Martin Wolf and what to do about the commodity shock

Martin Wolf's column today reflects on the commodity shock on the basis of the data provided by the World Bank in the last Commodity Markets Outlook. As has been the prevailing consensus he suggests that this is an unprecedented shock, larger than the oil shocks of the 1970s, and any other commodity crises of the last 50 years.

In his words, based on the World Bank: "the initial impact of the closure of the strait was a global loss of 10.1mn barrels a day of oil in March. This was much larger than the impact of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Arab oil embargo in 1973, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, or the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s."

The current data on the price of oil has not yet confirmed these pessimistic predictions. The issue might be related to how much of a chockepoint the Strait of Hormuz really is, and how trade can adapt to it. Note that between 1967 and 1975 the Suez Canal was closed and forced oil shipments around the Cape of Good Hope. This caused a surge in transport costs, incentivized the development of massive supertankers, and forced a rerouting of trade, but it had limited initial impact on oil prices compared to the 1973 oil crisis.

It is obviously to soon to say, but so far the current oil shock has not lived to previous ones, when oil producing countries in OPEC had more power. Figure below shows the nominal and real price of Brent oil, which remain quite below the 1970s peaks.

Wolf is on the pessimistic side of things, and suggest, correctly on that, that costs will be unevenly distributed and that action to avoid worst problems is necessary.  He says: "this is a sizeable disruption, which is sure to hit many of the world’s poorest people and most vulnerable countries hard. The rise in oil and fertiliser prices guarantees that. This underlines the moral case for continuing to provide international assistance." That's all good, even if one is more cautious about possible outcomes.

But then he goes on to say that: "central banks are going to have a tricky time navigating the consequences. But they must not let inflationary expectations slip out of control." In other words, this is going to hurt the poor, and he thinks it will very much, since this is an unprecedented shock, but central banks should not care, and be concerned only with inflation expectations.

Before the Pandemic inflation there was some growing understanding, now less so, that inflationary expectations are not that relevant (on that see this). Jeremy Rudd wrote an article for ROKE suggesting that modern macroeconomics assigns too much importance to inflation expectations, with weak theoretical and empirical justification. Measures of inflation expectations (surveys, market-based) are noisy, inconsistent and weakly correlated with actual inflation outcomes. For him, this makes them unreliable as a key driver in models.

If inflation is caused by a hike in costs of production, there is very little that a hike in interest rate could do to control it, other than repress wage increases by slowing down the economy. Not that this should be a major concern in most advanced economies, at least.

My guess is that the impact will be smaller than expected, and that central banks will overreact. That might be the case of the Fed today, that should reduce rates, but probably won't because of inflationary expectations.

GDP growth in Latin America

Writing a paper on Latin America. Nothing particularly relevant to report. I was just checking the date. Many sources to get the data. I suggest both the World Bank Development Indicators and the Conference Board Total Economic Database. At any rate, below GDP growth from the Golden Age (after the Korean War and up to Debt crisis) to the Neoliberal Era (starting in the 1990s).

Clearly growth has been more volatile and at lower rates. So much for the notion that Neoliberalism works.

Who reads the World Bank reports?

I don't. At least not regularly like I do with ECLAC, ILO, IMF and UNCTAD reports. There are a few ones that become highly controversial and had a broad readership, like the infamous East Asian Miracle Report back in 1993, written by a team that included Joseph Stiglitz, when the chief economist was Larry Summers, which presented the market-friendly approach to development, even if it made some concessions about the role of the State and industrial policy (basically saying that interventions that are market friendly are okay). The concessions to the role of State intervention were basically pushed by the Japanese government, that wanted to provide a theoretical framework more in accordance with its own development experience, and were resisted by the Bank's staff and the US. The market-friendly approach had been fully developed in the World Development Report 1991, the Bank's flagship publication.

Another World Development Report that was infamous was the 2000/2001 one. This one was on poverty, and the then chief economist Stiglitz brought Ravi Kanbur to lead the team that wrote it. The original draft gave more relevance to the empowerment of the poor than to growth (not much discussion of what causes growth, however, which would be more relevant, in my view), and it is said that Summers, US Treasury Secretary by that time, re-wrote several sections of the report. In particular, the Treasury did not want the World Bank to seem anti-globalization after the Seattle protests. Eventually Stiglitz and Kanbur resigned (Robert Wade wrote about the whole affair here).

The interesting thing is that with all this drama you would expect the readership of the World Bank reports to be huge. As it turns out, not so much.* This paper shows that:

"The World Bank invests about one-quarter of its budget for country services in knowledge products... About 13 percent of policy reports were downloaded at least 250 times while more than 31 percent of policy reports are never downloaded. Almost 87 percent of policy reports were never cited."

A lot of these are country specific reports. But given that a lot of the research is not properly autonomous, and is highly influenced by donors (meaning essentially the US Treasury), one wonders what is the purpose of the World Bank's research department.

* That is also likely true in academia, by the way. But you would expect the World Bank to have a broader readership than obscure academic journals.

Mundell-Fleming, Independent Central Banks, Inflation and Openness

Bucknell's Academic West (Bertrand Library in the background)

Teaching international finance this semester, after a long while. At Utah I taught mostly intermediate macro and Latin American Development for undergrads (and macro and history of thought for graduate students), and the eventual elective. But here the course was up for grabs, so to speak. Decided to use Peter Montiel's International Macroeconomics, since his books always provide competent presentations of the mainstream views, plus having worked at the IMF and World Bank, he always tries to cover real problems with plenty of developing country examples.

The limitation of the book is, as it should be expected, that the mainstream analytical view is, as Montiel's (p. x) says: "a generalized and modernized [sic] version of the original Mundell-Fleming model." The book does present in the last chapter the 'modern' intertemporal approach to the current account. In a later post I'll discuss the limitations of the Mundell-Fleming model, but for those interested check this paper by Serrano and Summa. In other words, Montiel's book can present the mainstream views, but lacks any critical perspective, which is not uncommon, but certainly problematic given the poor state of the mainstream understanding of how the economy works.

It is illustrative of the lack of alternatives in the book, the presentation of the relation between openness and inflation. Montiel's follows the evidence on an inverse relation between openness (that can be measured in many ways: import share, imports plus exports over GDP, etc.) and inflation presented in David Romer's well-known paper (see here). Montiel argues that in closed economies governments might tend to run fiscal deficits, that if monetized, would lead to inflation. In a more open economy, the higher deficits and inflation would lead to higher rates of interest, since international creditors faced with a risky government would demand a higher premium. In this context, "the higher interest rates that the government has to pay would tend to discourage excessively expansionary fiscal policies, thus reducing pressures on central banks to expand the money supply." If the central bank is more autonomous or independent from the Treasury then you should expect also less inflation (that would be Bernanke's explanation for the Great Moderation; here).

Many problems, as you can see. Yes, for Montiel inflation is caused by excess demand (fiscal deficits) and by increasing money supply, which seems to be what the central bank controls (let alone that all central banks control really the rate of interest). Worse, in a sense, is the notion that fiscal deficits in domestic currency (presumably, since nothing is said), may cause foreign investors to punish the government. Note that what should have investors concerned would be the current account surplus (which provides foreign reserves) and the amount of foreign reserves held by the central bank. The evidence on interest rates and fiscal deficits, by the way, is less than forthcoming for Montiel's story (see here).

A simple alternative suggests that inflation more often than not is caused by cost pressures, rather than excess demand, and that two of the main sources of cost pressures are the prices of imported goods and wage pressures. In a more open economy, in which firms are faced with competition from foreign firms, and workers might be afraid of losing their jobs, then wage resistance might be subdued. Note that over the last few decades unionization rates have declined and that also constrains the ability of workers to demand higher wages (see here). In this case, lower inflation in the globalized economy has been predicated on a weaker labor force that faces more international competition, and is more willing to accept stagnant wages. Inequality and stagnant wages, rather then well-behaved governments and independent central banks are behind the Great Moderation in this story.

Two ex-graduate students of mine, Perry and Cline (yes, someone was paying attention after all), teamed up and provided some empirical evidence in favor of the alternative story (go here). If you want to see alternative views on inflation, implicit in this discussion, go to the linked posts and papers here.

Kevin P. Gallagher on BRICS Consensus

By Kevin P. Gallagher

Conveniently scheduled at the end of the World Cup, leaders of the BRICS countries travel to Brazil in mid-July for a meeting that presents them with a truly historic opportunity. While in Brazil, the BRICS hope to establish a new development bank and reserve currency pool arrangement. This action could strike a true trifecta — recharge global economic governance and the prospects for development as well as pressure the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — to get back on the right track. The two Bretton Woods institutions, both headquartered in Washington, with good reason originally put financial stability, employment and development as their core missions. That focus, however, became derailed in the last quarter of the 20th century. During the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank and the IMF pushed the “Washington Consensus,” which offered countries financing but conditioned it on a doctrine of deregulation.

Read rest here.

Chang & Grabel on The End of The Neoliberal Approach To Development

The following is an extract from Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel's new book Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual :

We should take note of what we see as the beginning of the end of the neoliberal approach to development. The process of discrediting that development model begins in the aftermath of the east Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. At the time there appeared to be nothing new in the nature of the east Asian crisis or in the crisis response. But, in fact, the east Asian crisis marked the gradual beginning of the end of the neoliberal consensus in the development community. The severe constraints on policy space that followed the east Asian crisis created momentum behind a new vision – that developing countries had to put in place new strategies and institutions to prevent a repeat of the events of the late 1990s. Policymakers in a number of Asian countries and in other successful developing countries sought to insulate themselves from the hardships and humiliations suffered by east Asian policymakers at the hands of the IMF. Indeed, as a consequence of the crisis, the IMF suffered a loss of purpose, standing and relevance. In the early 2000s, demand for the institution's resources was at a historic low. In 2005, just six countries had standby arrangements with the fund, the lowest number since 1975. From 2003 to 2007, the fund's loan portfolio shrank dramatically: from $105bn (£63bn) to less than $10bn. The fund's loan portfolio contracted even further after the loans associated with the east Asian crisis were repaid, as those countries that could afford to do so deliberately turned away from the institution. This trend radically curtailed the geography of the IMF's influence. In this context, the IMF began to soften its traditional opposition to policies that regulate the international movement of capital (ie policies called "capital controls"). At the same time, the World Bank also began to show signs of grudging change in its traditional opposition to industrial policy.

Read the rest here.

Note: Chang & Grabel's book has an introduction written by Robert Hunter Wade. Although I could not transcribe parts of his intro into this post, let it be known that much of Wade's position with respect to the topic at hand is illustrated here.

World Bank thinks contraction in developing countries is good

The World Bank suggests that the slowdown in the periphery is good, since it has moved several countries from a positive output gap, with excess demand, to sustainable positions with negative output gaps, as shown in the graph below (h/t Otaviano Canuto; source here).

Note that Brazil, China, and India are in this category. Argentina still has excess demand. Potential GDP, which given Okun's Law imply a certain level of unemployment and connect the concept with the other neoclassical standard assumption of a natural rate of unemployment, are quite low in many developing countries if you believe the World Bank.

These are, in the World Bank's view, of course, supply side constraints that are not affected in any way by demand forces, even if the evidence in favor of the accelerator, which suggests that capacity adjusts to demand, is overwhelming.

What's the deal with PPP?

In a previous post I suggested that there might some problems with using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) measures of income per capita, the traditional measure of well-being used by the World Bank, for example. And although some might think that the main problems are basically empirical, my fundamental preoccupation is theoretical (see this paper, which in fact comes from my thesis).

PPP was developed by Gustav Cassel as an extension of the Quantity Theory of Money (QTM) to international matters. The quantity of money determined domestically the internal price level, and the exchange rate was determined as the ratio of domestic and foreign prices (or vice versa depending on how you define the exchange ratio), or in dynamic versions, the change in the exchange rate was defined as the difference of the inflation rates.

Wicksell was very critical of Cassel's theory, as I note in my paper [there were significant personal differences between the two main authors of the Swedish school, beyond their divergences on economic theory]. He basically suggested that the rate of interest, the natural rate determined by the productivity of capital and the savings decisions of economic agents, was the key variable, not the money supply. Hence, the bank rate, if it was lower than the natural rate, would not only generate his famous cumulative process of inflation, but it would also lead to flows of capital, provided that it was not in line with the bank rate of interest in other countries, and would basically determined the foreign exchange rate [note that Wicksell, and not the Keynes of the Tract, as is often argued, is the first, in 1919, to defend what we would today refer to as the uncovered interest parity condition].

From our perspective what matters here is that, even within the marginalist approach, the notion that the Quantity of Money, and prices, determine the equilibrium exchange rate is ultimately incorrect, once money is endogenous, as Wicksell assumed [note that the modern consensus in macroeconomics, both the New Keynesians and the so-called New Neoclassical Synthesis, assume an exogenous rate of interest, using some sort of rule, typically a variation of Taylor's rule]. Further, if we assume free capital movement, which implies a uniform rate of profit, marginalism would require that capital would flow to places in which it is scarce, and eventually (in the long run) the rate of profit or the natural rate of interest would be equalized.* Hence, the exchange rate that would be establish after the process is complete, would correspond to the uniform natural rate, which governs the bank rate, which as we saw is what Wicksell suggested determines exchange rate. So there must exist a natural exchange rate that corresponds to the natural rate of interest (and the natural rate of unemployment and its correspondent real wage, Friedman would argue).

It is obvious that there are 'imperfections' and the natural rate of interest is not equalized in the real world, so the exchange rate also deviates from the natural rate. But that isn't the main problem with the mainstream view. As we saw, the capital debates undermine the theoretical basis for a natural rate of interest, and hence for a natural exchange rate (or a natural rate of unemployment for that matter). Hence, it is the Keynesian (and Sraffian) institutional rate of interest, as determined by monetary authorities that rules the roost. The conventional rate of interest is then connected to a conventional exchange rate [then institutional factors become relevant, like the existence or not of capital controls, etc.].

Leave aside the theoretical problems of purchasing power parity measures, since they are NOT attractors of the actual exchange rates [the reasons why Argentina had a 1 to 1 exchange rate with the dollar for a decade, or Greece has a 'fixed' parity too are political and institutional], and even if for some purposes you may want to use PPP rates as a measure of material welfare, one may also be interested in actual market exchange rates for other purposes. Indeed, for most of the relevant matters that concern economic well being, particularly in peripheral countries, like the capacity to repay foreign debt and avoid default and import capital goods to promote growth, it is the market exchange rate that is central to convert incomes in different countries into a common numeraire.**

* The fact that capital does NOT flow to developing countries is something that still puzzles very much mainstream economists like Robert Lucas (see here).

** Which means that China is considerably less developed than Argentina and Brazil, even if it is growing fast, it has a regional hegemonic project, and is, by sheer size, one of the most important economies in the world.

Heterodox (Development) Bankers

Robert Skidelsky recounts how Victor Urquidi was instrumental in changing the future World Bank from a reconstruction to a development bank. In the words of Urquidi:

"With our chief delegate’s approval, and without any consultation with US delegation… we drafted an amendment to Article III, in order to lend more emphasis to development….Because my English was better than my fellow delegate’s I was asked to read it aloud…Keynes was characteristically quick to realise the ‘political’ significance of our amendment, which was…supported only by Peru and Norway…As he pushed his spectacles to the top of his nose and shuffled the various amendments that were upon the table, he picked out and expressed agreement with ours if we would accept a drafting change. The original text merely stated that ‘The resources and facilities of the Bank shall be used for the benefit of members’. In the amendment we submitted, we wrote a second paragraph as follows: ‘The Bank shall give equal consideration to projects for development and to projects for reconstruction…’ Keynes suggested ‘The resources and facilities of the Bank shall be used exclusively for the members with equitable consideration to projects for development and projects for reconstruction alike’. We were pleased with the word ‘equitable’ and that he put ‘development’ ahead of ‘reconstruction’. I quickly nodded…and the amendment was carried by consensus."

Urquidi then worked at the then Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA, later with the addition of the Caribbean ECLAC), when Raúl Prebisch was the secretary general in the 1950s. For more on Urquidi go here.

In the news

Two big news today.

The US, as expected, managed to keep the presidency of the World Bank. Kim was chosen over more qualified and progressive alternatives (José Antonio Ocampo, in particular). See more here.

And Argentina has nationalized the oil company (YPF) that had been privatized during the neoliberal period. By the way, notice that neither Brazil nor Mexico, the other two large countries in Latin America, had privatized their oil companies. See more here.

You've been punk'd!



Via Billy blog. The World Bank announced Madelyn Antoncic as its new Vice President and Treasurer. According to the president of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick:

“She brings to the Bank an extensive background in the financial industry and a demonstrated record of leadership, innovation, and integrity.”

Yep, she does. She was Lehman’s Global Head of Market Risk Management.  She does have experience with bankrupting institutions!