given in Table 16.10 "Notation in the Solow Growth
Model": We use the notation gx to represent the growth rate of a variable x; that is, gx =
Δx
x
= %Δx.
There are two key ingredients to the model: the aggregate production function and the
equation for capital accumulation.
Table 16.10 Notation in the Solow Growth Model
Variable Symbol
Real gross domestic
product
Y
Capital stock K
Human capital H
Workforce L
Technology A
Investment rate i
Depreciation rate δ
The Production Function
The production function we use is the Cobb-Douglas production function:
Equation 16.1
Y = Ka(HL)1−aA.
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Growth Accounting
If we apply the rules of growth rates to Equation 16.1, we get the following expression:
Equation 16.2
gY = agK + (1 − a)(gL + gH) + gA.
Balanced Growth
The condition for balanced growth is that gY = gK. When we impose this condition on our
equation for the growth rate of output (Equation 16.2), we get
gBGY = agBGY+(1−a)(gL+gH)+gA,
where the superscript “BG” indicates that we are considering the values of variables when the
economy is on a balanced growth path. This equation simplifies to
Equation 16.3
gBGY=gL+gH+(
1
1−a )gA.
The growth in output on a balanced-growth path depends on the growth rates of the
workforce, human capital, and technology.
Using this, we can rewrite Equation 16.2 as follows:
Equation 16.4
gY=agK+(1−a)gBGY.
The actual growth rate in output is an average of the balanced-growth rate of output and the
growth rate of the capital stock.
Capital Accumulation
The second piece of our model is the capital accumulation equation. The growth rate of the
capital stock is given by
Equation 16.5
gK =
1
K
− δ.
Divide the numerator and denominator of the first term by Y, remembering that i = I/Y.
Equation 16.6
gK =
i
K /Y
−δ.
The growth rate of the capital stock depends positively on the investment rate and negatively
on the depreciation rate. It also depends negatively on the current capital-output ratio.
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The Balanced-Growth Capital-Output Ratio
Now rearrange Equation 16.6 to give the ratio of capital to gross domestic product (GDP),
given the depreciation rate, the investment rate, and the growth rate of the capital stock:
K
Y
=
i
δ+ gK
.
When the economy is on a balanced growth path, gK = gBGY, so
(
K
Y
)
BG
=
i
δ+ BG
Y
.
We can also substitute in our balanced-growth expression for gBGY (Equation 16.3) to get an
expression for the balanced-growth capital output ratio in terms of exogenous variables.
(
K
Y
)
BG
=
i
δ+ gL+ gH+
1
1−a
+ gA
.
Convergence
The proof that economies will converge to the balanced-growth ratio of capital to GDP is
relatively straightforward. We want to show that if K/Y <
(
K
Y
)
BG
, then capital grows faster than
output. If capital is growing faster than output, gK − gY > 0. First, go back toEquation 16.4:
gY = ag K+ (1−a)g BG
Y
.
Subtract both sides from the growth rate of capital:
gK −gY=g K−ag K −(1−a )g BG
Y
.
Now compare the general expression for ratio of capital to GDP with its balanced growth
value:
K /Y =
i
δ+ g K
(general expression)
and
(K /Y )
BG
=
i
δ+ g BG
Y
(balanced growth).
If K/Y < ( K Y ) BG , then it must be the case that gK > g BG
Y , which implies (from the previous equation)
that g K> gY .
Output per Worker Growth
If we want to examine the growth in output per worker rather than total output, we take the
per-worker production function (Equation 16.2) and apply the rules of growth rates to that
equation.
gY / L = (
a
1−a
)g K /Y + g H + g A .
(1 − a)gY = a[gK − gY] + (1 − a)[gL + gH] + gA = a[gK − gY] + (1 − a)[gL + gH] + gA.
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We then we divide by (1 − a) to get
gY =
a
(1−a )
[g K−gY ] + g L + g H + (
1
1−a
) g A .
and subtract gL from each side to obtain
gY – g L =
a
(1−a)
[g K – gY ] + g H + (
1
1−a
)g A .
Finally, we note that gY − gL = gY/L:
With balanced growth, the first term is equal to zero, so
gY / L =
a
(1−a)
[g K – gY ] + g H + (
1
1−a
)g A .
Endogenous Investment Rate
In this analysis, we made the assumption from the Solow model that the investment rate is
constant. The essential arguments that we have made still apply if the investment rate is
higher when the marginal product of capital is higher. The argument for convergence becomes
stronger because a low value of K/Y implies a higher marginal product of capital and thus a
higher investment rate. This increases the growth rate of capital and causes an economy to
converge more quickly to its balanced-growth path.
Endogenous Growth
Take the production function
Y=Ka
(HL)
1−a A.
Now assume A is constant and
H=(
B
A
)
1/ (1−a)
× (K / L) ,
so
Y =K
a
(L(
B
A
)
1/(1−a)
(K / L)) A
1−a
= K
a
((
B
A
)
1 /(1−a)
(K )) A
1−a
= BK.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 5 “Globalization and Competitiveness”
Chapter 6 “Global Prosperity and Global Poverty”
16.19 The Aggregate Expenditure Model
The aggregate expenditure model relates the components of spending (consumption,
investment, government purchases, and net exports) to the level of economic activity. In the
short run, taking the price level as fixed, the level of spending predicted by the aggregate
expenditure model determines the level of economic activity in an economy.
An insight from the circular flow is that real gross domestic product (real GDP) measures
three things: the production of firms, the income earned by households, and total spending on
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firms’ output. The aggregate expenditure model focuses on the relationships between
production (GDP) and planned spending:
GDP = planned spending= consumption + investment + government purchases + net exports.
Planned spending depends on the level of income/production in an economy, for the
following reasons:
If households have higher income, they will increase their spending. (This is captured
by the consumption function.)
Firms are likely to decide that higher levels of production—particularly if they are
expected to persist—mean that they should build up their capital stock and should thus
increase their investment.
Higher income means that domestic consumers are likely to spend more on imported
goods. Since net exports equal exports minus imports, higher imports means lower net
exports.
The negative net export link is not large enough to overcome the other positive links, so we
conclude that when income increases, so also does planned expenditure. We illustrate this
in Figure 16.11 “Planned Spending in the Aggregate Expenditure Model” where we suppose for
simplicity that there is a linear relationship between spending and GDP. The equation of the
line is as follows:
spending = autonomous spending + marginal propensity to spend × real GDP.
Figure 16.11 Planned Spending in the Aggregate Expenditure Model
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The intercept in Figure 16.11 “Planned Spending in the Aggregate Expenditure Model” is
called autonomous spending. It represents the amount of spending that there would be in
an economy if income (GDP) were zero. We expect that this will be positive for two reasons:
(1) if a household finds its income is zero, it will still want to consume something, so it will
either draw on its existing wealth (past savings) or borrow against future income; and (2) the
government would spend money even if GDP were zero.
The slope of the line in Figure 16.11 “Planned Spending in the Aggregate Expenditure
Model” is given by the marginal propensity to spend. For the reasons that we have just
explained, we expect that this is positive: increases in income lead to increased spending.
However, we expect the marginal propensity to spend to be less than one.
The aggregate expenditure model is based on the two equations we have just discussed. We
can solve the model either graphically or using algebra. The graphical approach relies
on Figure 16.12. On the horizontal axis is the level of real GDP. On the vertical axis is the level
of spending as well as the level of GDP. There are two lines shown. The first is the 45° line,
which equates real GDP on the horizontal axis with real GDP on the vertical axis. The second
line is the planned spending line. The intersection of the spending line with the 45° line gives
the equilibrium level of output.
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Figure 16.12
More Formally
We can also solve the model algebraically. Let us use Y to denote the level of real GDP
and E to denote planned expenditure. We represent the marginal propensity to spend by β.
The two equations of the model are as follows:
Y = E
and
E = E
0
+ β × Y.
Here, E0 is autonomous expenditure. We can solve the two equations to find the values
ofE and Y that are consistent with both equations. Substituting for E in the first equation, we
find that
Y
equil
= (
1
1−β
) × E0 .
The equilibrium level of output is the product of two terms. The first term—(1/(1 − β))—is
called the multiplier. If, as seems reasonable, β lies between zero and one, the multiplier is
greater than one. The second term is the autonomous level of spending.
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Here is an example. Suppose that
C = 100 + 0.6Y,
I = 400,
G = 300,
and
NX = 200 − 0.1Y,
where C is consumption, I is investment, G is government purchases, and NX is net exports.
First group the components of spending as follows:
C + I + G + NX = (100 + 400 + 300 + 200) + (0.6Y − 0.1Y)
Adding together the first group of terms, we find autonomous spending:
E
0
= 100 + 400 + 300 + 200 = 1,000.
Adding the coefficients on the income terms, we find the marginal propensity to spend:
β = 0.6 − 0.1 = 0.5.
Using β = 0.5, we calculate the multiplier:
(
1
1− β
) = (
1
1−.5
) = 2.
We then calculate real GDP:
Y = 2 × 1,000 = 2,000.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”
Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”
Chapter 15 “The Global Financial Crisis”
16.20 Price Adjustment
The price adjustment equation summarizes, at the level of an entire economy, all the decisions
about prices that are made by managers throughout the economy. The price adjustment
equation is as follows:
inflation rate = autonomous inflation − inflation sensitivity × output gap.
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The equation tells us that there are two reasons for rising prices. The first is because the
output gap is negative. The output gap is the difference between potential output and actual
output:
output gap = potential real gross domestic product (real GDP) − actual real GDP.
A positive gap means that the economy is in recession—below potential output. If the
economy is in a boom, then the output gap is negative.
The second reason for rising prices is that autonomous inflation is positive. Autonomous
inflation refers to the inflation rate that prevails in an economy when an economy is at
potential output (so the output gap is zero). Looking at the second term of the price
adjustment equation, we see that when real GDP is greater than potential output, the output
gap is negative, so there is upward pressure on prices in the economy. The inflation rate will
exceed autonomous inflation. By contrast, when real GDP is less than potential output, the
output gap is negative, so there is downward pressure on prices. The inflation rate will be
below the autonomous inflation rate. The “inflation sensitivity” tells us how responsive the
inflation rate is to the output gap.
The output gap matters because, as GDP increases relative to potential output, labor and
other inputs become scarcer. Firms are likely to see rising costs and increase their prices as a
consequence. Even leaving this aside—that is, even when an economy is at potential output—
firms are likely to increase their prices somewhat. For example, firms may anticipate that
their suppliers or their competitors are likely to increase prices in the future. A natural
response is to increase prices, so autonomous inflation is positive.Figure 16.13 “Price
Adjustment” shows the price adjustment equation graphically.
Figure 16.13 Price Adjustment
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The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 7 “The Great Depression”
Chapter 10 “Understanding the Fed”
Chapter 11 “Inflations Big and Small”
Chapter 12 “Income Taxes”
16.21 Consumption and Saving
The consumption function is a relationship between current disposable income and current
consumption. It is intended as a simple description of household behavior that captures the
idea of consumption smoothing. We typically suppose the consumption function is upward-
sloping but has a slope less than one. So as disposable income increases, consumption also
increases but not as much. More specifically, we frequently assume that consumption is
related to disposable income through the following relationship:
consumption = autonomous consumption + marginal propensity to consume × disposable
income.
A consumption function of this form implies that individuals divide additional income
between consumption and saving.
We assume autonomous consumption is positive. Households consume something
even if their income is zero. If a household has accumulated a lot of wealth in the past
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or if a household expects its future income to be larger, autonomous consumption will
be larger. It captures both the past and the future.
We assume that the marginal propensity to consume is positive. The marginal
propensity to consume captures the present; it tells us how changes in current income
lead to changes in current consumption. Consumption increases as current income
increases, and the larger the marginal propensity to consume, the more sensitive
current spending is to current disposable income. The smaller the marginal propensity
to consume, the stronger is the consumption-smoothing effect.
We also assume that the marginal propensity to consume is less than one. This says
that not all additional income is consumed. When a household receives more income, it
consumes some and saves some.
Figure 16.14 “The Consumption Function” shows this relationship.
Figure 16.14 The Consumption Function
More Formally
In symbols, we write the consumption function as a relationship between consumption (C)
and disposable income (Yd):
C = a + bYd
where a and b are constants. Here a represents autonomous consumption and b is the
marginal propensity to consume. We assume three things about a and b:
1. a > 0
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2. b > 0
3. b < 1
The first assumption means that even if disposable income is zero (Yd = 0), consumption will
still be positive. The second assumption means that the marginal propensity to consume is
positive. By the third assumption, the marginal propensity to consume is less that one. With 0
< b < 1, part of an extra dollar of disposable income is spent.
What happens to the remainder of the increase in disposable income? Since consumption plus
saving is equal to disposable income, the increase in disposable income not consumed is
saved. More generally, this link between consumption and saving (S) means that our model of
consumption implies a model of saving as well.
Using
Y
d
= C + S
and
C = a + bY
d
we can solve for S:
S = Y
d
− C = −a + (1 − b)Y
d
.
So −a is the level of autonomous saving and (1 − b) is the marginal propensity to save.
We can also graph the savings function. The savings function has a negative intercept because
when income is zero, the household will dissave. The savings function has a positive slope
because the marginal propensity to save is positive.
Economists also often look at the average propensity to consume (APC), which measures how
much income goes to consumption on average. It is calculated as follows:
APC = C/Y
d
.
When disposable income increases, consumption also increases but by a smaller amount. This
means that when disposable income increases, people consume a smaller fraction of their
income: the average propensity to consume decreases. Using our notation, we are saying that
using C = a + bYd, so we can write
APC = a/Y
d
+ b.
An increase in disposable income reduces the first term, which also reduces the APC.
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The Main Use of This Tool
Chapter 12 "Income Taxes"
16.22 The Government Budget Constraint
Like households, governments are subject to budget constraints. These can be viewed in two
ways, either within a single year or across many years.
The Single-Year Government Budget Constraint
In any given year, money flows into the government sector, primarily from the taxes that it
imposes on individuals and corporations. We call these government revenues. Money flows
out in the form of outlays: government purchases of goods and services and government
transfers. The circular flow of income tells us that any difference between government
purchases and transfers and government revenues represents a government deficit.
government deficit = outlays – revenues
= government purchases + transfers – tax revenues
= government purchases (tax revenues – transfers)
= government purchases – net taxes.
Often, we find it useful to group taxes and transfers together as “net taxes” and separate out
government purchases, as in the last line of our definition.
When outflows are less than inflows, then we say a government is running a surplus. In other
words, a negative government deficit is the same as a positive government surplus, and a
negative government surplus is the same as a positive government deficit.
government surplus = −government deficit.
When a government runs a deficit, it must borrow from the financial markets. When a
government runs a surplus, these funds flow into the financial markets and are available for
firms to borrow. A government surplus is sometimes called government saving.
Intertemporal Government Budget Constraint
Tax and spending decisions at different dates are linked. Although governments can borrow
or lend in a given year, a government’s total spending over time must be matched with
revenues. When a government runs a deficit, it typically borrows to finance it. It borrows by
issuing more government debt (government bonds).
To express the intertemporal budget constraint, we introduce a measure of the deficit called
the primary deficit. The primary deficit is the difference between government
outlays, excluding interest payments on the debt, and government revenues. Theprimary
surplus is minus the primary deficit and is the difference between government revenues and
government outlays, excluding interest payments on the debt.
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The intertemporal budget constraint says that if a government has some existing debt, it
must run surpluses in the future so that it can ultimately pay off that debt. Specifically, it is
the requirement that
current debt outstanding = discounted present value of future primary surpluses.
This condition means that the debt outstanding today must be offset by primary budget
surpluses in the future. Because we are adding together flows in the future, we have to use the
tool of discounted present value. If, for example, the current stock of debt is zero, then the
intertemporal budget constraint says that the discounted present value of future primary
surpluses must equal zero.
The stock of debt is linked directly to the government budget deficit. As we noted earlier,
when a government runs a budget deficit, it finances the deficit by issuing new debt. The
deficit is a flow that is matched by a change in the stock of government debt:
change in government debt (in given year) = deficit (in given year).
The stock of debt in a given year is equal to the deficit over the previous year plus the stock of
debt from the start of the previous year. If there is a government surplus, then the change in
the debt is a negative number, so the debt decreases. The total government debt is simply the
accumulation of all the previous years’ deficits.
When a government borrows, it must pay interest on its debt. These interest payments are
counted as part of the deficit (they are included in transfers). If a government wants to
balance the budget, then government spending must actually be less than the amount
government receives in the form of net taxes (excluding interest).
This presentation of the tool neglects one detail. There is another way in which a government
can fund its deficit. As well as issuing government debt, it can print money. More precisely,
then, every year,
change in government debt = deficit − change in money supply.
Written this way, the equation tells us that the part of the deficit that is not financed by
printing money results in an increase in the government debt.
More Formally
We often denote government purchases of goods and services by G and net tax revenues (tax
revenues minus transfers) by T. The equation for tax revenues is as follows:
T = τ × Y,
where τ is the tax rate on income and Y is real gross domestic product (real GDP). The deficit
is given as follows:
government deficit = G − T = G − τ × Y.
From this equation, the deficit depends on the following:
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Fiscal policy through the choices of G and τ
The level of economic activity (Y)
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 11 "Inflations Big and Small"
Chapter 12 "Income Taxes"
Chapter 13 "Social Security"
Chapter 14 "Balancing the Budget"
Chapter 15 "The Global Financial Crisis"
16.23 The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption
The life-cycle model of consumption looks at the lifetime consumption and saving decisions of
an individual. The choices made about consumption and saving depend on income earned
over an individual’s entire lifetime. The model has two key components: the lifetime budget
constraint and individual choice given that constraint.
Consider the consumption/saving decision of an individual who expects to work for a known
number of years and be retired for a known number of years thereafter. Suppose his
disposable income is the same in every working year, and he will also receive an annual
retirement income—again the same in every year. According to the life-cycle model of
consumption, the individual first calculates the discounted present value (DPV) of lifetime
income:
DPV of lifetime income = DPV of income from working + DPV of retirement income.
(If the real interest rate is zero, then the DPV calculation simply involves adding income flows
across years.)
We assume the individual wants to consume at the same level in each period of life. This is
called consumption smoothing. In the special case of a zero real interest rate, we have the
following:
annual consumption =
lifetime income
number of years of life
.
More Formally
Suppose an individual expects to work for a total of N years and to be retired for R years.
Suppose his disposable income is equal to Yd in every year, and he receives annual retirement
income of Z. Then lifetime income, assuming a zero real interest rate, is given as follows:
lifetime income = NY
d
+ RZ.
If we suppose that he wants to have perfectly smooth consumption, equal to C in each year,
then his total lifetime consumption will be
C × (N + R).
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The lifetime budget constraint says that lifetime consumption equals lifetime income:
C × (N + R) = NY
d
+ RZ.
To obtain his consumption, we simply divide this equation by the number of years he is going
to live (N + R):
C +
NY
d
+ RZ
N + R
.
Provided that income during working years is greater than income in retirement years, the
individual will save during his working years and dissave during retirement.
If the real interest rate is not equal to zero, then the basic idea is the same—an individual
smooths consumption based on a lifetime budget constraint—but the calculations are more
complicated. Specifically, the lifetime budget constraint must be written in terms of
the discounted present values of income and consumption.
The Main Uses of This Tool
Chapter 7 "The Great Depression"
Chapter 13 "Social Security"
Chapter 14 "Balancing the Budget"
16.24 Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand
The aggregate supply and aggregate demand (ASAD) model is presented here. To understand
the ASAD model, we need to explain both aggregate demand and aggregate supply and then
the determination of prices and output.
The aggregate demand curve tells us the level of expenditure in an economy for a given price
level. It has a negative slope: the demand for real gross domestic product (real GDP)
decreases when the price level increases. The downward sloping aggregate demand curve
does not follow from the microeconomic “law of demand.” As the price level increases, all
prices in an economy increase together. The substitution of expensive goods for cheap goods,
which underlies the law of demand, does not occur in the aggregate economy.
Instead, the downward sloping demand curve comes from other forces. First, as prices rise,
the real value of nominal wealth falls, and this leads to a fall in household spending. Second,
as prices rise today relative to future prices, households are induced to postpone
consumption. Finally, a higher price level can lead to a higher interest rate through the
response of monetary policy. All these factors together imply that higher prices lead to lower
overall demand for real GDP.
Aggregate supply is equal to potential output at all prices. Potential output is determined by
the available technology, physical capital, and labor force and is unaffected by the price level.
Thus the aggregate supply curve is vertical. In contrast to a firm’s supply curve, as the price
level increases, all prices in an economy increase. This includes the prices of inputs, such as
labor, into the production process. Since no relative prices change when the price level
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increases, firms are not induced to change the quantity they supply. Thus aggregate supply is
vertical.
The determination of prices and output depends on the horizon: the long run or the short run.
In the long run, real GDP equals potential GDP, and real GDP also equals aggregate
expenditure. This means that, in the long run, the price level must be at the point where
aggregate demand and aggregate supply meet. This is shown in Figure 16.15 "Aggregate
Supply and Aggregate Demand in the Long Run".
Figure 16.15 Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand in the Long Run
In the short run, output is determined by aggregate demand at the existing price level. Prices
need not be at their long-run equilibrium levels. If they are not, then output will not equal
potential output. This is shown in Figure 16.16 "Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand in
the Short Run".
Figure 16.16 Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand in the Short Run
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The short-run price level is indicated on the vertical axis. The level of output is determined by
aggregate demand at that price level. As prices are greater than the long-run equilibrium level
of prices, output is below potential output. The price level adjusts over time to its long-run
level, according to the price-adjustment equation.
The Main Uses of This Tool
We do not explicitly use this tool in our chapter presentations. However, the tool can be used
to support the discussions in the following chapters.
Chapter 7 "The Great Depression"
Chapter 10 "Understanding the Fed"
Chapter 11 "Inflations Big and Small"
Chapter 12 "Income Taxes"
16.25 The IS-LM Model
The IS-LM model provides another way of looking at the determination of the level of short-
run real gross domestic product (real GDP) in the economy. Like the aggregate expenditure
model, it takes the price level as fixed. But whereas that model takes the interest rate as
exogenous—specifically, a change in the interest rate results in a change in autonomous
spending—the IS-LM model treats the interest rate as an endogenous variable.
The basis of the IS-LM model is an analysis of the money market and an analysis of the goods
market, which together determine the equilibrium levels of interest rates and output in the
economy, given prices. The model finds combinations of interest rates and output (GDP) such
that the money market is in equilibrium. This creates the LM curve. The model also finds
combinations of interest rates and output such that the goods market is in equilibrium. This
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creates the IS curve. The equilibrium is the interest rate and output combination that is on
both the IS and the LM curves.
LM Curve
The LM curve represents the combinations of the interest rate and income such that money
supply and money demand are equal. The demand for money comes from households, firms,
and governments that use money as a means of exchange and a store of value. The law of
demand holds: as the interest rate increases, the quantity of money demanded decreases
because the interest rate represents an opportunity cost of holding money. When interest
rates are higher, in other words, money is less effective as a store of value.
Money demand increases when output rises because money also serves as a medium of
exchange. When output is larger, people have more income and so want to hold more money
for their transactions.
The supply of money is chosen by the monetary authority and is independent of the interest
rate. Thus it is drawn as a vertical line. The equilibrium in the money market is shown
in Figure 16.17 "Money Market Equilibrium". When the money supply is chosen by the
monetary authority, the interest rate is the price that brings the market into equilibrium.
Sometimes, in some countries, central banks target the money supply. Alternatively, central
banks may choose to target the interest rate. (This was the case we considered in Chapter 10
"Understanding the Fed".) Figure 16.17 "Money Market Equilibrium" applies in either case: if
the monetary authority targets the interest rate, then the money market tells us what the level
of the money supply must be.
Figure 16.17 Money Market Equilibrium
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To trace out the LM curve, we look at what happens to the interest rate when the level of
output in the economy changes and the supply of money is held fixed. Figure 16.18 "A Change
in Income" shows the money market equilibrium at two different levels of real GDP. At the
higher level of income, money demand is shifted to the right; the interest rate increases to
ensure that money demand equals money supply. Thus the LM curve is upward sloping:
higher real GDP is associated with higher interest rates. At each point along the LM curve,
money supply equals money demand.
We have not yet been specific about whether we are talking about nominal interest rates or
real interest rates. In fact, it is the nominal interest rate that represents the opportunity cost
of holding money. When we draw the LM curve, however, we put the real interest rate on the
axis, as shown in Figure 16.19 "The LM Curve". The simplest way to think about this is to
suppose that we are considering an economy where the inflation rate is zero. In this case, by
the Fisher equation, the nominal and real interest rates are the same. In a more complete
analysis, we can incorporate inflation by noting that changes in the inflation rate will shift the
LM curve. Changes in the money supply also shift the LM curve.
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Figure 16.18 A Change in Income
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Figure 16.19 The LM Curve
IS Curve
The IS curve relates the level of real GDP and the real interest rate. It incorporates both the
dependence of spending on the real interest rate and the fact that, in the short run, real GDP
equals spending. The IS curve is shown in Figure 16.18 "A Change in Income". We label the
horizontal axis “real GDP” since, in the short run, real GDP is determined by aggregate
spending. The IS curve is downward sloping: as the real interest rate increases, the level of
spending decreases.
Figure 16.20 The IS Curve
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In fact, we derived the IS curve in Chapter 10 "Understanding the Fed". The dependence of
spending on real interest rates comes partly from investment. As the real interest rate
increases, spending by firms on new capital and spending by households on new housing
decreases. Consumption also depends on the real interest rate: spending by households on
durable goods decreases as the real interest rate increases.
The connection between spending and real GDP comes from the aggregate expenditure
model. Given a particular level of the interest rate, the aggregate expenditure model
determines the level of real GDP. Now suppose the interest rate increases. This reduces those
components of spending that depend on the interest rate. In the aggregate expenditure
framework, this is a reduction in autonomous spending. The equilibrium level of output
decreases. Thus the IS curve slopes downwards: higher interest rates are associated with
lower real GDP.
Equilibrium
Combining the discussion of the LM and the IS curves will generate equilibrium levels of
interest rates and output. Note that both relationships are combinations of interest rates and
output. Solving these two equations jointly determines the equilibrium. This is shown
graphically in Figure 16.21. This just combines the LM curve from Figure 16.19 "The LM
Curve" and the IS curve from Figure 16.20 "The IS Curve". The crossing of these two curves is
the combination of the interest rate and real GDP, denoted (r*,Y*), such that both the money
market and the goods market are in equilibrium.
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Figure 16.21
Equilibrium in the IS-LM Model.
Comparative Statics
Comparative statics results for this model illustrate how changes in exogenous factors
influence the equilibrium levels of interest rates and output. For this model, there are two key
exogenous factors: the level of autonomous spending (excluding any spending affected by
interest rates) and the real money supply. We can study how changes in these factors
influence the equilibrium levels of output and interest rates both graphically and algebraically.
Variations in the level of autonomous spending will lead to a shift in the IS curve, as shown
in Figure 16.22 "A Shift in the IS Curve". If autonomous spending increases, then the IS curve
shifts out. The output level of the economy will increase. Interest rates rise as we move along
the LM curve, ensuring money market equilibrium. One source of variations in autonomous
spending is fiscal policy. Autonomous spending includes government spending (G). Thus an
increase in G leads to an increase in output and interest rates as shown in Figure 16.22 "A
Shift in the IS Curve".
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Figure 16.22 A Shift in the IS Curve
Variations in the real money supply shift the LM curve, as shown in Figure 16.23 "A Shift in
the LM Curve". If the money supply decreases, then the LM curve shifts in. This leads to a
higher real interest rate and lower output as the LM curve shifts along the fixed IS curve.
Figure 16.23 A Shift in the LM Curve
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More Formally
We can represent the LM and IS curves algebraically.
LM Curve
Let L(Y,r) represent real money demand at a level of real GDP of Y and a real interest rate of r.
(When we say “real” money demand, we mean that, as usual, we have deflated by the price
level.) For simplicity, suppose that the inflation rate is zero, so the real interest rate is the
opportunity cost of holding money. [1] Assume that real money demand takes a particular
form:
L(Y,r) = L
0
+ L
1
Y – L
2
r.
In this equation, L0, L1, and L2 are all positive constants. Real money demand is increasing in
income and decreasing in the interest rate. Letting M/P be the real stock of money in the
economy, then money market equilibrium requires
M/P = L
0
+ L
1
Y – L
2
r.
Given a level of real GDP and the real stock of money, this equation can be used to solve for
the interest rate such that money supply and money demand are equal. This is given by
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r = (1/L
2
) [L
0
+ L
1
Y – M/P].
From this equation we learn that an increase in the real stock of money lowers the interest
rate, given the level of real GDP. Further, an increase in the level of real GDP increases the
interest rate, given the stock of money. This is another way of saying that the LM curve is
upward sloping.
IS Curve
Recall the two equations from the aggregate expenditure model:
Y = E
and
E = E
0
(r) + βY.
Here we have shown explicitly that the level of autonomous spending depends on the real
interest rate r.
We can solve the two equations to find the values of E and Y that are consistent with both
equations. We find
Y equil = (
1
1−β
) × E0 (r).
Given a level of the real interest rate, we solve for the level of autonomous spending (using the
dependence of consumption and investment on the real interest rate) and then use this
equation to find the level of output.
Here is an example. Suppose that
C = 100 + 0.6Y,
I = 400 − 5r,
G = 300,
and
NX = 200 − 0.1Y,
where C is consumption, I is investment, G is government purchases, and NX is net exports.
First group the components of spending as follows:
C + I + G + NX = (100 + 400 − 5r + 300 + 200) + (0.6Y − 0.1Y)
Adding together the first group of terms, we find autonomous spending:
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E
0
= 100 + 400 + 300 + 200 − 5r = 1000 − 5r.
Adding the coefficients on the income terms, we find the marginal propensity to spend:
β = 0.6 − 0.1 = 0.5.
Using β = 0.5, we calculate the multiplier:
(
1
1− β
) = (
1
1−.5
) = 2.
We then calculate real GDP, given the real interest rate:
Y = 2 × (1000 − 5r) = 2000 − 10r.
Equilibrium
Combining the discussion of the LM and the IS curves will generate equilibrium levels of
interest rates and output. Note that both relationships are combinations of interest rates and
output. Solving these two equations jointly determines the equilibrium.
Algebraically, we have an equation for the LM curve:
r = (1/L
2
) [L
0
+ L
1
Y – M/P].
And we have an equation for the IS curve:
Y = mE
0
(r),
where we let m = (1/(1 – β)) denote the multiplier. If we assume that the dependence of
spending in the interest rate is linear, so that E0(r) = e0 – e1r, then the equation for the IS
curve is
Y = m (e
0
-e
1
r),
To solve the IS and LM curves simultaneously, we substitute Y from the IS curve into the LM
curve to get
r = (1/L
2
) [L
0
+ L
1
m(e
0
-e
1
r) – M/P].
Solving this for r we get
r = A
r
– B
r
M/P.
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where both Ar and Br are constants, with Ar = (L0 + L1me0)/(L1me1 + L2) and Br =
1/(L1me1 + L2). This equation gives us the equilibrium level of the real interest rate given the
level of autonomous spending, summarized by e0, and the real stock of money, summarized
by M/P.
To find the equilibrium level of output, we substitute this equation for r back into the equation
for the IS curve. This gives us
Y = A
y
+ B
y
(M/P),
where both A
y
and B
y
are constants, with A
y
= m(e
0
– e
1
A
r
) and B
y
= me
1
B
r
. This equation
gives us the equilibrium level of output given the level of autonomous spending, summarized
by e
0
, and the real stock of money, summarized by M/P.
Algebraically, we can use the equations to determine the magnitude of the responses of
interest rates and output to exogenous changes. An increase in the autonomous spending, e
0
,
will increase both A
r
and A
y
, implying that both the interest rate and output increase. [2] An
increase in the real money stock will reduce interest rates by B
r
and increase output by B
y
. A
key part of monetary policy is the sensitivity of spending to the interest rate, given by e
1
. The
more sensitive is spending to the interest rate, the larger ise
1
and therefore the larger is B
y
.
The Main Uses of This Tool
We do not explicitly use this tool in our chapter presentations. However, the tool can be used
to support the discussions in the following chapters.
Chapter 9 "Money: A User’s Guide"
Chapter 10 "Understanding the Fed"
Chapter 11 "Inflations Big and Small"
Chapter 14 "Balancing the Budget"
[1] If we wanted to include inflation in our analysis, we could write the real demand for money
as L(Y, r + π), where π is the inflation rate.
[2] To see that Ay increases with e0 requires a bit more algebra
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