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Bolivia

Ecuador

Globalization and Trade

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

NAFTA Advocates Continue to Make Misleading Claims

In an effort to defend NAFTA and promote similar agreements, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) – Washington’s most influential think tank on international economic policy – had a full day of events yesterday. The program highlighted one of their recent publications [pdf], which seeks “not to rehash old claims that may have been overstated but to clear the air so that the benefits and challenges of trade can be examined in an objective light.” In spite of this disclaimer, the authors grossly overstated the benefits of NAFTA for Mexico, and put forward a number of misleading claims, including a particularly egregious bait-and-switch used to justify a rant against the economic policies of the “Andean-3” aka Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. It is a good example of how ideology can trump facts when it comes to commercial agreements made in Washington.

Earlier this year, CEPR published a paper giving an overview of the Mexican economy in the NAFTA era (“Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years”), so I will focus here on the claims made about Mexico by the PIIE economists. In terms of their bottom line for Mexico, the authors’ findings concur with our conclusions. They say that “Mexican growth in the NAFTA era has been disappointing.” But they also argue that without NAFTA Mexico’s economy would be $170 billion smaller. In other words, they attribute half of Mexico’s (per capita) growth rate to trade in goods and services stimulated by NAFTA (see table below.) Given Mexico’s population (about 118 million), this amounts to a payoff of $1,441 per person, or about $4 per day. In a country where over 27 percent of the population lives on less than $4 a day – in rural areas it is over 48 percent of the population – this would be very significant. In reality, results such as these are produced by economic models that are highly sensitive to parameters which the researchers themselves determine, so it is easy to end up with results that corroborate one’s worldview.

CEPR and Stephan Lefebvre / July 16, 2014

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Quick Thoughts on the New CBO Projections

The deficit hawks will undoubtedly find much to hype in the latest long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). After all, they move forward by a year to 2030 the date of the Social Security trust fund's depletion. That should be worth a quick war dance down at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, but there are a few items worth noting for more serious folks.

CEPR / July 16, 2014

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Yet More Frat Boy Budget Reporting at the Washington Post

Some folks might think that a newspapers job is to convey information to its readers: not the Washington Post. At least when it comes to budget reporting the Post firmly believes in the frat boy ritual of throwing out really big numbers that will be almost meaningless to virtually all of its readers.

It gave us one such ritualistic piece on Saturday that discussed new budget projections from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Among other things the piece told readers:

"The White House said Friday that the federal budget deficit will fall to $583 billion this year, the smallest deficit of President Obama’s tenure and the first to dip below $600 billion since the Great Recession took hold in 2008. ...

"The White House predicts that the nation’s finances will deteriorate markedly over the next decade, with deficits rising nearly $600 billion above previous projections. ...

"When Obama took office in 2009, the economy was in free fall and the budget deficit was soaring toward $1.4 trillion, the first of four consecutive trillion-dollar deficits that drove the national debt to the highest level as a percentage of the economy since the end of World War II. ...

"Democrats hailed Friday’s White House deficit forecast, which came on the same day as a Treasury Department announcement that the government recorded a surplus of $71 billion for the month of June. ....

"Republicans, meanwhile, noted that the long-term outlook remains gloomy, with the national debt forecast to rise to more than $25 trillion by 2024 if Obama’s policies are enacted.

"On Friday, the debt stood at $17.6 trillion."

Feel well informed? The amazing part of this story is that the reporter did not even herself have to wade through the long arduous process of dividing the numbers by GDP to make them somewhat meaningful to readers. This information was actually contained in the blogpost by OMB director Brian Deese to which the piece links.

She could have told readers that the new projections show a deficit of 3.4 percent of GDP for fiscal 2014, which is projected to fall to 3.0 percent of GDP in 2015. The size of the deficit is projected to continue to fall, hitting 2.1 percent of GDP in 2024.

While the Post piece implies that the debt situation is bad news ("remains gloomy) by just giving dollar numbers without any context, in fact it is projected to edge down slightly. The ratio of total debt (including money owed to the Social Security trust fund) to GDP is currently just over 100 percent. The latest OMB numbers project the debt to GDP ratio falls to 94.1 percent of GDP in 2024. In short, for deficit hawks the reality is the opposite of what the Post article asserts.

In addition to its frat boy use of numbers, it is also worth elaborating slightly on the pieces reference to "painful but historic spending cuts." The budget cuts were painful to millions of people who were denied work since the government was reducing demand in a badly depressed economy, therefore leaving more people without jobs. They were also painful to tens of millions of workers who were unable to secure a share of the gains from economic growth in higher wages because the weak labor market left them with little bargaining power.

The cuts probably were not painful to most business owners or highly paid professionals. The former have seen profits hit a record share of GDP, likely in part due to the fact that wages are low. The latter have benefited from being able to hire cheap help, since workers have few choices in a labor market that has been kept weak by budget cuts.

Addendum:

It is worth noting that the burden of the debt is measured by the amount of debt service, not the size of the debt. The latest OMB reports a net interest burden in 2024 of 3.0 percent of GDP. This is slightly less than its early 1990s levels. Thanks to Robert Salzberg for reminding me about this point.

 

Note: Type corrected, thanks to Rodrigo.

Dean Baker / July 14, 2014

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Bolivia

Brazil

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Does the US Have a Double Standard When it Comes to Spying on Latin America?

Brazilians may have little love for Germany following Brazil’s historic World Cup loss to the German team Tuesday, but the two countries do have something in common: both have notably been targeted for espionage by the U.S. Yesterday, U.S.-German relations suffered a new blow after Germany announced it was kicking out the CIA station chief over revelations that an employee of the German defense ministry may have passed secrets to the U.S. government. Just last week a member of Germany’s intelligence service was arrested, accused of selling information to the CIA. These scandals follow disclosures made available by Edward Snowden last year of NSA spying on Germans, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Snowden has also revealed extensive political and economic spying by the NSA on Brazil.

The Washington Post reported yesterday:

“The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the Embassy of the United States of America has been requested to leave Germany,” government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement Thursday.

…

Seibert said the request for the CIA official’s departure was made “against the backdrop of the ongoing investigations of the Federal Prosecutor General as well as the questions pending for months about the activities of the US intelligence services in Germany, for which the Lower House of Parliament has also established a parliamentary inquiry committee.”

German officials have also been angered by the revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of widespread U.S. surveillance in Germany. Among the targets was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, an operation that has since been halted.

Germany is a key partner for U.S. intelligence, and Germany’s allegations and response are no doubt being taken very seriously by both the Obama administration and the media. While the administration clearly hopes it can downplay the scandal -- and while the CIA chooses to Tweet about its robotic fish rather than publicly address the incident (h/t Jonathan Schwarz) -- officials have underscored the gravity of Germany’s response in anonymous comments to press.  The AP reported:

CEPR / July 11, 2014

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Fellow Travelers of the Depression Lobby

Paul Krugman took off the gloves in his column today. He said that much of the opposition to the Fed's low interest rate policy stems from the narrow interest of very rich people who earn lots of interest on their money. While we hear arguments, often from prominent economists, that low interest rates and other expansionary policies from the Fed risk hyper-inflation and other evil things, these arguments have repeatedly been disproven by the evidence. Krugman argues that the reason the argument against low interest rates continually reappears in different forms is the money that the 0.01 percent have at stake in protecting their interest income.

On its face this is a plausible story. Certainly the very rich have been especially prominent in making and backing absurd arguments that hyperinflation is just around the corner, or even already here, but we just can't see it  because the government is hiding it.

While we are on the topic of interests determining views on monetary policy, let's take a step over to a different, but arguably more important issue: dollar policy. The key point here is that the value of the dollar is the main determinant of the trade deficit. The basic point is simple. When the dollar is highly valued in terms of foreign currency (i.e. it takes a lot of euros, yen, or yuan to buy a dollar) our goods and services become more expensive relative to the goods and services produced by other countries. This means we will import lots of items from other countries, because they are cheap to us, and they will buy few of our exports, because they are expensive to them. In other words, we will have a large trade deficit. 

That is a big deal, especially now that even respectable economic types recognize the problem of secular stagnation. If we have a trade deficit of $500 billion (@ 3 percent of GDP), which we do, this is demand that we are generating in other countries rather than here. We have no simple mechanism for replacing this demand.

Dean Baker / July 11, 2014