Globalisation has stopped, but it's not actually reversing - yet

In case you’ve been too worried about your mortgage to notice, the era of ever-increasing globalisation has ended. There’s a backlash against greater economic integration and a risk it will start going backwards, causing the global economy to “fragment”.

The process of globalisation involves the free flow of ideas, people, goods, services and financial capital across national borders, leading to economic integration. But, as a new post on the International Monetary Fund’s blog site reminds us, globalisation is not new, and the process has ebbed and flowed over many decades.

The post charts the progress of globalisation back more than 150 years. Using openness to international trade – measured as global exports plus imports as a proportion of world gross domestic product – it divides that period into five successive eras.

First came the era of industrialisation between 1870 and 1914, when increasing trade between Europe and the “new world” of North America, Argentina and Australia was driven largely by technological advances in transportation – including steel-hulled, steam-driven ships and refrigeration for shipping meat – which lowered the cost of trade.

The laying of undersea cables to improve communication between countries also helped.

Then came the era of wars and protectionism, beginning with the start of World War I in 1914 and finishing with the end of World War II in 1945.

In between came the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was made much worse than it needed to have been by governments trying to protect their domestic industries by using high import duties (“tariffs”) to keep people buying local.

It sounds like a great idea when you do it to other countries. It turns into a stupid idea when they retaliate and do it to you, leaving everyone worse off.

After trade had increased from 30 per cent of world GDP to more than 40 per cent during the era of industrialisation, it had fallen back to about 15 per cent by the end of World War II.

Third came the era of tariff reform between 1945 and 1980. Even before the war had ended, the Allies knew they’d have to fix the world economy. They decided to move to a system of fixed exchange rates and establish the IMF and the World Bank. Most importantly, they set up the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organisation).

The GATT arranged eight successive “rounds” of multilateral trade negotiations, in which the developed countries agreed to big reductions in their barriers to imports. Thanks to all this, trade doubled from 15 per cent of world GDP to 30 per cent.

This led on to the era of “hyperglobalisation” between 1980 and 2008, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and collapse of the Soviet Union, bringing the Cold War to an end.

The eighth, biggest and final, “Uruguay” round of the GATT, in 1994, focused on increasing trade between the developed and developing countries, with many poor economies joining the WTO.

China’s economy began growing rapidly after it was opened up in the late 1970s, and in 2001 it was permitted to join the WTO, hugely increasing its trade.

The era also brought a move to floating exchange rates and deregulation of banking systems, leading to much increased investment between rich and poor countries.

As well, big advances in telecommunications, computerisation and the advent of the internet allowed a surge of trade in digital services, including data processing.

Resulting from all this, trade reached a peak of more than 55 per cent of world GDP in 2008, on the eve of the global financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.

The IMF bloggers label the present period, with figures from 2008 up to 2021, the era of “slowbalisation”. To date, those figures bear this out: trade has reached a plateau of about 55 per cent. More recent figures show world trade has largely bounced back from the initial effects of the pandemic’s global coronacession.

It seems the combined effect of the Great Recession and rising protectionist sentiment has stopped trade from continuing to shoot up relative to world GDP, but not caused it to fall back – or not yet.

Less optimistic observers, however, refer to present as the era of “deglobalisation”. They worry that we’re in the early stages of a period of “policy-induced geoeconomic fragmentation”.

It’s not hard to see what’s worrying them. First we had Britain deciding to leave the European Union, then the election of Donald Trump, vowing to “make America great again” by whacking up tariff barriers against the exports of friend and foe alike, and starting a trade war with China.

Now we have the use of trade and other economic sanctions by many countries to punish Russia in its war against Ukraine, which is fragmenting world trade.

US President Joe Biden has toned down his predecessor’s excesses, but not abandoned the trade war. This doesn’t seem to be about protectionism so much as America’s desire not to be overtaken by China as the world’s dominant superpower. In particular, the US wants to stay ahead of the Chinese in advanced digital technology, by denying them access to the latest and best semiconductors.

The risk is that the two could end up dividing the global economy into separate trading blocs, America and its democratic friends versus China and its autocratic friends. This would almost certainly slow the economic growth of both groupings.

And, as economist Dr John Edwards has written, dividing the trading world into good guys and bad guys would not suit us, nor our region. Our exports to China greatly exceed our exports to the US and other close security allies.

And all the East Asian economies – including Japan and South Korea – have China as a major trading partner. For that matter, China and the US are major trading partners of each other.

Fortunately, and despite all the sparring we’ve seen, Edwards and others find no evidence that the US and China have yet started to “decouple”.

Let’s hope economic sense prevails, and it stays that way.

Read more >>

RBA warning: our supply-side problems have only just begun

In one of his last speeches for the year, Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe has issued a sobering warning. Even when we’ve got on top of the present inflation outbreak, the disruptions to supply we’ve struggled with this year are likely to be a recurring problem in the years ahead.

Economists think of the economy as having two sides. The supply side refers to our production of goods and services, whereas the demand side refers to our spending on those goods and services, partly for investment in new production capacity, but mainly for consumption by households.

Lowe notes that, until inflation raised its ugly head, the world had enjoyed about three decades in which there were few major “shocks” (sudden big disruptions) to the continuing production and supply of goods and services.

When something happens that disrupts supply, so that it can’t keep up with demand, prices jump – as we’ve seen this year with disruptions caused by the pandemic and its lockdowns, and with Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

What changes occurred over the three decades were mainly favourable: they involved increased supply of manufactured goods, in particular, which put gentle downward pressure on prices.

This made life easier for the world’s central banks. With the supply side behaving itself, they were able to keep their economies growing fairly steadily by using interest rates to manage demand. Put rates up to restrain spending and inflation; put rates down to encourage spending and employment.

The central banks were looking good because the one tool they have for influencing the economy – interest rates – was good for managing demand. Trouble is – and as we saw this year – managing demand is the only thing central banks and their interest rates can do.

When prices jump because of disruptions to supply, there’s nothing they can do to fix those disruptions and get supply back to keeping up with demand. All they can do is strangle demand until prices come down.

So, what’s got Lowe worried is his realisation that a lot of the problems headed our way will be shocks to supply.

“Looking forward, the supply side looks more challenging than it has been for many years” and is likely to have a bigger effect on inflation, making it jump more often.

Lowe sees four factors leading to more supply shocks. The first is “the reversal of globalisation”.

Over recent decades, international trade increased significantly relative to the size of the global economy, he says.

Production became increasingly integrated across borders, and this lowered costs and made supply very flexible. Australia was among the major beneficiaries of this.

Now, however, international trade is no longer growing faster than the global economy. “Trading blocs are emerging and there is a step back from closer integration,” he says. “Unfortunately, today barriers to trade and investment are more likely to be increased than removed.”

This will inevitably affect both the rise in standards of living and the prices of goods and services in global markets.

The second factor affecting the supply side is demographics. Until relatively recently, the working-age population of the advanced economies was steadily increasing. This was also true for China and Eastern Europe – both of which were being integrated into the global economy.

And the participation of women in the paid labour force was also rising rapidly. “The result was a substantial increase in the number of workers engaged in the global economy, and advances in technology made it easier to tap into this global labour force,” Lowe says.

So, there was a great increase in global supply. But this trend has turned and the working-age population is now declining, with the decline projected to accelerate. The proportion of the population who are either too young or too old to work is rising, meaning the supply of workers available to meet the demand for goods and services has diminished.

The third factor affecting the supply side is climate change. Over the past 20 years, the number of major floods across the world has doubled and the frequency of heatwaves and droughts has also increased.

This will keep getting worse.These extreme weather events disrupt production and so affect prices – as we know all too well in Australia. But as well as lifting fruit and vegetable prices (and meat prices after droughts break and herd rebuilding begins), extreme weather can disrupt mining production and transport and distribution.

The fourth factor affecting the supply side is related: the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. This involves junking our investment in coal mines, gas plants and power stations, and new investment in solar farms, wind farms, batteries and rooftop solar, as well as extensively rejigging the electricity network.

It’s not just that the required new capital investment will be huge, but that the transition from the old system to the new won’t happen without disruptions.

So, energy prices will be higher (to pay for the new capital investment) and more volatile when fossil-fuel supply stops before renewables supply is ready to fill the gap.

Lowe foresees the inflation rate becoming more unstable through two channels. First, shocks to supply that cause large and rapid changes in prices.

Second, the global supply curve becoming less “elastic” (less able to respond to increases in demand by quickly increasing supply) than it has been in the past decade.

Lowe says bravely that none of these developments would undermine the central banks’ ability to achieve their inflation target “on average” - that is, over a few years – though they would make the bankers’ job more complicated.

Well, maybe. As he reminds us, adverse supply shocks can have conflicting effects, increasing inflation while reducing output and employment. The Reserve can’t increase interest rates and reduce them at the same time.

As Lowe further observes, supply shocks “also have implications for other areas of economic policy”. Yes, competition policy, for instance.

My conclusion is that managing the economy can no longer be left largely to the central bankers.

Read more >>

This isn't America, so please stop acting like a Yank

If there’s one thing that annoyed me about 2021, it’s the way people have been aping all things American. Our financial markets copped a bad dose of it, the media got carried away, we looked to the Yanks – the smart ones and the crazies - to know what we should think and do about the coronavirus, and many on the Right of politics took their lead from Trump’s Republicans.

One on one, I like the Americans I know. But put them together as a nation, and they seem to have lost their way. We’ve long imagined the US to be the wellspring of everything new and better, but these days it seems to be racing headlong towards dystopia.

Who’d want to be an American? Who’d want to live there?

There’s nothing new, of course, about American cultural imperialism. You’ve long been able to buy a Coke in almost any country. Or, these days, a Big Mac or KFC.

But globalisation has hugely increased America’s influence in the world. Wall Street dominates the world’s now highly integrated financial markets. What’s less well appreciated is the way advances in telecommunications and information processing have globalised the news media. Call it the internet.

These days, news of a major occurrence in any part of the world spreads almost in real time. One thing this means is that you can read the latest from The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald in almost any country.

But another thing is that we get saturation coverage of all things America. These days, America’s greatest export is “intellectual property” – patents and copyright covering machines, medicines and software, but also books, films, TV shows, videos and recorded music, and news and commentary from all of America’s great “mastheads”.

Of course, the little sister syndrome applies. Just as Kiwis know more about us than we know about them, so we and people in every other country know more about the Americans than they know about us. Just ask John Fraser, Malcolm Trumble and “that fella from Down Under”.

And remember this: when you’re as big and as rich as America, you’re the best in the world at most things – but also the worst in the world. These guys win the Nobel Prize in economics almost every year but, no doubt, have the biggest and best Flat Earth Society. They have loads of the super-smart, but even more of the really dumb.

Back to this year’s Yankophile annoyances, as soon as Wall Street decided America had an inflation problem and would soon be putting up interest rates, our local geniuses decided we’d soon be doing the same.

Small problem – we don’t have a problem with inflation. Our money market dealers know more about the US economy than they know about their own. To them, we’re just a smaller, carbon copy of America. If you’ve seen America, you’ve seen ’em all.

The Americans have a lot of people withdrawing from the workforce – leaving jobs and not looking for another – which they’re calling the Great Resignation. Wow. Great new story. So, some people in our media are seizing any example they can find to show we have our own Great Resignation.

Small problem. Ain’t true. Following the rebound from the first, nationwide lockdown in 2020, our “participation rate” – the proportion of the working-age population participating in the labour force by having a job or actively looking for one – hit a record high. With the rebound from this year’s lockdowns well under way, the rate’s almost back to the peak.

A lot of America’s problems arise from the “hyperpolarisation” of its politics. Its two political tribes have become more tribal, more us-versus-them, more you’re-for-us-or-against-us. The two have come to hate each other, are less willing to compromise for the greater good, and more willing to damage the nation rather than give the other side a win. More willing to throw aside long-held conventions; more winner-takes-all.

The people who see themselves as the world’s great beacon of democracy are realising they are in the process of destroying their democracy, brick by brick – fiddling with electoral boundaries and voting arrangements, and stacking the Supreme Court with social conservatives.

Donald Trump continues to claim the presidential election was rigged, and many Republicans are still supporting him.

It’s not nearly that bad in Australia, but there are some on the Right trying to learn from the Republicans’ authoritarian populism playbook.

When your Prime Minister starts wearing a baseball cap it’s not hard to guess where the idea came from. Or when the government wants to require people to show ID before they can vote, or starts stacking the Fair Work Commission with people from the employers’ side only. Enough.

Read more >>

Why we're stuck with low interest rates for a long time

When it comes to interest rates, we’re living in the strangest of times, with rates lower than ever.

Savers are getting next to no reward for lending their money. Does this make sense? Not really. But we’re moving through uncharted waters and aren’t sure how we’ll get out of them, nor what happens next.

When Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe appeared before Parliament’s economics committee last Friday, he was asked whether we get the interest rates the world forces on us, or whether our authorities are free to set the rates they want.

Lowe’s answer was “we have the freedom, but we don’t”. Huh? “It’s complicated,” he explained.

Sure is. What he could have said is that we have some freedom, but not much. Were we to set our interest rates at a very different level to those in the rest of the world, there’d be a price for us to pay.

His own explanation was as clear as mud: we don’t have freedom in a structural sense, but we still have freedom in a cyclical sense.

Let me have a go. Remember that, as part of the process of globalisation over the past 40 years, the rich countries’ national financial markets are now so closely integrated with each other that each country exists in what’s pretty much a single global market, producing a single long-term real interest rate.

Purely by virtue of its big share of the global market, the things an economy as big as the US does can influence the level of the global interest rate. But nothing a middle-size economy like ours does is big enough to move the world rate. We are, as economists say, a “price taker”. We’re free only to take it or leave it.

The market price of something (including the price of borrowing money – the rate of interest) is set by the interaction of demand and supply: how much of it the buyers want to buy, relative to how much the sellers want to sell.

Lowe explained that the reason the “world equilibrium interest rate” has fallen so close to zero since the global financial crisis of 2008 is that, around the world, there’s been an increased desire by people to save, but a reduced desire to invest. That is, savers want to lend a lot more money than investors want to borrow, so interest rates have fallen sharply.

I think by now most economists accept this as the best explanation for the amazing low to which interest rates have fallen. It’s what Lowe means by “structural”. Just why saving is so much greater and investment so much smaller are questions economists are still debating.

Note that this explanation laughs at the standard view in neo-classical economics that saving increases when interest rates are higher, while investment increases when interest rates are lower.

Nor does it fit with the view that the “natural” rate of interest should reflect the rate of business profitability. Although the profits of some businesses have been hard hit by the pandemic, before it arrived – and even since, for most businesses – profitability has been high.

An alternative, minority view – pushed by economists at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, the central bankers’ central bank – is that world interest rates have fallen so low because of the Americans’ excessive use of “quantitative easing” (central banks buying second-hand bonds and paying for them with money they’ve just created) after the global financial crisis and then, once the US economy had recovered, their failure to sell those bonds back to the market and so push interest rates back up.

An economy where households are saving too much of their incomes, and businesses don’t want to invest in expansion, is an economy that’s growing too slowly and not creating many new jobs. The solution, Lowe said, was to give people confidence to spend (and so get their rate of saving down) and give firms the confidence to invest.

How is he doing this? By cutting the official interest rate as close to zero as possible, and using quantitative easing to lower longer-term government and private sector interest rates. Really? Sounds to me like hoping to recover from a hangover by having another drink.

But back to the point. If interest rates ought to be higher to give savers a decent reward on the money they lend, why can’t our central bank set our interest rates higher than those being paid in other parts of the world?

Well, it can. We do retain that freedom. But because our financial markets are just part of the global market, what that would do is push up our exchange rate.

Why? Because financial institutions around the world would shift money into Australian dollars so as to get into our market and take advantage of our higher interest rates. When the demand for “the Aussie” exceeds the supply, the price goes up.

Such a rise in our currency’s rate of exchange against other currencies would reduce the international price competitiveness of our export and import-competing industries, thus reducing our economy’s growth and job opportunities.

That’s the price we’d pay for stepping out of line.

Lowe told the committee that the two main factors that drive the value of our dollar are world commodity prices and relative interest rates – that is, the level of our interest rates relative to other countries’ rates.

The prices we receive for the commodities we export (particularly iron ore) are up but, he said, the Aussie hadn’t appreciated (risen) by as much as you’d expect from past relationships. Why not? Because our lower official interest rates and quantitative easing have narrowed the interest rate “differential” between our rates and the rest of the world.

So, although rising commodity prices have caused our exchange rate to go higher, our quantitative easing has nevertheless caused the dollar to be “lower than it otherwise would be”. Ah. That’s the game he’s playing.

Read more >>

Mistreating workers isn’t a smart path to prosperity

Sometimes I think that, when it comes to industrial relations, we’ve gone from one extreme to the other. We used to be pushed around – and frequently inconvenienced – by overly powerful unions, but now the employers are on top and want it all their own way.

We’ve gone from often inflexible and unreasonable unions to “workplace flexibility” that’s all about making life easier – and more hugely remunerated – for bosses, while making work unpleasant and unrewarding – emotionally and monetarily – for far too many of our workers.

I guess what it proves is that when one side or the other acquires too much power, the temptation to abuse it is irresistible.

The push to “reform” Australia’s highly centralised wage fixing began with the Hawke-Keating government and its accord with the union movement. It was taken a lot further – and became a lot more overtly anti-union – under the Howard government.

At the time, many of these “reforms” seemed sensible. What we didn’t realise then was the way globalisation (“Why don’t I move my factory to Asia where wages are lower?”) and the digital revolution (“Why employ a worker when you can farm stuff out to some unknown slave on the internet?”) would undercut the unions without any help from reforming legislators.

The result is, unions are now a shadow of their former selves, clinging to their role in industry super funds to keep themselves relevant. The proportion of workers who belong to unions has gone from half to 15 per cent and falling.

On the other hand, one unintended consequence of the now-ended era of neoliberalism has been to convince our manager class they have a divine right to be given whatever they think necessary to their greater success.

Which brings us to the latest batch of “reforms” being proposed by Scott Morrison and his Attorney-General, the misleadingly advertised Christian Porter, of Robodebt fame. With Parliament now off on Christmas holidays, the much-debated bill has gone to a parliamentary committee, and won’t resurface until March.

If you listen to some people, the proposed reforms are nothing more than an employers’ wish list. Fortunately, they’re not that bad. With one notable exception, the changes are the product of Porter’s extensive joint discussions with the unions and employer groups.

No Liberal government is capable of doing other than making changes that lean in favour of the employers, but the measures are the result of those discussions – so no surprise to the unions – and include some wins for the union side.

The big, undiscussed surprise is the plan to suspend – temporarily, of course; take my word for it – the requirement that enterprise agreements leave workers “better off overall” despite any reduction in particular benefits.

The unions aren’t buying that one. But, in any case, Porter has already signalled his willingness to drop it. This is no WorkChoices 2.0. The Libs are still smarting over the real WorkChoices’ role in the Howard government’s defeat in 2007. Whatever else he may be, Morrison is no crazy brave when it comes to pushing through controversial economic reforms.

No, the other changes are more modest and less objectionable. One is to include in the legislation the first-ever (weak) definition of what it means to be a “casual”. Another is a sunset provision to kill off enterprise agreements that are decades old and out of date.

Truth is, the changes we need to our labour laws are much more sweeping. Although you need to dig deep into the official statistics to find evidence, the unions and labour economists are right to say we have a growing problem with precarious employment, of which the “gig economy” is just the tip.

Outfits such as Uber are a strange combination of highly beneficial innovation (a more efficient way of bringing riders and drivers together) and an arrogant attempt to sidestep the labour laws that give much-needed protection to employees (and the taxman).

Then there’s the proliferation of franchising and labour hire companies. And the epidemic of wage theft – prompted by business people’s belief that, whatever some law may say, as God’s gift to the economy they are protected from prosecution.

I think we’re getting muddled between means and ends. The business proposition is: if only you’ll let me give my workers a hard time, my business will be more successful and everyone will benefit. If only you’ll accept an insecure job with hours that change from one week to the next according to my needs, the economy will be much better off.

But if you take the workers and their dependents out of the economy, you don’t have much left. People rightly crave job security. Make their working lives a misery and a pay rise is poor consolation. (And right now, of course, we can’t afford the pay rise either.)

We’re getting the cart before the horse, turning the people who are supposed to be the chief beneficiaries of a good economy into the people who, we’re told, must suffer to bring the good economy about. That’s what needs reform.

Read more >>

How inflation became a big problem, but has disappeared

Treasury Secretary Dr Steven Kennedy observed this week that there’s been “a fundamental shift in the macro-economic underpinnings of the global and domestic economies, the cause of which is still not fully understood”. He’s right. And he’s the first of our top econocrats to say it. But he didn’t elaborate.

This week we got further evidence of that fundamental shift. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ consumer price index for the September quarter showed an annual “headline” inflation rate of 0.7 per cent and an “underlying” (that is, more reliable) rate of 1.2 per cent.

This is exceptionally low and is clearly affected by the coronacession, as you’d expect. But there’s more going on than just a recession. Since 1993, our inflation target has been for annual inflation to average 2 to 3 per cent. For the six years before the virus, however, it averaged 1.6 per cent. And most other rich countries have also been undershooting their targets.

So, part of the “fundamental shift” in the factors underpinning the global economy is that inflation has gone away as a significant problem. But why? As Kennedy says, these things are “still not fully understood”. Some economists are advancing explanatory theories, which the other economists are debating.

Former Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane, who has form for being the first to spot what’s happening, offered his own explanation of the rise and fall of inflation in a recent Jolly Swagman podcast.

Macfarlane says that, though every developed economy’s experience is different, they’re all quite similar. If you stand well back and look at the rich countries’ experience over the past 60 years, he says it’s not too great a simplification to say that two phases stand out: inflation rose in the first phase to reach a peak in the mid-1970s to early 1980s, but then fell almost continuously until we reached the present situation where it’s below the targets set by central banks.

In our case, we had double-digit inflation in the ’70s and rates of 5 to 7 per cent in the ’80s, then a long period within the target range until about six years ago. Since then it’s been below the target “despite the most expansionary monetary policy [the lowest interest rates] anyone can remember”.

So how is this experience of roughly 30 years of rising inflation, then 30 years of falling inflation explained? Macfarlane thinks there are about half a dozen reasons for the worsening of inflation in Australia.

For a start, the growth of production and employment during the 30-year post-war Golden Age was stronger than any period before or since. We had high levels of protection against imports, with little or no competition from developing countries.

We had a strong union movement, confident that in pushing for higher wages it wasn’t jeopardising workers’ job prospects. We had a centralised system for setting wages, with widespread indexation of wages to the consumer price index.

Our businesses took a “cost-plus” approach to their prices. If wages or the cost of imported components rose, this could be passed on to customers, confident your competitors would be doing the same. That is, firms had “pricing power”.

Finally, businesses’, unions’ and consumers’ expectations about how fast prices would rise in future were quite low at the start of the period, but they picked up and, by the end, had become entrenched at a high rate.

“This macro-economic environment was clearly conducive to rising inflation, and it took one policy error to push it over the limit,” Macfarlane says.

Under the McMahon government – predecessor of the Whitlam government – fiscal policy was made expansionary even though the inflation rate was already 7 per cent. Monetary policy was eased, with interest rates remaining below the inflation rate. And the centralised wage-fixing system awarded 6 or 9 per cent pay rises.

So, that’s how we acquired an inflation problem. What changed in the second 30-year period of declining inflation? Macfarlane thinks “the defining feature of the later period was that, in the long struggle between capital and labour, the interests of capital took precedence over those of labour”.

That is, the bargaining power of labour collapsed. In most countries the labour share of gross domestic product has declined, with the profits share increasing. Wage growth has been restrained, union membership has shrunk and the inequality of income and wealth has increased.

“These features have been most pronounced in the US, but many other countries, including Australia, have shown most of the same signs,” he says.

Two main developments account for this change. First, globalisation. The rapid growth of manufactured exports from China and the developing world pushed down consumer prices. More importantly, businesses and workers in the rich world realised that firms or whole industries could be shifted to countries where wages were lower.

Businesses had lost pricing power and sought to maintain profits by cutting costs and reducing staff levels. Union members became more concerned with saving their jobs than pushing for higher wages.

Second, labour-saving technological advance. In manufacturing, sophisticated machines started replacing workers. In the much bigger services sector, advances in information and communications meant that armies of state managers, regional managers and other middle management were no longer needed. Clerical processes were automated. Call centres were cheaper than a network of offices. Customers could buy on the internet, without the need for shop assistants.

As the period of high inflation passed into distant memory, Macfarlane says, inflationary expectations fell. Inflation expectations – whose importance comes because they tend to be self-fulfilling – change very slowly. It took decades for them to rise in the earlier period and, now, after nearly three decades of moderate and low inflation, it will take a long time before higher inflationary expectations are rekindled.

I see much truth in Macfarlane’s explanation. But it certainly means there’s been a “fundamental shift” in the factors bearing down on the economy – the implications of which we’re yet to fully realise, let alone fix.

Read more >>

Too soon to say how hard virus will hit economy

To judge by the gyrations of the world’s sharemarkets, the coronavirus has us either off to hell in a handcart or the markets are panicking about something bad that’s happening, but they’re not sure what’s happening, how long it will last or how bad it will end up being. I’d go with the latter.

So would Reserve Bank deputy governor Dr Guy Debelle. He said in a speech this week that there’s been a large increase in the financial markets’ "risk aversion and uncertainty".

"The virus is going to have a material economic impact but it is not clear how large that will be. That makes it difficult for the market to reprice financial assets," he said.

That’s central-bankerspeak for "they’ve got no idea what will happen". Which is hardly surprising, since no one else has, either. More from Debelle’s speech as we go.

But understand this. Farr’s law of epidemics, developed in the mid-19th century, says that the number of cases of a new disease rises and then falls in a roughly symmetrical pattern, approximating a bell-shaped curve.

Depending on how quickly the disease spreads, the bell can have a steep rise and fall or a shallow one. Epidemiologists seek to make the bell as shallow as possible by slowing the disease’s spread. This allows the health system to avoid being overwhelmed – reducing the likelihood of panic and chaos, and making it more likely those who most need medical attention get it.

In theory, it allows more time for the development of a vaccine or useful drugs, but the World Health Organisation has said it will take about 18 months for a coronavirus vaccine to be widely available.

At this stage, the main way of slowing the spread is "social distancing" – reducing the contact between people by cancelling sporting events, closing schools or workplaces or ordering people to work at home. Of course, many people are doing their own social distancing by staying away from restaurants and bars.

The virus has now arrived in most countries. Its spread is well advanced in China, Iran, Italy and South Korea, but much less so in Singapore and Hong Kong, where the authorities got in earlier with their social distancing measures.

Such measures, however, cause considerable inconvenience, especially to parents, and disruption to the economy – both to the production of goods and, more particularly, services, and to their purchase and consumption. Not to mention the associated loss of income.

Some of this economic activity may merely be postponed – so that there’s a big catch-up once the epidemic subsides. But much of it – particularly the performance of services (if you miss a restaurant meal or a haircut you don’t catch up by having two) – will be lost forever.

Obviously, China is central to the story for both the world economy and ours. China’s economy was hit hard by the virus and the drastic but belated measures to slow its spread, though the number of cases does seem to have passed its peak and rapidly declined. Debelle said "the Chinese economy is now only gradually returning to normal. Even as this occurs, it is very uncertain how long it will take to repair the severe disruption to supply chains."

The globalisation of the world economy in recent decades is a major part of the story of this virus. It means people in any part of the world are almost instantly informed about unusual things happening anywhere else in the world. It’s good to be better informed, but sometimes it can be frightening.

For another thing, globalisation has greatly increased the trade between countries, particularly trade in services, such as tourism and education. Trade in services has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of cheap air travel.

It’s all the overseas air travel everyone does these days that has caused epidemics that break out in one part of the world to spread around the world within a few weeks. More pandemics has become one of the big downsides of globalisation.

And when governments try to limit the spread of a virus by banning the entry of people from countries where the virus is known to have spread widely, this disrupts and damages those of that country’s industries who sell their services to foreign visitors.

(When the government stops you supplying a service to willing buyers, economists classify this as a shock to the "supply side" of the economy. When your sales fall because customers become more reluctant to buy whatever you’re selling, that’s a "demand-side shock" to the economy.)

Our imposition of a ban on non-residents entering Australia from China has hit our tourism industry and our universities. Debelle said that, since January, inbound airline capacity from China has fallen by 90 per cent. Until recently, he said, tourist arrivals from other countries had held up reasonably well, "but that may no longer be true".

The Reserve estimates that Australia’s services exports will decline by at least 10 per cent in the March quarter, roughly evenly split between tourism and education. Since services exports account for 5 per cent of gross domestic product, this suggests the travel ban will subtract 0.5 percentage points from whatever growth comes from other parts of the economy during the quarter.

Another consequence of growing globalisation is the emergence of "global supply chains" – the practice of multinational companies manufacturing the components of their products in different countries, before assembling them in one developing country and exporting them around the world.

China is at the heart of the supply chains for many products. So Debelle’s remark about the delay in repairing "the severe disruption to supply chains" is ominous. The Reserve’s business contacts tell it supply chain disruptions are already affecting the construction and retail industries – but there’s sure to be more of this "supply-side shock" to come.

And the shock to demand as - whether through virus-avoidance, necessity or uncertainty - consumers avoid spending money, has a long way to run. But, Debelle said, it’s "just too uncertain to assess the impact of the virus beyond the March quarter".

Read more >>

Star pupil Philip Lowe gives tips on why inflation is so low

Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe started his study of economics at high school in Wagga Wagga and finished it with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Much thanks to his teacher, Mrs King, whose teaching style convinced him economics was interesting as well as important.

The great attraction of high school economics is its emphasis on linking theory to current events.

According to a speech he gave last week, when Lowe did the HSC in 1979, the standard exam question was: why does Australia have both high inflation and high unemployment ("stagflation") and what’s the government doing about it?

In those days there was much interest in the "misery index", which adds the inflation rate to the unemployment rate. We got to peaks well above 20 per cent. Today, however, it’s below 7 per cent.

As the Australian Bureau of Statistics advised this week, the consumer price index rose by just 1.6 per cent over the year to June. Which means it’s been below the Reserve’s inflation target of "between 2 and 3 per cent, on average, over the medium term" for almost five years.

So Lowe’s guess is that, these days, exam questions are likely to ask: why is inflation so low at the same time as unemployment is also low – and what’s the government doing about it?

Just to be of help, he told us how he’d answer the question – which is one of interest and importance to all of us, not just youngsters preparing for their finals.

He started by noting that very low inflation has become the norm in most economies. At present, three-quarters of advanced economies have an inflation rate below 2 per cent.

There’s no single answer, he says, but there are three factors that, together, help explain what’s happened.

First, the credibility of the monetary "frameworks" that central banks eventually adopted when, in the second half of the 1970s, they realised inflation was way too high and needed to be got under control.

It wasn’t until the early '90s that our Reserve Bank adopted its present target for inflation which, as Lowe says, helped cement low inflation “norms” in the economy. In econospeak, it provided an anchor for business and unions’ expectations about how much prices were likely to rise over the next year or two.

"Many people understand that if inflation were to pick up too much, the central bank would respond to make sure the pick-up was only temporary,” Lowe says.

It would do so by raising interest rates and so discouraging borrowing and spending, of course. Economists call this the "monetary policy reaction function".

(It’s one of the reasons for the old view among economists that attempts to use the budget to stimulate demand by cutting taxes or increasing government spending wouldn’t achieve much. The central bank, fearing the stimulus would push up inflation, would react by raising interest rates and so stymie it. In the new world of continuing weak demand and too-low inflation, however, central banks are most unlikely to react to budgetary stimulus in such a way, meaning the new view is that budgetary stimulus is very effective.)

Has inflation targeting worked? Well, annual inflation has averaged 2.4 per cent since the target was adopted, so it certainly seems to have.

The second part of Lowe’s explanation for very low inflation is that spare capacity to produce goods and services (including spare workers who are unemployed or under-employed) in many advanced economies means there’s little upward pressure on prices.

That certainly seems the case in Australia. Our unemployment rate could go a lot lower than its present 5.2 per cent without causing wages to take off – especially with our under-employment rate of 8.3 per cent.

Our labour market seems to be more flexible – and less inflation-prone - than it used to be.

The third part of his explanation is that changes in the structure of the economy caused by technology and globalisation seem to be keeping prices low.

For one thing, digitisation and globalisation seem to be lowering the cost of producing many goods. The entry of China and other emerging economies into the global trading system has added hundreds of millions of factory workers to the global market.

The prices of manufactured goods in the advanced economies have barely increased over the past couple of decades.

For another thing, globalisation and advances in technology are making markets more contestable and increasing competition. This is extending beyond manufacturing to almost every corner of the economy, including the services sector.

Historically, most services couldn’t be traded across national borders. But globalisation – driven mainly by advances in information and communication technology – means many services can now be delivered by somebody in another country.

Examples include preparation of architectural drawings, document design and publishing, and customer service roles (a nice name for call centres). As well, many tasks such as accounting and payroll have been automated.

The internet and its digital “platforms” have revolutionised services such as retail, media and entertainment, and transformed how we communicate, and search for information and compare prices.

"These changes are having a material effect on pricing, with services price inflation lower than it once was. Many firms know that if they don’t keep their prices down, another firm somewhere in the world might undercut them," Lowe says.

"And many workers are concerned that if the cost of employing them is too high, relative to their productivity [an important qualification], their employer might look overseas or consider automation."

More broadly, using the internet for better “price discovery” keeps the competitive pressure on firms.

The end result is a pervasive feeling of more competition. And more competition normally means lower prices.

What’s the government doing about low inflation and the deficient demand that is part of its cause?

Well, if you mean the elected government, the short answer is: not nearly enough. Especially when you remember how little scope the Reserve Bank has left to cut interest rates.

Read more >>

Economy’s health requires reform of earlier wage reforms

Can you believe that many economists were disappointed by this week’s news from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that consumer prices rose by only 2.1 per cent over the year to June?

Why would anyone wish inflation was higher than it is? Well, not because there’s anything intrinsically terrific about fast-rising prices, but because of what a slow rate of increase tells us about the state of the economy.

It’s usually a symptom of weak growth in economic activity and, in particular, of weak growth in wages. Prices and wages have a chicken-and-egg relationship. By far the most important factor that pushes up prices is rising wages.

But, as measured by the bureau’s wage price index, wages rose by just 2.1 per cent over the year to March, roughly keeping up with prices, but not getting ahead of them.

We’re used to wages growing each year by 1 per cent-plus faster than prices, but such “real” growth hasn’t happened for the past four years or so (which probably explains why so many people are complaining about the high “cost of living” even when price rises are so small).

It’s important to understand that wages can grow faster than prices without that causing higher inflation, provided there is sufficient improvement in workers’ productivity – output per hour worked – to cover the real increase.

Of late we’ve had that productivity improvement, but all the benefit of it has stayed with business profits, rather than being shared between capital and labour by means of increases in real wages.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until it’s no longer relevant: the economy won’t be back to healthy growth until we’re back to healthy growth in real wages. That’s for two reasons.

First, in a capitalist economy like ours, the “social contract” between the capitalists and the rest of us says that the people without much capital get their reward mainly via higher real wages leading to higher living standards.

Second, consumer spending accounts for more than half the demand for goods and services in the economy; consumer spending is done from households’ income, and by far the greatest source of household income is wages.

So, as a general proposition, if wages aren’t growing in real terms, there won’t be much real growth in household income and, in that case, there won’t be much real growth in consumer spending. And the less enthusiastic we are about buying their stuff, the less keen businesses will be to invest in expansion.

Get it? Of all the drivers of economic growth, by far the most important is real wage growth. If your economy’s real wage growth’s on the blink, you’ve got a problem. You won’t get far.

Economists used to believe that real wage growth in line with trend improvement in the productivity of labour was built into the equilibrating mechanism of a capitalist economy. A chap called Alfred Marshall first came up with that idea.

But with each further quarter of weak price and wage increase it’s becoming clearer it was a product of industrial relations laws that boosted workers’ economic power by helping them form unions and bargain collectively with employers.

As has happened in most rich countries, our governments, Labor and Coalition, have been “reforming” our wage-fixing process since the early 1990s by reducing union rights and encouraging workers to bargain as individuals rather than groups.

Trouble is, governments have been weakening legislative support for workers and their unions at just the time that powerful natural economic forces – globalisation and greater trade between rich and poor countries, “skill-biased” technological change, the shift from manufacturing to services – have been weakening the bargaining power of labour.

Whoops. In hindsight, maybe not such a smart “reform”. My guess is it won’t be long before governments decide they need to promote real wage growth by restoring legislative support for unions and collective bargaining.

But how could they go about this? Well, Joe Isaac, a distinguished professor of labour economics at Monash and Melbourne universities and a former deputy president of the Industrial Relations Commission, outlines a plan in the latest issue of the Australian Economic Review.

Isaac proposes four main reforms of the reforms. First, the Fair Work Act should be less prescriptive, giving the Fair Work Commission greater discretion to intervene in industrial disputes, to conciliate and, if necessary, impose an arbitrated resolution on both sides.

Second, the present restrictions on unions’ right to enter workplaces should be eased to allow them to check the payments made to union and non-union employees, as well as to recruit members.

The widespread allegations of illegal underpayment of wages suggest “a serious lack of inspection of pay records” – formerly a task in which unions had a major role. “These breaches in award conditions cannot be discounted as a factor in the slow wages growth,” Isaac says.

Third, legislation against “sham contracting” – employers reducing their workers’ entitlements by pretending those employees are independent contractors – should be tightened.

Fourth, the present procedures and delays before workers are allowed to strike while negotiating new wage agreements should be reduced.

As well, bargaining and striking over multiple-employer or industry-wide agreements should be permitted. As economists long ago established, real wage rises should reflect the economy-wide rate of productivity improvement, not the experience of particular firms.

Industry-wide and multiple-employer agreements allow unions to support people working in small and medium businesses, not just those in big businesses and government departments.

Such bargains are known as “pattern bargaining” and are illegal at present. It’s true that pattern bargaining was pressed and extended to other industries unjustifiably in years past, but the commission should have the power to prevent pattern bargaining where it’s not justified.

Now, many employers may view Isaac’s proposed “reregulation” of wage fixing with alarm. What’s to stop the return of unreasonable union behaviour and excessive wage rises?

Ah, that’s just the point. What will prevent it is all those other developments that have weakened workers’ bargaining power.

Read more >>

Lure of globalisation battles our instinctive tribalism

What has caused the rise in populism that's threatening the mainstream political parties around the developed world, including here?

Economists tend to explain it essentially in economic terms – the bottom has been given a rough deal for years, and finally is rising up – but other scholars see it much more in social and cultural terms: people objecting to being overrun by incomers. Immigrants, asylum seekers, Mexicans, Muslims, Asians.

In his new book for the Lowy Institute, Choosing Openness, Parliament's most accomplished economist, Dr Andrew Leigh, also Labor's shadow assistant treasurer, readily acknowledges the role of xenophobia in explaining why "openness makes us uncomfortable".

He sees our fear of foreigners as part of our evolutionary make-up, and I don't doubt he's right.

Drawing on the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, he argues that "for most of history, humans lived in groups of about 150 people" – a figure known as "Dunbar's number".

Such groups were big enough for some specialisation, but small enough for everyone to know and trust everyone else. People were born, mated, hunted and died within their small community.

"In this environment, there were two kinds of people: those in your tribe and those not in your tribe," Leigh says.

"It made sense to take care of your tribal members. You shared a lifelong relationship with them. Thanks to inbreeding, the rest of the tribe probably looked a lot like you and you certainly all dressed alike.

"Conversely, outsiders were likely to look a bit different and were probably dangerous. While some groups traded, killing was extremely common."

One in seven people in these kinds of societies met their end as a result of violence by another person, he says.

For about 99 per cent of the time that homo sapiens have been on the planet, most of us have lived in small groups. As a species, that is what we evolved to do.

"Each of us is here today because our primitive ancestors were skilled at either fighting outsiders or avoiding conflict. The rule that 'different equals dangerous' kept our forebears alive."

But while hunkering down in the face of difference might have been a useful evolutionary strategy in the past, the growth of cities changed the equation, Leigh argues.

Cities are bound together by not by familial relationships, but by rules and norms of acceptable behaviour.

For hundreds of years, the most productive cities have been those that welcome visitors. In a primitive tribe, a dislike of difference can keep you alive. In a city, it's likely to just make you poorer.

"In this sense, a distrust of diversity is a bit like wisdom teeth – an evolutionary vestige that once helped us grind up plants, but now are more likely to take us on a trip to the dentist's chair."

Today's backlash against openness, Leigh argues, shows how humans' natural discomfort with difference can be exploited for political gain.

In a seminal study of the politics of hatred, the Harvard authority on urban economics Edward Glaeser noted that the key to building a powerful coalition around hate is to focus voters' anger on an "out group" that is sufficiently large to be taken seriously as a threat, but too small to be electorally decisive.

Remind you of any redheads you know?

So Leigh says that populism – the idea that politics is a conflict between the pure mass of people and a small vile elite – is the product of four main forces.

First, slow growth in living standards when the proceeds of economic growth haven't been shared.

"In societies where prosperity is broadly shared, a cosmopolitan outlook steadily replaces traditional values of religion, deference to authority, and an exclusive focus on the security of our family and tribe," he says.

Second, populism is fostered by the pace at which society and technology are changing. Voters may turn to extreme politics as a way of saying "Stop the world – I want to get off."

Third, populism has benefited from canny political entrepreneurs – Duterte, Erdogan, Trump – able to generate massive free media coverage by attacking rivals and breaking taboos.

Fourth, populism has grown because of a loss of faith in mainstream centrist parties. (Their ever-declining standards of behaviour would have nothing to do with this, of course.)

In the late 1960s, seven out of 10 Australians said they always voted for the same party. Today, the share of party loyalists is down to four in 10.

Seems to me that, though much of the problem is manifest in fear of foreigners, the best way to strengthen cosmopolitan values is to ensure the benefits of globalisation and technological change are shared more fairly.

Read more >>

Closing out the world won't fix our problems

Talk about a slow burn. It's 10 years since the beginnings of the global financial crisis, the greatest economic collapse any of us will ever see. Things ought to be back to normal by now, but they aren't.

The world is still picking through the wreckage, deciding what should be kept and what dispensed with. What needs to be done differently to restore normality and ensure there's never another disaster like that one.

A lot of people were surprised the retribution didn't happen at the time: bankers sent to jail, famous economists and their theories discredited, presiding politicians pushed out to pasture, their reputations in tatters.

For a long time, it looked as though the same people who brought us the disaster were kept on to clean up the mess. "Sorry about that. Poor execution. Nothing wrong with the basic policies, of course. Won't let it happen again."

Now, however, there's a revolt by disillusioned and angry punters evident in many developed countries: the Americans voting in an outsider oddball like Trump, the Brits voting to quit the European Union then knackering the government trying to arrange it, the French electing a president from neither of the two main parties, the Germans re-electing Mummy Merkel, but only after reducing the combined vote of her party and the main alternative to their lowest share since the war.

It's a similar story in Oz, where last year's election saw one voter in four avoiding the two main parties and the resurrection of One Nation to scourge the establishment.

Fancy footwork by the Rudd government at the time allowed us to escape the GFC with only a few scratches. Turns out it's not that simple. The economy's been below par ever since and, for the past four years, our growth in wages has been as weak as in the other advanced economies.

BREAKING NEWS ALERT
Get the latest news and updates emailed straight to your inbox.

Trouble is, when the pressure for change comes from the grassroots rather than frank admission of failure on the part of the policy elite, the great risk is that we'll flip to populism – policies that are popular because they sound like they'd make things better, when they wouldn't really because they misunderstand the deeper causes of the problem.

Much of the discontent has centred around globalisation – the breaking down of barriers separating countries.

Globalisation is a popular target because it can be blamed for the fall in jobs in manufacturing as well as the admission to our country of people who look different and have strange habits. Are they taking our jobs or just taking over our country?

But though it's true that some of the jobs lost in manufacturing have shifted to other countries (providing employment and income to people much poorer than any of us), our compulsive fear of foreigners blinds us to the much greater role played by automation.

As Dr Andrew Leigh, federal Labor's shadow assistant treasurer and a former economics professor, writes in a new book for the Lowy Institute, Choosing Openness, advances in technology have been shifting jobs from the farm to the cities, and now from manufacturing to the services sector, continuously since Australia became a federation.

This means attempting to "make Australia great again" by restoring protection – reducing our openness to the world – can't work. We'd have trouble establishing many new factories, and those we did would employ a lot more machines than workers.

What restoring protection would do, however, is raise the prices of all the goods we protected – starting with cars, clothing and footwear – worsening the cost of living of all working people.

It's too easy to forget the benefits of globalisation along with the costs.

Apart from being a bit too late, trying to return to White Australia would rob us of greater human links with rapidly developing Asia, where we all know our best hope of future prosperity lies.

Overall, we've gained more than we've lost from the successive waves of new technology, as well as from the way we opened our economy to the world in the 1980s. Trying to re-erect the shutters would be a costly mistake.

Overall, employment has just kept growing – which is not to deny that many less-skilled men formerly employed in manufacturing have not been able to find satisfactory employment.

The sensible conclusion is that there have been losers as well as winners, but little has been done to help the losers – with the winners required to do more to kick the tin.

"The chief challenge," Leigh says, "is to deal with the inequality that can accompany technological change and economic openness.

"This is not just a matter of fairness; it is also essential if we are to deal with the political backlash against openness.

"A spate of studies in economics and psychology have shown that humans exhibit loss aversion [we prefer to avoid losses more than we prefer making gains] and are more conscious of headwinds than tailwinds.

"Open markets require egalitarian institutions," Leigh concludes.

He's right. This is the key principle of reform we lost sight of after the departure of Hawke and Keating.

Read more >>

Why global trade growth has slowed

One thing you can be sure of is that international trade grows much faster than the world economy. It's the classic proof of growing globalisation, and it's been happening for ages. Except that it seems to have stopped.

For two decades from the mid-1980s, world trade – measured as exports plus imports – grew at more than double the rate of growth in gross world product.

Between 1986 and 2007, the volume of trade grew at an average annual rate of 3.4 per cent of world real gross domestic product, meaning it went from being equivalent to almost 30 per cent of gross world product to almost 60 per cent.

But then it dipped sharply in 2008 and 2009, thanks to the fall-off in trade after the global financial crisis and the onset of the Great Recession.


It bounced back in 2010 but, since 2011, its growth has been only a little faster than world production of goods and services.

In the decades before 1986, the volume of trade grew faster than production, but at much slower rates than in the two decades that followed. That's how we know to date the modern era of globalisation – the breaking down of economic barriers between national economies – from the mid-80s.

So, why has trade growth slowed so noticeably, and is this merely cyclical (temporary) or is it structural (lasting)?

According to a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a fair bit of both.

The study estimates that about 40 per cent of the slowdown between 2011 and 2015, as compared with the period from 1991 to 2007, is explained by the weak growth of demand in the global economy.

In particular, the crisis saw a sharp fall-off in businesses' investment spending on new physical capital – which happens to be import-intensive – but it hasn't recovered all that much in the years since then.

But that leaves roughly 60 per cent of the slowdown explained by deeper, more structural forces, ones that won't just go away if we wait a few more years.

Part of the explanation is that, in the two decades before the crisis, certain factors contributed to making trade growth exceptionally strong, but these factors have now lost their force.

The biggest cause of this exceptional growth in trade was various measures to reduce tariff and non-tariff restrictions on trade.

In 1989, and partly at Australia's instigation, the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation partnership between 21 countries was established to promote free trade.

The European Union moved to a single market in goods, services, labour and capital in 1992, increasing trade between its members. Because Europe consists of a number of separate countries, it's highly (international) "trade intensive" in a way that America – composed of states rather than countries – or even Australia, isn't.

In 1994, the "Uruguay round" of multilateral negotiations – the biggest of the many rounds of reductions in protection organised by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade since World War II – was reached.

This round extended membership of the GATT from the developed countries to about 150 developing countries – thus doing much to increase trade between the two groups. It also reached trade agreements covering new areas such as textiles, agriculture, services and intellectual property.

And, for good measure, the round turned the GATT into the World Trade Organisation.

The North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico began in January 1994.

And also hugely important to the growth of trade, China – now the world's second-largest trading nation – joined the WTO, cutting much of its protection as a condition of entry.

A second factor promoting the growth of trade in the two decades before the crisis was the widespread development of "global value chains" – value as in "value-added" – under which manufactured goods (cars, for instance) are assembled in one country using parts from many countries.

As trade liberalisation measures slowed in about 2000, continued growth in trade was supported by China's rapid emergence into the world economy.

By the second half of the noughties, however, these structural sources of growth had waned.

In this century, the WTO's Doha round of multilateral negotiations, launched in November 2001, has ground to a halt. According to the study, this halt in liberalisation explains about a quarter of the slowdown in the growth of trade between 2011 and 2015, compared with 1991 to 2007.

Many bilateral and regional trade agreements have been signed since then, but the only really significant agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership, signed in February 2016, has since been scuttled by US President Donald Trump.

Add to this, "creeping protectionism from myriad small measures" in various countries, which has put trade liberalisation into reverse.

The spread of global value chains seems to have reached its limit, even declined.

Meanwhile, China's period of export-led growth has ended, with its authorities now aiming for growth led by domestic demand.

So what happens next, and what should be done?

The study says some cyclical recovery in the growth of trade is likely but, without further trade liberalisation, a return to the glory days seems unlikely.

"Trade", it reminds us, "and the related expansion of global value chains, boosts [economic] growth through increased productivity, by improving resource allocation, increasing scale and specialisation, encouraging innovation, facilitating knowledge transfer, fostering the expansion of more productive firms and the exit of the least productive ones."

All true. But, as the study acknowledges, the benefits of increased trade aren't spread evenly between or within the countries involved.

As a consequence of this – and the politicians' failure to ensure the losers from globalisation were compensated by the winners – the electorate in many rich countries is "increasingly polarised into pro- and anti-globalisation groups".

We have a lot of ground to make up before much enthusiasm for further globalisation returns.

Read more >>

Little right, much wrong with Trumponomics

For years I've wondered how America's business elite could grab almost all the proceeds of the country's growth, leaving real wages permanently stagnant, without having ordinary workers rioting in the streets.

Now I know. The anger kept building until a political huckster called Trump found the way to exploit it for personal advancement.

The bitter joke is that the populist promises he made to keep out Muslims, Mexicans and Chinese imports would do little to make the mug punters better off, whereas many of his more conventional economic policies will do much to further fatten the pockets of the 1 per cent the punters so resent.

While we wait to see which promises he acts on, the best guess is he'll implement those of his policies that fit with Republican orthodoxy.

After all, he'll be relying on the usual Republican suspects to make up his cabinet and relying on Republican majorities in Congress to put his policies into law.

This suggests he'll be quick to start phasing corporation tax down from 35 per cent to 15 per cent, and lowering all rates of personal income tax (though not necessarily in a way that favours low and middle earners).

He's likely to increase defence spending and maybe even keep his promise to fund a much-needed urban infrastructure renewal program.

But surely this would cause a huge expansion of the still-excessive federal budget deficit, wouldn't it?

Yes, but that's unlikely to stop it happening. It is, after all, similar to what Ronald Reagan did on coming to office in 1981.

We're about to see confirmation of an eternal truth of American politics: the Republicans care hugely about the evils of debt and deficit – it keeps them awake worrying about what we're leaving for our children and grandchildren – but only when there's a Democrat in the White House.

For the most part it will be a giant exercise in trickle-down economics – even though many of the people who fell for Trump's crude charms now rightly see it for the voodoo economics it mainly is.

Protectionism may be the new saviour – in Nick Xenophon's Oz as well as Trump's Rust Belt states – but it's still the delusion it always was. It seems "only common sense", but that doesn't mean it works.

In any case, were Trump to impose a huge tariff on Chinese imports, do you imagine that would re-open the ghostly steel mills in Gary, Indiana, or the rusting automobile plants down the road from Michael Moore's place in Flint, Michigan?

Turning back globalisation is no easier than turning back time. The main thing you'd do is rob working people (and the rest of us) of access to the one aspect of globalisation they've clearly benefited from: imported goods much cheaper than the locally made goods they replaced.

Don't kid yourself: some lost their jobs in factories, but all workers – most of whom never worked in manufacturing – benefited from lower prices.

That's why there's no free lunch in protection: it's a scheme where the fortunate few are subsidised by the less-favoured multitude. It's not foreigners who lose out, it's other locals.

And don't kid yourself on this: far from all the jobs lost from manufacturing were lost through import competition.

Far more than many oldies realise were lost through computerisation. That's a big part of the reason reimposing high tariffs would do surprisingly little to restore manufacturing employment.

It's a convenient delusion that globalisation is solely the product of "neo-liberal" deregulation. Its other, bigger driver is technological advance and the digital revolution. Think any pollie can stop that?

This isn't to say scuttling the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement would be any loss. It offered trivial benefits to us, in return for giving foreign multinationals power to push our government around.

Just because preferential trade deals are called "free-trade agreements" doesn't make them a good thing. The US's primary goal in its many agreements is to advance the interests of its exporters of intellectual property, while continuing to protect its farmers.

Its trans-Pacific deal was intended as cover for the bilateral deal with Japan hidden within it, as well as strengthening America's trading links with all the main Asian economies that weren't China.

The Yanks may be paranoid about the rise of China, but the joke is there never were two big economies – the two biggest – more interdependent. The US is China's largest trading partner, while China is the US's second-biggest – and its biggest creditor.

The Yanks are really stoopid​ enough to take a crack at Chinese imports? Trump is a cunning con man, not an idiot.

Read more >>

Continued globalisation requires more 'inclusive' growth

Remember globalisation? It was big news some years back. Now, however, the leaders of the global economy worry that public opinion is turning against it, pressuring governments to reverse it.

Globalisation is the process by which the barriers separating nations and their economies have been broken down by international co-operation and deregulation, but mainly by advances in technology.

We now have much more telecommunications, travel, trade, investment, money flows and migration between countries. News now travels around the world almost in real time.

Just how worried leaders have become about a reversal of this trend is revealed by a speech Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, gave in Canada this month.

She began by asserting the benefits of the process. The ability of countries to rise above narrow self-interest over the 70 years since World War II has brought unprecedented economic progress, she argues.

"Conflicts have diminished, diseases have been eradicated, poverty has been reduced and life expectancy has increased around the world."

The prime beneficiaries of economic integration and openness have been the developing countries, she says, a point the critics of globalisation rarely want to admit.

One of the most important developments was the entry of China, India and the former communist countries into the world trading system in the early 1990s.

According to the World Bank, international trade has helped reduce by half the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty.

China, for instance, saw its rate of extreme poverty drop from 36 per cent at the end of the 1990s to 6 per cent in 2011.

In a single generation, Vietnam has moved from being one of the world's poorest nations to middle-income status, which has allowed increased investment in health and education.

But the rich economies have also benefited through higher living standards, caused by a more efficient allocation of capital between countries, improved productivity and lower prices for consumers.

"Research on the consumer benefits suggest trade has roughly doubled the real incomes for a typical [rich-country] household. And for the poorest households, trade has raised real incomes by more than 150 per cent," she says.

So what's the problem? Well, for a start, the opening up of world trade effectively doubled the size of the global workforce, putting downward pressure on the wages of lower-skilled workers in the advanced economies.

In the US, competition from low-wage countries has been one of the factors contributing to a decline in manufacturing employment, along with a wave of automation.

This decline has not been spread evenly across the economy, but concentrated in some states and towns that have faced deep and long-lasting effects from overseas competition, she says.

Similarly, the benefits from economic growth have not been spread evenly. In the major advanced economies, incomes for the top 10 per cent increased by 40 per cent in the past two decades, while growing only modestly at the bottom.

Then there is the globalisation of capital. Between 1980 and 2007 there was an eight-fold expansion in global trade, but a 25-fold increase in flows of financial capital.

This has greatly increased investment in developing countries. But much of the flows have been short-term and speculative, opening the door to financial contagion – sudden outflows sweeping from country to country – leading to concerns about the stability of financial systems.

"Growing inequality in wealth, income and opportunity in many countries has added to a groundswell of discontent, especially in the industrialised world – a growing sense among some citizens that they 'lack control', that the system is somehow against them," she says.

"Financial institutions are being seen as unaccountable to society. Tax systems allow multinational companies and wealthy individuals not to pay what many would consider a fair share."

Couldn't happen here, could it.

"And there is the challenge from uncontrolled migration flows, contributing to economic and cultural anxieties."

So what should we do? The goal should be to maintain the benefits from globalisation while sharing them more widely, she says.

Governments need to do more to encourage economic growth, but make it more inclusive, to "benefit workers across all economic sectors". (The need for growth to be "inclusive" is something leaders are talking about everywhere but here.)

We need to "step up direct support for lower-skilled workers" by greater public investment in education, retraining and by facilitating occupational and geographic mobility.

We need to "strengthen social safety nets" by providing appropriate unemployment insurance, health benefits and portable pensions. The US, for instance, could cushion labour market dislocations by increasing the federal minimum wage.

We need to "address the lack of vigorous competition in key areas. Think of major industries – from banking to pharmaceuticals to social media – where some advanced economies are facing large increases in market concentration."

Not here, of course.

"Boosting fairness also means clamping down on tax evasion and preventing the artificial shifting of business profits to low-tax locations," she says.

These measures can create a positive feedback loop: stronger, more inclusive growth reduces economic inequality and increases support for further reforms and openness.

But we must resist the temptation offered by "politicians seeking office by promising to 'get tough' with foreign trade partners through ... restrictions on trade".

We tried that in the 1930s as a solution to the Great Depression, and made things a lot worse for everyone.

Read more >>

What's been happening to the distribution of our income

The single best explanation for the rise of Mr Crazy, Donald Trump, is that over the four years to 2013, the real income of the top 1 per cent of American households rose by 17.4 per cent, while that of the bottom 99 per cent rose by 0.7 per cent, giving the top few 85 per cent of the growth.

Another country where the gap between high and low incomes has widened markedly is Britain. And what crazy thing have the Brit voters just gone and done? You remember.

I think it's a case of what physiotherapists call "referred pain" - what you feel in some part of your body is actually coming from a problem somewhere else.

Many voters are conscious that their income doesn't seem to be growing and know something's badly wrong. But they don't join the dots the way an economist would.

They look around for something or someone to blame. They turn against their political leaders, who are "out of touch". Which they may well be.

But, as has happened many, many times before, voters also focus their resentment on the new migrants around them, especially those of a different race or creed. These people are taking all the jobs (especially those the local don't want), or they're all unemployed and getting too much help from the government.

Australia, it turns out, has also been acting strangely of late, turning against mainstream politicians on both sides, voting for populist protectionists like the Xenophones​ and resurrecting Pauline Hanson and One Nation, with new improved conspiracy theories.

So what's been happening to the gap between the top and the bottom in Oz? It's been widening but, fortunately, not nearly as quickly as in the US or Britain.

The Bureau of Statistics conducts a survey of the distribution of disposable income (that is, after allowing for income tax paid and welfare benefits received) between households. It's conducted every two years and the latest was for 2013-14.

Household disposable income that year averaged $998 a week, but with households in the lowest quintile (20 per cent block) getting $375 and those in the highest quintile, $2037 a week.

It's obvious that, if income were distributed equally between all households, each 20 per cent block of households would get 20 per cent of the total income of households.

In fact, the lowest quintile's share of total income in 2013-14 was less than 8 per cent. The share of the middle quintile (those households between 10 percentage points below the median and 10 points above it) was 17 per cent.

But the highest quintile's share was 41 per cent - more than twice what they'd get if income was distributed equally.

That's proof of the wide gap between high and low incomes in Australia.  It puts us above the average for income inequality among the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Even so, the bureau's figures show no significant worsening over the six years between 2007-08 and 2013-14 - the longest period in which its surveys can be compared on a consistent basis.

The most commonly used measure of the degree of inequality between households is the Gini coefficient - a scale running from 0, where income is equal between all households, to 1, where one household has all the income.

Our Gini was 0.34 in 2007-08 and 0.33 in 2013-14. You could call this a slight improvement, but I wouldn't - the change is too small to be taken literally.

Does that lack of change surprise you? It does me, especially as the Gini fell a little in the surveys of 2009-10 and 2011-12, before rising again in 2013-14. Huh?

Our base year of 2007-08 came just before the global financial crisis of September 2008.

Professor Peter Whiteford, of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, thinks the initial decline was caused by the Rudd government's big discretionary increase in pensions in 2009 and, on the other hand, the big fall in the sharemarket, which would have cut the incomes of higher income-earners.

Recessions usually hit the bottom of the distribution as well as the top by greatly increasing unemployment. But not this time because of the Rudd government's quick response and because the downturn's causes came more from the financial side of the economy.

Whiteford thinks the Gini's return to a more usual level in the latest survey is explained by the slow rise in unemployment in more recent years and the sharemarket's recovery.

But the stats bureau's practice of presenting the income distribution in quintiles tends to conceal an important development: the way income at the very top is growing much faster than it is even for people not that far from the top.

Economics professor-turned-politician Dr Andrew Leigh worked with one of the world's top experts in this field, British economist Sir Tony Atkinson, to develop a time series of movements in high incomes, based on data from the Australian Taxation Office. Leigh has handed it over to Professor Roger Wilkins, of the Melbourne Institute.

Wilkins' series shows that, between 1989 and 2013, the share of total individuals' income gained by the top 10 per cent of income-earners rose by 5 percentage points to more than 33 per cent.

But the top 5 per cent captured almost all of that increase. And the top 1 per cent claimed well over half the increase in the share of the top 5 per cent.

The top 1 per cent's share of total individuals' income is now 9 per cent. That is, their incomes average nine times what they'd be if incomes were equal.

Fortunately, this isn't nearly as extreme as it is in the US, or even Britain. But it does show Australia is moving down the same road as the others, suggesting the causes are international: technological change and globalisation.

Read more >>