Europe’s fiscal compact went into effect January 1, as a result of its ratification December 21 by the 12^th country, Finland, a year after German Chancellor Angela Merkel prodded eurozone leaders into agreement.   The compact (technically called the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union) requires  member countries to introduce laws limiting their structural government budget deficits to less than ½ % of GDP.  A limit on the “structural deficit” means that a country can run a deficit above the limit to the extent — and only to the extent — that the gap is cyclical, i.e., that its economy is operating below potential due to temporary negative shocks.   In other words, the target is cyclically adjusted.  The budget balance rule must be adopted in each country, preferably in their national constitutions, by the end of 2013.

    Will the new approach help?   The aim is to fix Europe’s long-term fiscal problem, which since the date of the euro’s inception has been evident in the failure of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), the crisis in Greece and other periphery countries that surfaced in 2010, and the various ways in which these countries were subsequently bailed out.  

     There is no reason to doubt that the eurozone countries will follow through to the extent of adopting the national rules by the end of the year.  ["The granting of new financial assistance under the European Stability Mechanism is conditional on ratification of the fiscal compact and transposition of the balanced budget rule into national legislation in due time."]  But after that the fiscal compact will probably founder on precisely the same shoals as the SGP.

    Since the inception of the euro, its members have made official fiscal forecasts that are systematically biased in the optimistic direction.   Other countries do this too, but the bias among eurozone countries is, if anything, even worse than that elsewhere.  During a period of economic expansion, such as 2002-07, governments are tempted to forecast that the boom will continue indefinitely.  Forecasts for tax revenue and budget surpluses are correspondingly optimistic and so hide the need for adjustment of fiscal policies.  During a period of recession, such as 2008-2012, governments are tempted to forecast that their economies and budgets will soon rebound.  Since forecasting is subject to so much genuine uncertainty, nobody can prove that the forecasts are biased when they are made.

     Fiscal rules such as the SGP ceilings won’t constrain budget deficits, if forecasts are biased.  The reason is that governments can in any given year forecast that their growth rates, tax revenues, and budget balances will improve in the subsequent years, and then next year say that the shortfalls were unexpected.   Indeed, it turns out that the eurozone bias in official forecasts during 1999-2011 can be neatly characterized as responding to the SGP’s 3% limit on budget deficits by offering over-optimistic forecasts each time governments exceed the limit.  In other words, they adjust their forecasts rather than their policies.   (The results described here come from a new paper, coauthored with Jesse Schreger: “Over-optimistic Official Forecasts and Fiscal Rules in the Eurozone,” forthcoming 2013 in the Review of World Economy, vol.149, no.2, from Germany’s Kiel Institute.)

    Phrasing the budget rules in cyclical terms, while highly desirable in terms of macroeconomic impact, does not help solve the problem of forecast bias.  It can even make it worse.  In a year when a forecast for the actual budget deficit turns out to have been over-optimistic, the government has to admit that it made a mistake, which can carry some embarrassment.  In a year when a forecast for the structural budget deficit turns out to have been over-optimistic, the government can still claim that its own calculations show the shortfall to have been cyclical rather than structural.   After all, estimation of potential output and hence the cyclical versus structural decomposition is notoriously, even after the fact.

   Will it help that under the fiscal compact the rules are to be adopted at the national level, as opposed to the supranational level on which the SGP operated?  A look at the various rules and institutions that have already been tried by European countries shows that some work and others don’t.  Creating an independent fiscal institution that provides its own independent budget forecasts works, in that it reduces the bias in projections.  Euro area governments with an independent budget forecasting institution have a mean bias when making forecasts while in violation of the Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) that is smaller by 2.7% of GDP [at the one-year horizon], compared to euro area countries that are in violation of the EDP without such an independent fiscal institution.

    It would be better still if the governments were legally bound to use these independent forecasts in their budget plans (thereby borrowing an innovation from Chile).  

   Regardless how well-designed the rules are, clever and determined politicians can find ways around them.  One of the tricks is the privatization of government enterprises which reduces the budget deficit this year on a one-time non-repeatable basis, but might raise it in the long-term if the enterprise had been earning profits.  Another trick is phony legislated sunsets on tax cuts, in order to make future revenues look larger despite the political intention later to make the tax cuts permanent. 

   Still, other things equal, the right institutions can reduce the procyclicality of fiscal policy in the short run and help deliver debt sustainability in the long run.    Examples of the right institutions are cyclically adjusted budget targets combined with independent agencies that make independent fiscal forecasts.  Things can still go wrong even if such mechanisms are in place; but, as the history of the SGP illustrates, the risk is higher if they are not.

     [The original of this post appears at Project Syndicate.  Comments may be posted there.]

It is with regret that we announce the death of Inflation Targeting.    The monetary regime, known affectionately as “IT” to its friends, evidently passed away in September 2008.   That the demise of IT has not been officially announced until now testifies to the esteem in which it was widely held, its usefulness as a figurehead for central banks, and fears that there might be no good candidates to assume its position as preferred anchor for monetary policy.

Inflation Targeting was born in New Zealand in March 1990.   Admired for its transparency and accountability, it achieved success there, and soon also in Canada, Australia, the UK, Sweden and Israel.  It subsequently became popular as well in Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru) and in other developing countries (South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and Turkey, among others).   

One reason that IT gained such wide acceptance as the champion nominal anchor was the failure of its predecessor, exchange rate targeting, in the currency crises of the 1990s.   Pegged exchange rates had succumbed to fatal speculative attacks in many of these countries.  The authorities needed something new to anchor the public’s expectations of monetary policy.  IT was in the right place at the right time.

Before the reign of exchange rate targeting, in turn, the fashion in the early 1980s had been money supply targeting, the brainchild of monetarist Milton Friedman.   The money supply rule had succumbed to violent money demand shocks rather quickly.  Friedman’s general argument for rules over discretion, in order to make a commitment to low inflation credible, however, is still very influential.

Inflation Targeting was best known as a rule that told central banks to set a target range for the yearly rate of change of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and to try their best to attain it.    Close cousins included targeting the price level (instead of the inflation rate) and targeting the core inflation rate (that is, excluding the volatile food and energy components of prices) instead of the headline number.    

There were also proponents of Flexible Inflation Targeting, who held that it was fine to put some weight on real GDP growth in the short run, so long as there was a clear target for CPI inflation in the longer term.     But some felt that if the definition of IT were stretched too far, it would lose its meaning.

Regardless, Inflation Targeting has taken some heavy blows over the last four years, analogous to the crises that hit exchange rate targets in the 1990s.   Perhaps the biggest setback came in September 2008, when it became clear that central banks that had been relying on IT had not paid enough attention to asset bubbles. 

Central bankers had told themselves that they were giving asset markets all the attention they deserved, by specifying that housing prices and equity prices could be taken into account to the extent that they carried information regarding goods inflation.  But this escape clause proved insufficient:  When the global financial crisis hit, suggesting at least in retrospect that monetary policy had been too loose during the years 2003-06, it was neither preceded nor followed by an upsurge in inflation.  

That the boom-bust cycle could take place without inflation should not have come as a surprise.  The same thing had happened when asset market bubbles ended in crashes in the United States in 1929, Japan in 1990, and Thailand and Korea in 1997.  And the Greenspan hope that monetary easing could clean up the mess in the aftermath of such a crash proved wrong in the great recession of 2008-09.

While the lack of response to asset market bubbles was probably the biggest failing of Inflation Targeting, another major setback was inappropriate responses to supply shocks and terms of trade shocks.  An economy is healthier if monetary policy responds to an increase in the world prices of its exported commodities by tightening enough to appreciate the currency.   But CPI targeting instead tells the central bank to appreciate in response to an increase in the world price of the imported commodities — exactly the opposite of accommodating the adverse shift in the terms of trade.  For example, it is widely suspected that the reason for the otherwise-puzzling decision of the European Central Bank to raise interest rates in July 2008, as the world was sliding into the worst recession since the 1930s, was that oil prices were just then reaching an all-time high.  Oil prices get a substantial weight in the CPI, so stabilizing the CPI when dollar oil prices go up requires appreciating versus the dollar.

One promising candidate to take the position of preferred nominal anchor has lately received some enthusiastic support in the blogs:  Nominal GDP Targeting.   The idea is not new.  It had been a candidate to succeed money targeting in the 1980s, since it did not share the latter’s vulnerability to velocity shocks. 

Nominal GDP Targeting was never adopted at that time.  But now it is back.  Its fans point that it would not, like Inflation Targeting, have the problem of excessive tightening in response to adverse supply shocks.    Nominal GDP targeting stabilizes demand, which is really all that can be asked of monetary policy.  (An adverse supply shock is automatically divided between inflation and real GDP, equally, which is pretty much what a central bank with discretion would do anyway.)

A dark horse candidate is Product Price Targeting.  It would focus on stabilizing an index of producer prices rather than an index of consumer prices, and so would not like IT have the problem of responding perversely to terms of trade shocks.  The supporters of both Nominal GDP targeting and Product Price Targeting claim that IT sometimes gave the public the misleading impression that it would stabilize the cost of living even in the face of supply shocks or terms of trade shocks, over which central banks have no control.

IT is survived by the gold standard, an elderly distant relative.   Although some eccentrics favor a return to gold as the monetary anchor, most would prefer to leave this relic of another age to its peaceful retirement, reminiscing over burnished fables of its long lost youth.

[This post originally appeared as an op-ed in Project Syndicate.]

            As Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet prepares to hand over power to her newly elected successor, she remains extraordinarily popular.  It is worth reflecting on the fiscal aspects of her term in office, as Chile has important lessons for other countries struggling with fundamental long-term budget problems, which includes a lot of countries right now.

             As recently as June 2008, President Bachelet and her Finance Minister, Andres Velasco, had the lowest approval ratings of any President or Finance Minister, respectively, since the return of democracy to Chile. (See graphs below.) There may have been multiple reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was popular resentment that the two had resisted intense pressure to spend the receipts from copper exports, which at the time were soaring along with world copper prices.  One year later, in the summer of 2009, the pair had the highest approval ratings of any President and Finance Minister since the return of democracy.  Why the change?  

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