Contractionary fiscal policy is … contractionary
There has been some dispute over the robustness of the finding that countries that embarked upon fiscal contraction experienced lower growth. There’s also been some dispute over the proper time horizon (I used 2010-12 in this post.) Here I provide some additional information.
Quick links to a few items I found of interest.
I’m writing a piece on recent thinking on fiscal policy efficacy, and in looking back at the debate over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, I read this choice comment from an Econbrowser reader in September 2009:
After today’s unemployment report, and in light of your past running blog fight with Posner, I’m thinking that Q3 GDP is going to come in much, much less than you would have predicted based on stimulus spending. You won’t take this as a repudiation of your multiplier theories, but I will.
From Ted Truman (former director of Int’l Finance at the Fed, former Ass’t Sec. Treasury), at Peterson Institute’s Real Time Economic Issues Watch, yesterday:
The impending congressional adoption this week of a $1.1 trillion appropriations bill has been hailed far and wide as a victory for sorely needed bipartisanship cooperation in Washington. Left out of the legislation, however, was an important but little understood and underappreciated proposal to implement reform at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). …
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Jamus Jerome Lim (World Bank), Sanket Mohapatra (World Bank), and Marc Stocker (World Bank). The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this article are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.
More from For a Few Dollars More: Reserve Accumulation in Times of Crisis, by Matthieu Bussiere (Banque de France), Menzie Chinn (UW), Gong Cheng (Sciences Po), Noemie Lisack (European University Institute) (also NBER Working Paper No. 19791):
From Davey, “Twinned Cities Now Following Different Paths,” NY Times today:
“It’s staggering, really, like night and day,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got two states with the same history, the same culture, the same people — it’s kind of like they’re cousins. And now they’re looking across the border and seeing one world, then seeing something else entirely on the other side.”
From the Economist last week:
Since the financial crisis the European Central Bank (ECB) has ploughed a solitary course, reflecting its unique status as a monetary authority without a state. While other big central banks, notably America’s Federal Reserve, adopted quantitative easing– buying government bonds by creating money– to stimulate recovery, the ECB relied mainly on lowering interest rates and providing unlimited liquidity to banks on longer terms and against worse collateral. But as the Fed phases out its asset-buying programme in 2014, it may be the ECB’s turn to become unorthodox.
By one measure, the ECB may already be there.
Somewhat of a surprise, nonfarm payroll employment increased only 74,000 in December, according to estimates from the BLS. Private NFP increased 84,000.
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Jon Frost and Ayako Saiki, econonomists at the De Nederlandsche Bank. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of De Nederlandsche Bank.