Unemployment rates across the OECD member countries
30 Jul 2015 Leave a comment
in business cycles, currency unions, economic growth, Euro crisis, job search and matching, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, unemployment Tags: employment law, employment regulation, EU, Euro sclerosis, Euroland, Eurosclerosis, Japan, labour market regulation
Why Greece joined the Euro
06 Jul 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, budget deficits, business cycles, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, currency unions, economic growth, economic history, Euro crisis, fiscal policy, fisheries economics, global financial crisis (GFC), international economics, macroeconomics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: Euro sclerosis, Greece, insurance attacks, sovereign defaults, speculative attacks
The roots of Greece’s crisis are simple. Before Greece joined the Eurozone, investors treated it as a middle-income country with poor governance — which is to say, a credit risk.
After Greece joined the Eurozone, investors thought that Greece was no longer a credit risk — they figured, if push came to shove, other Eurozone members like Germany would bail Greece out. They were wrong.
Michael Dooley put forward a theory of speculative attacks on currencies as insurance attacks on currencies for emerging markets after the East Asian financial crisis:
First generation models of speculative attacks show that apparently random speculative attacks on policy regimes can be fully consistent with rational and well-informed speculative behaviour.
Unfortunately, models driven by a conflict between exchange rate policy and other macroeconomic objectives do not seem consistent with important empirical regularities surrounding recent crises in emerging markets. This has generated considerable interest in models that associate crises with self-fulfilling shifts in private expectations.
In this paper we develop a first generation model based on an alternative policy conflict. Credit constrained governments accumulate reserve assets in order to self-insure against shocks to national consumption. Governments also insure poorly regulated domestic financial markets.
Given this policy regime, a variety of internal and external shocks generate capital inflows to emerging markets followed by successful and anticipated speculative attacks.
We argue that a common external shock generated capital inflows to emerging markets in Asia and Latin America after 1989. Country specific factors determined the timing of speculative attacks. Lending policies of industrial country governments and international organizations account for contagion, that is, a bunching of attacks over time.
His model was not within the context of a currency union but his basic theory is correct.
There are speculative attacks on a currency or a bank run after foreign markets revises their estimates of the available central bank reserves and international lines of credit to bail out the banking systems and/or foreign debt.
Michael Dooley was dealing with the emerging economies of Southeast Asia and their official lines of credit that insure their foreign exchange liabilities and domestic banking system. Greece is about lines of credit for similar purposes to other European union member states.
via 12 charts and maps that explain the Greek crisis – Vox and The Most Important Graphs of 2011 – The Atlantic.
How great was the Great Depression unemployment? The official and Darby estimates of US unemployment in the 1930s
17 Jun 2015 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic history, great depression, labour economics, macroeconomics, unemployment Tags: Euro sclerosis, measurement error, Michael Darby
The graph below shows two different series for unemployment in the 1930s in the USA: the official BLS level by Lebergott; and a data series constructed famously by Michael Darby.
Figure 1: US unemployment rate, 1929 – 40: Darby and Lebergott estimates
Source: Robert Margot (1993).
Darby includes workers in the emergency government labour force as employed – the most important being the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Once these workfare programs are accounted for, the level of U.S. unemployment fell from 22.9% in 1932 to 9.1% in 1937, a reduction of 13.8%.
For 1934-1941, the corrected unemployment levels are reduced by two to three-and-a half million people and the unemployment rates by 4 to 7 percentage points after 1933.
Not surprisingly, Darby titled his 1976 Journal of Political Economy article Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941. The corrected data by Darby shows stronger movement toward the natural unemployment rate after 1933.
From about 1935, the unemployment rate in the Great Depression in the USA is not much different from what it is in Europe in recent decades under Eurosclerosis.
In the 1930s in the USA, many unemployed were employed by the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress administration. In contemporary Europe, the unemployed are simply paid not to work under their welfare state arrangements.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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