Why doesn’t capital flow from the rich countries to supposedly capital shallow New Zealand?
03 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in econometerics, economic growth, industrial organisation, politics - New Zealand Tags: capital mobility, Trans-Tasman income gap
Hall and Scobie (2005) attributed 70 percent of the labour productivity gap with Australia to New Zealand workers using less capital per worker than their Australian counterparts, rather than their using w3capital less efficiently. Figure 1 shows that the capital labour ratio is lower in New Zealand than in Australia and has been lower than Australia for several decades and is getting worse.
Figure 1: Capital intensity in New Zealand relative to Australia: 1978-2002
Source: Hall and Scobie 2005.
In 1978, New Zealand and Australian workers had about the same amount of capital per hour worked. By 2002, capital intensity in Australia was over 50 percent greater than in New Zealand. This lower rate of capital intensity is capital shallowness.
Capital should flow to countries with the highest risk adjusted rates of return. If workers in a country work with less capital than in other countries, the rate of return on providing them with more capital is higher than the global average return to capital. As Stigler (1963) said:
There is no more important proposition in economic theory than that, under competition, the rate of return on investment tends toward equality in all industries.
Entrepreneurs will seek to leave relatively unprofitable industries and enter relatively profitable industries, and with competition there will be neither public nor private barriers to these movements.
This mobility of capital is crucial to the efficiency and growth of the economy: in a world of unending change in types of products that consumers and businesses and governments desire, in methods of producing given products, and in the relative availabilities of various resources—in such a world the immobility of resources would lead to catastrophic inefficiency
Hall and Scobie (2005) acknowledged that lower capital intensities could be entirely a by-product of lower MFP. New Zealand had the third worst MFP growth performance since 1985, one quarter the OECD average (OECD 2009).
Rather than money being left on the table by persistent, known but unexploited entrepreneurial opportunities for pure profit by investing more in under-capitalised New Zealand and providing additional capital and equipment and more advanced technologies for New Zealanders to work with, investors have done the best they could the relative poor investment opportunities here.
Figure 2: Differences in capital intensity: the case of different production functions
Source: Hall and Scobie 2005.
A divergence in labour productivity levels between Australia and New Zealand emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Kehoe and Ruhl (2003) attributed 96 percent of the fall in labour productivity in New Zealand between 1974 and 1992 to a fall in MFP. Changes in capital intensities played a minor role.
Aghion and Howitt (2007) found that three-quarters of the growth in output per worker in Australia and New Zealand between 1960 and 2000 was due to growth in MFP. New Zealand’s annual MFP growth of 0.45 percent between 1960 and 2000 was simply much lower than Australia’s 1.26 percent per year. Capital deepening was equally lower in New Zealand with 0.16 percent comparing to 0.41 percent in Australia.
Less would be invested in a country if the returns are lower because the capital is poorly employed. There might be a lack of complementary skills and education and, more often, policy distortions that lower MFP (Alfaro et al 2007; Caselli and Feyrer 2007; Lucas 1990).Investment in ICT capital is greatest in the USA because it is the global industrial leader and has very flexible markets. Investment in ICT in the EU is proportionately less because less flexible markets make ICT investments in the EU members less fruitful to investors.
To explore the relative role of lower MFP and the cost of capital in capital shallowness, Hall and Scobie (2005) used national accounts data to estimate the cost of capital and found that New Zealand faced a higher cost of capital than Australia, the USA and the OECD average since the early 1990s. Research that is more recent disputes these concerns about a higher cost of capital in New Zealand.
In Caselli and Feyrer’s (2007) revised cost of capital estimates, the cost of capital is significantly lower in New Zealand than in Australia and elsewhere in the OECD area such as the USA, Japan and UK – see Figure 3. Caselli and Feyrer (2007) correct for an overestimation of the cost of capital that is prevalent for countries such as New Zealand where the value of land and natural resources are high.
Figure 3: Caselli and Feyrer’s Estimates of the Cost of Capital, 1996
Source: Caselli and Feyrer (2007); Hsieh and Klenow (2011).
Notes: The measure of capital income used by Hall and Scobie (2005) to calculate the cost of capital includes payments to reproducible physical capital (equipment, machinery, ICT, buildings and other structures) as well as payments to natural capital (land and natural resources). Dividing the income that flows to all types of capital including land and natural resources by just the value of reproducible physical capital overestimates the cost of capital. Caselli and Feyrer (2007) used World Bank (2006) estimates of natural capital stocks in 1996 to estimate of income flows to reproducible physical capital. Their estimates excluded income flows to land and natural resources to estimate the cost of reproducible capital.
Caselli and Feyrer (2007) revised estimate in Figure 3 is for the cost of capital for investing in equipment, machinery, ICT, buildings and structures. When land and resources are included, shown in light blue as the naive cost of capital, the estimated cost of capital is one-half of percentage point higher in New Zealand than in Australia and two percent higher in New Zealand than the USA and UK in Figure 3. When land and natural resources are excluded, shown in red as the adjusted for natural capital estimate, the cost of capital is much lower in New Zealand than in Australia, the USA, Japan and UK – see Figure 3.
What Caselli and Feyrer (2007) show is the estimation of the cost of capital to New Zealand is fraught with statistical difficulties. A broader data set yields radically different results. That is the broader lesson.
At a minimum, safest thing to say, is there are no reliable estimates of the cost of capital in New Zealand. Depending on how you measure it, the cost of capital in New Zealand is either much higher or much lower than in the leading industrial countries such as the USA and UK. Such a broad range of estimates is no basis for public policy interventions.
When having to choose between arguing for a persistent, known but unexploited entrepreneurial opportunities for risk-free profit left on the table in New Zealand by foreign investors for decades, and measurement error in the case of one of the nastiest measurement jobs – measuring capital and natural resources – measurement error is more likely.
Capital is the most internationally mobile of factors of production. Entrepreneurs have every incentive to move it to new destinations with higher risk-adjusted rates of returns. Returns will not be exactly equal, but there will be a tendency for equalisation subject to these reservations listed by George Stigler in 1963:
- Some dispersion in rates of return exist because of imperfect knowledge of returns on alternative investments.
- Dispersion of returns would arise because of unexpected developments and events which call for movements of resources requiring considerable time to be completed.
- Dispersion in rates of return would arise because of differences among industries in monetary and nonmonetary supplements to the average rate of return.
- In any empirical study, there is also a fourth source of dispersion: the difference between the income concepts used in compiling the data and the income concepts relevant to the allocation of resources.
The last of these reservations listed by George Stigler in 1963 about the statistical concepts used in compiling what data can be collected and the concepts relevant to the entrepreneurial decisions about the allocation of resources appear to be crucial to the debate about capital shallowness in New Zealand. They also echo Hayek’s great reservation in his 1974 lecture The Pretence to Knowledge about focusing on what can be measured rather than what is important in both economic analysis and public policy making:
We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant.
Hall and Scobie (2005) were careful scholars who noted that possibility that the apparent capital shallowness in New Zealand is merely the result of measurement error because of the problems of measuring land and natural. Caselli and Feyrer (2007) justify their caution and vindicated the view that the marginal product of capital is pretty much the same all round the world. As Caselli and Feyrer (2007) explain:
There is no prima facie support for the view that international credit frictions play a major role in preventing capital flows from rich to poor countries.
Lower capital ratios in these countries are instead attributable to lower endowments of complementary factors and lower efficiency, as well as to lower prices of output goods relative to capital. We also show that properly accounting for the share of income accruing to reproducible capital is critical to reach these conclusions.
There is various debates in policy circles in New Zealand about this lack of capital per worker and a higher cost of capital in New Zealand.
But that debate and any policy measures that were introduced as a result may be misplaced and all due to measurement error, or more correctly the grave difficulties of measuring both the capital stock and the cost of capital, both generally and in New Zealand course of its large bounty of natural resources. The data was always in doubt, so any policy interventions should be very cautious and incremental.
It would have been surprising to find that lower productivity in New Zealand was due to a lack of access to capital. There is growing evidence that capital intensities are not a major contributor to cross-national per capita income gaps.
There is a broad empirical consensus that capital intensity explains about 20 per cent of cross-country income differences; differences in human capital account for 10 to 30 per cent of cross-national differences with MFP accounting for the remaining 50 to 70 percent (Hsieh and Klenow 2011).
The New Zealand capital shallowness hypothesis is too marred in measurement shortcomings to rebut this broad empirical consensus about MFP differences between all other countries. For example, when reviewing the trans-Atlantic productivity and income gap, Edward Prescott said:
The capital factor is not an important factor in accounting for differences in incomes across the OECD countries… [It] contributes at most 8 percent to the differences in income between any of these countries.”
At the broader level, this blind alley about capital shallowness in New Zealand illustrates the pretence to knowledge. The politicians and bureaucrats pretended to know the cost of capital and the size of the capital stock in New Zealand and then work out what to do in response while doing more good than harm. This was despite serious reservations about the quality of data at hand.
This blind alley about the cost of capital and capital shallowness in New Zealand illustrates Josh Lerner’s point about distractions such as these and their many equivalents overseas reinforce the importance of the neglected art of setting the table– of fostering a favourable business environment. The neglected art of setting the table includes:
- investing in a favourable tax regime (low taxes on capital gains relative to income tax are particularly important as studies show people respond to incentives); and
- making the labour market more flexible (again the opposite of what has happened in continental Europe ),
- reducing informal and formal sanctions on involvement in failed ventures;
- easing barriers to technology transfer, and
- providing entrepreneurship education for students and professionals alike.
The timing of major economic reform programmes
01 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic growth, economics of regulation, monetarism, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, poverty and inequality Tags: economic reform, Margaret Thatcher, rent seeking, Rogernomics
There are plenty of critics of deregulation, albeit enough for them are smart enough to realise they cannot restore the lost monopolies and high marginal tax rates on the middle-class. They admit in their hearts that deregulation and other economic reforms worked as did inflation targeting.
The common force behind economic reform from 1980 onwards was the growing deadweight welfare losses of the pre-1980s status quo.The pressure for reform came from the rising burden that increases in taxes and regulation placed on economic growth as evidenced by the 1970s productivity slowdown and stagflation.
George Stigler argued that ideas about economic reform need to wait for a market. As Stigler noted, when their day comes, economists seem to be the leaders of public opinion. But when the views of economists are not so congenial to the current requirements of special interest groups, these economists are left to be the writers of letters to the editor in provincial newspapers and run angry blogs.
Post-1980 trends in taxes, spending, and regulation in New Zealand and abroad reflect demographic shifts, more efficient taxes, more efficient spending, a shift in the political influence from the taxed to the subsidised, shifts in political influence among taxed groups, and shifts in political influence among the subsidised groups (Becker and Mulligan 1998, 2003).
The common forces behind economic reform across the OECD area have subtle implications for the size of the reform dividend for New Zealand
- The deadweight losses of taxes, income transfers and regulation are a constraint on inefficient policies (Becker 1983, 1985; Peltzman 1989).
- This deadweight loss is the difference between winner’s gains less the loser’s losses from a tax or regulation-induced change in output. Changes in behaviour due to taxes and regulation reduce output and investment.
- Policies that significantly cut the total wealth available for distribution by governments are avoided because they reduce the payoff from taxes and regulation relative to the germane counter-factual, which are other even costlier modes of income redistribution (Becker 1983, 1985).
Certainly, in New Zealand, the post-1984 economic reforms followed a good 10 years of economic stagnation and regular economic crises.
In the early 1980s, New Zealand’s economy was in trouble. The country had lost its guaranteed export market when Britain joined the European Economic Union in 1973. The oil crisis that year had also taken a toll.
The Labour Party Minister of Finance, Sir Roger Douglas, prior coming to office in 1984, wrote a book called There’s Gotta Be A Better Way.
The rising deadweight cost of taxes and regulation due to technological change, and the dissipation of wealth through rising cost structures progressively enfeebled the subsidised groups, allowing others to win the initiative after the 1970s in many countries including New Zealand.
The Labour Government radically reduced the size and role of the state. It corporatised and restructured government departments, often in preparation for privatisation, and sold some state assets to private investors. It abolished many economic controls and removed farming subsidies.
The additional political pressure that the winners had to exert to keep the same dollar gain from income redistribution had to overcome rising pressure from the losers to escape their escalating losses.
Eventually, the fight was no longer worthwhile relative to the alternatives. Taxed, regulated and subsidised groups can find common ground in wealth enhancing policies and an encompassing interest in mitigating any reduction in wealth from income redistribution policies.
One barrier to reform is the transitional gains trap. The capitalisation of rents from taxi licenses is a classic example of the transitional gains trap.
Those who purchase the medallions from the owners at the time of initial regulation will pay the market rate for them and therefore will not receive any special rents. Yet, they will fight to prevent the taxi medallion system from being eliminated, since these owners will be harmed by such elimination. Thus, the city will be stuck with an inefficient medallion system that will be difficult to eliminate.
Eliminating the medallion program will harm existing taxis, many of whom did not lobby for the system in the first place and do not receive super competitive profits. The resources used in establishing the regulation or other programmes are lost forever.
Termination of a particular regulation or subsidies will nonetheless cause large capital losses for the incumbents. This will motivate incumbents to oppose reforms that jeopardise the income stream that has been previously capitalised (Tullock 1975; McCormick et al. 1984; Tollison and Wagner 1991). Any resources wasted in fighting economic reform must be deducted from the net gains from economic reform.
The literature on the transitional gains trap suggested that economic reform does not necessarily make society better off (Tullock 1975; McCormick et al. 1984; Tollison and Wagner 1991). The rent-seeking costs of the original privileges are capitalised and are lost forever. They are not regained by reform. The transitional gains trap is just a subset of a more general phenomenon indicating that deregulation can never replicate the status quo ante.
Too often it is assumed that deregulation can replicate the status quo ante. The prevailing model of deregulation is essentially a nirvana model, in that the gains from deregulation can essentially be had without cost. Further rent-seeking costs are incurred in lobbying for and against proposed reforms and these too are lost to forever.
The standard analysis of deregulation too easily treats reform as a return to the status quo ante. Fred McChesney observed
The airline industry of 1999 is not the airline industry of 1978 minus the Civil Aeronautics Board.
The wealth lost in rent seeking is not recovered, or even recoverable by deregulation. Production possibilities have been irretrievably diminished (McCormick et al. 1984; Tollison and Wagner 1991).
Reform is not a free lunch. To the extent that specialised resources were involved in the rent seeking–resources that could have been devoted to amassing specific capital in producing the regulated good–the deregulated relative price must be higher than the pre-regulation or competitive price. The abstract of the relevant article by Tollison and Wagner is as follows:
This paper applies the theory of rent seeking to argue that economic reform, in the sense of correcting past deformities in the economy, does not pay from a social point of view. Economic reform, at best, should focus on the prevention of future deformities.
The analysis is developed in terms of the example of monopoly, but its applicability extends to any example of economic reform. The general principle underlying the analysis is that reform is not a free lunch, all the more so when the costs of the reformer and the resistance of the object of reform are taken into account.
Despite this, new institutions arise when social groups notice opportunities for new gains which are impossible to realise under the prevailing institutional arrangements (Diana Thomas 2009). The chances that new institutional frameworks may develop increase when these alternative technological opportunities and export markets become available.
Reform is more likely when the net benefits of reform become large because there is plenty left over for credible compensation of the losers who could block change (Acemoglu and Robinson 2005; Acemoglu 2008). An example is if taxes or regulation causes cost padding or delay new technologies. Shedding these inefficiencies are potential benefits for all.
The political secret of the East Asian economic miracles was the focus on export led industrialisation. Because the new industries were exporting rather than entering and competing with domestic suppliers to home markets, these domestic special interest groups had no reason to lobby against the establishment of these export industries and otherwise blocked both their entry and the adoption of new technologies. The social change is much more subtle. The local industry is simply had to pay more for contract as the export industries grew and bid away their labour force with higher pay.
Successful subsidised groups are often coalitions of sub-sets of producers, consumers, employees and input suppliers and deregulation is always a possibility if some members can benefit from joining another coalition (Peltzman 1976, 1989). A surprising number of incumbents of regulated and state-owned industries were unprofitable – some close to bankruptcy – because of rising cost structures, the growing losses from mandated services and erosion of rents through non-price competition with existing firms. They would have closed anyway but for bailouts.
The economic reforms that picked up pace around 1980 were a success as Andrei Shleifer’s paper
The Age of Milton Freedom begins
The last quarter century has witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. The world’s per capita inflation-adjusted income rose from $5400 in 1980 to $8500 in 2005.Schooling and life expectancy grew rapidly, while infant mortality and poverty fell just as fast.
Compared to 1980, many more countries in the world are democratic today. The last quarter century also saw wide acceptance of free market policies in both rich and poor countries: from private ownership, to free trade, to responsible budgets, to lower taxes.
I prefer to link MPs pay rises to reductions in the trans-Tasman per capita income gap
26 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economic growth, macroeconomics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: incentive pay, lost decades, MPs pay, Trans-Tasman income gap
Edmund Phelps on Keynesian macroeconomic policy
25 Feb 2015 2 Comments
in budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, F.A. Hayek, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, macroeconomics, monetary economics Tags: Austrian real business cycle theory, Edmund Phelps, FA Hayek, Keynes in macroeconomic policy
The economic performance of the USA, Japan and the European Union prior to the global financial crisis
23 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic growth, Edward Prescott, Euro crisis, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: Euroland, GFC, global financial crisis
Source: Edward Prescott
Everybody is seriously richer because of post-war capitalism
22 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economic growth, economic history, liberalism Tags: capitalism and freedom, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
Figure 1: Growth in real average income for the bottom 90%
Source: voxeu.org
By the way, in the countries where growth in real average incomes appears to have flattened out, is it seriously suggested that middle-class families cannot buy a basket of goods of superior quality and quantity than they could 30 or 40 years ago?
US post-war economic booms compared
22 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic growth, economic history, macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: Edward Prescott
Source: Edward Prescott
Super-Economy: The Economic Performance of Europe and the United States
19 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economic growth, economic history, macroeconomics Tags: Eurosclerosis
Is the middle-class disappearing?
12 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economic growth, human capital, income redistribution, politics - USA, poverty and inequality Tags: middle class stagnation
When did global technological leadership migrate across the Atlantic?
10 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economic growth, human capital, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: global technological frontier, growth of knowledge, innovation, Schumpeter, technology diffusion
HT: theatlantic.com/a-short-history-of-american-invention/385279/ via Mikko Packalen and Jay Bhattacharya
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments