Month: December 2017

Aaron Steelman has an \”Interview\” with Douglas Irwin in the Econ Focus journal published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (2017, Third Quarter, pp. 20-25).

On the genesis of his most recent book, \” a comprehensive, more than 800-page history of U.S. trade policy, Clashing over Commerce\”:

\”I distinctly remember being in my Chicago office in 1995 when Michael Bordo gave me a call (email was still a novelty) and asked if I would write a paper on U.S. trade policy during the Great Depression. I really hadn’t worked much on U.S. trade policy up to that point, though I had the latent interest. I thought it would be a really easy paper to write because I assumed that there would be a large literature on trade policy during the Great Depression. But when I did my literature survey I discovered — to my horror — that there was almost nothing really analytical on the period. So I actually had to write something like five background papers just to write this one conference volume paper. After that, I started doing a lot of analytical and empirical work on various episodes in U.S. trade policy history. Once I had written enough papers, it became obvious that I really ought to synthesize them and turn it into a book. That was around 2000. After various delays, I came close to finishing the book in 2006, but then 2007 came, and like many economists, my work got diverted by the financial crisis and I returned to looking at issues related to the Great Depression. After more delays, I finally got back to the book around 2013 and pushed it through to completion. … The last major book of this sort was The Tariff History of the United States by Frank Taussig. It’s a great book, a classic, but it’s been a long time since his last edition.\”

On tariffs as the main source of government revenue in early US history: 

\”Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress did not have the power to levy taxes. The federal government was broke and couldn’t pay its bills, leading the country toward a crisis. So one of the major reasons for the Constitutional Convention was to give Congress the power to raise revenue. The Tariff Act of 1789 was really just a revenue measure to pay debts and to finance the spending of the federal government. Revenue remains the major issue in trade policy through the antebellum era. … There was a consensus among the Founders that it was the most efficient way of raising public funds as well as the most politically acceptable. Consider sales taxes in the early post-colonial period. They were very controversial and very costly to enforce; just think of the Whiskey Rebellion. An income tax just doesn’t make sense at this time for many reasons. But imports were coming into a relatively small number of ports, such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. So it makes sense that if you have a lot of goods coming into a small number of places, you just tax them right there, which is pretty easy to do. In addition, people don’t easily see the tax because it’s built into the consumer price, so there is less political resistance to it.\”

Why tariffs were not a cause of the Civil War:

\”I think the tariff issue had very little, if anything, to do with the Civil War. After the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, South Carolina essentially said we’re not going to enforce this law and we may withdraw from the union unless the policy is changed. That precipitated a real crisis, and it was defused with the Compromise of 1833 proposed by Henry Clay, which gradually reduced tariffs. From 1833 until the Civil War, tariffs were basically on a downward path. We reduced the tariff further in 1846 and then again in 1857. A year before the Civil War, the average tariff was below 20 percent, which was about the lowest it had been in the entire antebellum period. So the South and the Democrats really held the cards in terms of trade policy right up to the Civil War.\”

Did tariffs help growth in the 19th century US economy?

\”Did protectionism foster U.S. economic growth and development in the late 19th century? I’m not convinced that we can attribute America’s industrial advance in the 19th century to high tariffs or protection. There are a couple points to make on this. … A lot of the industrialization occurred prior to the Civil War, between 1840 and 1860 when we had low and declining tariffs. … In addition, there are so many other things going on. We had open immigration, so there was a lot of growth in the labor force. We revamped our banking laws during the Civil War, finance became very important, and we got capital deepening. That’s not because of the tariff; that’s because the whole financial system of the United States was really developing. Another point to be made is that when you look at the high productivity growth sectors in the U.S. economy in the late 19th century, John Kendrick and others have shown they’re mostly in the non-traded goods, service sector. Transportation and utilities were growing very rapidly. It’s hard to see how the tariff would help the nontraded goods, service sector of the economy improve its performance. Also, Steve Broadberry has done some work showing that increasing productivity in the service sector was very important to the United States catching up with Britain in the late 19th century. That, too, doesn’t seem to be tariff related. All of this doesn’t lend itself to an easy story where the tariffs are the key factor behind U.S. growth and industrialization.\” 

Did Smoot-Hawley contribute in a major way to the Great Depression?

\”I would say most economists have been skeptical of the claim that the Hawley-Smoot Tariff led to the Great Depression or even exacerbated it to any great extent.\” 

Why history suggests that Trump may have little effect on trade rules: 

\”When Donald Trump was elected, given his extreme rhetoric on trade, many people expected big changes in trade policy. … If you listen to the rhetoric, it might be reasonable to think that there is a big shift coming for U.S. trade policy. But I also noted that if you look back over the past 250 years, you see that we have had these periods where trade policy sort of veers off and then eventually returns to the old status quo. For example, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson slashed tariffs dramatically and tried to introduce much freer trade, but the Congress soon reimposed high tariffs when the Republicans were returned to power. When you look at what Franklin Roosevelt did with the RTAA [Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act], the introduction of trade agreements was a policy of evolution not an overnight revolution. The Reagan administration imposed a lot of protectionist measures in the 1980s, but those restrictions soon faded away.

\”As a result, I try to suggest in the book’s conclusion that there’s still a lot of status quo bias in the system. We can’t always believe the strong rhetoric, and maybe things won’t change as much as promised. And so far, as of August 2017, I think Trump hasn’t changed much in terms of U.S. trade policy. Yes, he pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but maybe Hillary Clinton would have done so also; Bernie Sanders too. Trump did say he wanted to renegotiate bilateral agreements with these countries. There’s no evidence we’ve moved forward with that but that’s at least saying that he’s open to the idea of trade agreements. He hasn’t pulled out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), although the renegotiation of it is not likely to go well. He might go after China a bit, but consider his announcement: He signed an executive order for the USTR not to initiate an investigation but to look into initiating an investigation. So there’s nothing there yet.\” 

International migration is one of the hot-button subjects everywhere. The World Migration Report 2018 from the International Organization for Migration (the UN Migration Agency) provides a wealth of facts and background not just about the economics, which is my focus here, but also about regional aspects of migration, international frameworks governing migration, media coverage of migration, how potential migrants perceive their choices, and more.

Here\’s a table showing total international migration over time. The absolute numbers have risen considerably, but the rise when viewed as a share of global population  looks smaller.

And here\’s a graph showing the destinations for migration by region:

Here\’s a summing up of the overall patterns (with footnotes omitted for readability):

\”The current global estimate is that there were around 244 million international migrants in the world in 2015, which equates to 3.3 per cent of the global population. A first important point to note is that this is a very small minority of the global population, meaning that remaining within one’s country of birth overwhelmingly remains the norm. The great majority of people in the world do not migrate across borders; much larger numbers migrate within countries (an estimated 740 million internal migrants in 20093). … Current data indicate that in 2016 there were 40.3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide and 22.5 million refugees. Further, the total number of people estimated to have been displaced globally is the highest on record. …

\”In regard to the distribution of international migrants by countries’ income group, about two thirds of international migrants resided in high-income economies in 2015 – around 157 million. This compares with 77 million foreign-born who resided in middle-income countries (about one third of the total migrant stock) and almost 9 million in low-income countries in the same year.\”

As implied already, the main focus of the report is not on the economics of migration. However, it does sketch this brief overview of the potential benefits of migration (again, footnotes omitted):

\”Migration can generate very large benefits for migrants, their families and countries of origin. The wages that migrants earn abroad can be many multiples of what they could earn doing similar jobs at home. For example, a study conducted in 2009 found that the ratio of wages earned by workers in the United States to wages earned by identical workers (with the same country of birth, years of schooling, age and sex, and rural/urban residence) abroad ranges from 15.45 (for workers born in Yemen) to 1.99 (workers born in the Dominican Republic), with a median ratio of 4.11. The wage differences and relative income gains from migration are largest for lower-skilled workers, whose international movements around the world are the most restricted. …  Importantly, the beneficial effects of migration for migrants and their families go beyond economic impacts and frequently include improvements in other dimensions of human development, such as education and health. For example, according to a recent report by the World Bank, immigrants from the poorest countries, on average, experienced a 15-fold increase in income, a doubling of school enrolment rates, and a 16-fold reduction in child mortality after moving to a developed country, 

\”In addition to benefiting individual migrants and their families, there is a large research literature that evidences the wider beneficial effects that emigration can have for migrants’ countries of origin. Emigration can reduce unemployment and underemployment, contribute to poverty reduction, and – with the appropriate supportive policies – foster broader economic and social development in origin countries in a variety of ways. … Remittances are generally a less volatile and more reliable source of foreign currency than other capital flows in many developing countries. According to the World Bank, in 1990 migrants remitted around USD 29 billion to lower- and middle-income countries in 1990. This amount had more than doubled to USD 74 billion in 2000 and reached USD 429 billion in 2016. Globally, remittances are now more than three times the amount of official development assistance. Migration can also result in the transfer of skills, knowledge and technology – effects that are hard to measure, but that could have considerable positive impacts on productivity and economic growth. Beyond these economic impacts, emigration can generate beneficial societal consequences for countries of origin, including poor and fragile States. For example, it is increasingly recognized that migrants can play a significant role in post-conflict reconstruction and recovery.

\”There is widespread agreement that migration can also generate economic and other benefits for destination countries. The precise nature and size of these benefits at a given time critically depends on the extent to which the skills of migrants are complementary to those of domestic workers, as well as on the characteristics of the host economy. In general, immigration adds workers to the economy, thus increasing the gross domestic product (GDP) of the host country. There are also a variety of ways in which migrants can have positive effects on labour productivity and GDP per head, e.g. if migrants are more skilled than national workers and/or if immigration has positive effects for innovation and skills agglomeration. By nature or necessity, migrants are often more likely to be risk takers, and this quality has led to enormous contributions to many destination countries in areas such as technology, science, the arts and a range of other fields.  … Immigration increases both the supply of and the demand for labour, which means that labour immigration (including of lower-skilled workers) can generate additional employment opportunities for existing workers. Of course, immigration can also have adverse labour market effects (e.g. on  wages and employment of domestic workers), but most of the research literature finds that these negative impacts tend to be quite small, at least on average. Beyond the labour market and macroeconomy, the immigration of young workers can also help with easing pressures on pensions systems of high-income countries with rapidly ageing populations. Finally, in contrast to popular perceptions, a recent OECD study found that the net fiscal effects of immigration, i.e. the taxes migrants pay minus the benefits and government services they receive, tend to be quite small and – for most OECD countries analysed in the study – positive.\”

My own sense of these arguments is that the case that migration offers very large benefits of migrants is extremely strong. The case that it benefits countries of origin is probably true, but with a lot of variation. For example, in an emerging market economy with good growth prospects, where people migrate, keep previous contacts, send remittances, and return now and then, migration can be a plus. However, in a low-income economy with poor growth prospects, where anyone who wants upward mobility feels a need to cut ties and leave, migration may not provide much benefit. The question of how migrants affect those in destination countries is most controversial of all. I tend to believe the evidence that there are overall gains, but the gains do not seem to be especially large, and there may well be some unwelcome distributional consequences. Much depends here on the specifics of how a nation implements its immigration policy.

Improvements in the technology of transportation and communication seem likely to lead to pressures for additional migration in the future. Consider three figures from the report, one showing a fall in costs of air transportation, one showing a rise in international tourism, and one showing a rise in internet and mobile phone use. To the extent that barriers of transportation costs or lack of information have been barriers to international migration in the past, those barriers have been declining.

However, there are also some factors that may tend to reduce international migration: namely, the great improvement in the growth prospects of China, India, Mexico, and other emerging markets. When people have improved opportunities for

As I\’ve argued on this blog in the past, it seems likely that the main hot spot for global migration in the next few decades will involve movement from African and the Middle East to nations of Europe. Population growth remains relatively high in many nations across Africa and the Middle East, while growth prospects are relatively low. There are many methods of finding out about immigration possibilities, many transportation routes, and a wealth of historical connections and groups of already-established migrants. For the US, the enormous wave of immigrants from Mexico and other nations in Latin America has eased and even gone slightly into reverse; in fact, immigration to the US from China and India now exceeds that from Mexico. But I suspect that apprehensions across Europe about a rise in immigration are only just beginning.

For those interested in digging into the economics, the Fall 2016 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, where I labor in the fields as Managing Editor, included a three-paper symposium on \”immigration and labor markets\”:

• Giovanni Peri, \”Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets\”
• Christian Dustmann, Uta Schönberg and Jan Stuhler, \”The Impact of Immigration: Why Do Studies Reach Such Different Results?
• Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh, \”Is the Mediterranean the New Rio Grande? US and EU Immigration Pressures in the Long Run\”

Also, back in the Summer 2011 issue, the JEP had a three-paper symposium on \”Emigration\”:

• Michael A. Clemens, \”Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?\”
• John Gibson and David McKenzie, \”Eight Questions about Brain Drain\”
• Dean Yang, \”Migrant Remittances\”

Let\’s be clear: an \”occupational license\” means that if you don\’t have the license, you don\’t have government permission to do the job. If you do the job without such a license, you can be legally punished, even put in jail.

There are a number of alternative of methods that seek to reassure buyers about quality that don\’t involve requiring an occupational licensing. For example, many occupations have a certification exam (sometimes done by the government, sometimes by third parties), but anyone who wishes to hire an uncertified worker is free to do so. Providers can become bonded or insured voluntarily, or states can impose requirements for bonding or insurance. States can require providers to register with a legal name and address. States can provide inspections, as is done with restaurants, for example, and on many building projects. Thus, occupational licensing is not just a method of seeking to ensure quality, but an especially restrictive method. The Institute for Justice digs into these issues in the second edition of its report \”License to Work: A National Study of Burdens from Occupational Licensing,\” written by Dick M. Carpenter II, Lisa Knepper, Kyle Sweetland and Jennifer McDonald (November 2017). They write (footnotes omitted):

\”The share of American workers needing a license to work has climbed steadily in recent decades, from 1 in  20 workers in the 1950s to roughly 1 in 4 today … Research suggests this growth is not primarily due to more workers leaving the farm and the factory for traditionally licensed fields like medicine and law. Instead, the main driver is new laws expanding licensing into previously unlicensed occupations.\” 

The IJ report looks at occupational licensing rules across states in a sample if 102 lower- and middle-wage occupations; that is, it doesn\’t look at occupational licensing in higher wage jobs like doctors, lawyers, teachers. Of these jobs that require occupational licenses, \”[s]ome, such as family child care home operator, public school preschool teacher and non-instructional teacher assistant, cater to the needs of children. Others, like dental assistant, dietetic technician, optician and psychiatric worker, come from the health care sector. Still others represent the service sector and the construction and transportation trades. These include barber, bartender, cosmetologist, massage therapist, manicurist and skin care specialist; various contractor designations; and bus, taxi and truck driver. … The list of 102 occupations includes some that are commonly licensed—and commonly recognized as such—including barber and cosmetologist, two ubiquitously and long-licensed occupations. Also on the list are many occupations that are generally familiar to the public, though the fact that they are licensed may not be. Such occupations include florist, funeral attendant, home entertainment installer, locksmith and upholsterer. Finally, there are some occupations on the list that are, along with their licenses, highly obscure: milk sampler, conveyor operator and dairy equipment still machine setter, for example.\”

When you start looking at the state occupational licensing laws across these kinds of occupations, all sorts of inconsistency and strangeness becomes apparent.

For example, Louisiana requires 500 hours of training get an occupational license to braid hair, and in 2012 had 32 hair-braiders in the state. Neighboring Mississippi has zero hours of required training, although it does require hair-braiders to register their business with the state, and had over 1,200 hair-braiders.

As another example, Maryland doesn\’t license auctioneers, but the city of Baltimore does. \”The city of Baltimore requires licenses or registrations for at least 26 occupations in addition to the 59 low- and middle-income occupations licensed by the state of Maryland. For example, Maryland is one of the 21 states that do not license auctioneers, but auctioneers in Baltimore must get a license from the city to work. And that license is relatively onerous, requiring $1,600 in licensing fees and either a one-year apprenticeship or an expensive training course.\”

\”EMTs hold lives in their hands, yet 73 other occupations have greater average licensure burdens. This includes barbers and cosmetologists, home entertainment installers, interior designers, log scalers, manicurists and numerous contractor designations. For perspective, while the average cosmetologist must complete 386 days of training, the average EMT must complete a mere 34. Even the average tree trimmer must complete more than 16 times the amount of education and experience as the average EMT.\”

Locksmiths require a state license in 14 states. Opticians require a state license in 22 states. It seems unlikely that locks or eyes differ substantially across states. Thus, defenders of such licenses need to justify why they don\’t seem necessary in other states. \”\”On average, the 102 occupations studied here are licensed by just 27 states. Only 23 occupations are licensed by 40 states or more. Such inconsistency is suspect. The vast majority of these occupations are practiced in at least one state—and typically many more than one—without need of permission from the state and evidently without widespread harm.\”

The common argument for occupational licenses is that they are needed for purposes of quality or safety. But for the kinds of jobs discussed in the IJ study, evidence doesn\’t back up that claim, \”Studies of licensing and service quality have examined a wide range of occupations, including florists, tour guides, hair braiders and cosmetologists, without finding positive effects. Even research
on occupations where health risks may be more pronounced, such as dental hygienists, nurse practitioners and opticians, has found that licensing restrictions raise the cost of services without
improving quality.Put differently, research suggests that consumers are paying more without getting better results.\”

Several recent academic studies have offered additional evidence. For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis recent published \”Is Occupational Licensing a Barrier to Interstate Migration?\” by Janna E. Johnson and Morris M. Kleiner ((Staff Report 561, December 6, 2017). From the abstract:

\”We analyze the interstate migration of 22 licensed occupations. Using an empirical strategy that controls for unobservable characteristics that drive long-distance moves, we find that the between-state migration rate for individuals in occupations with state-specific licensing exam requirements is 36 percent lower relative to members of other occupations. Members of licensed occupations with national licensing exams show no evidence of limited interstate migration. The size of this effect varies across occupations and appears to be tied to the state specificity of licensing requirements. We also provide evidence that the adoption of reciprocity agreements, which lower re-licensure costs, increases the interstate migration rate of lawyers. Based on our results, we estimate that the rise in occupational licensing can explain part of the documented decline in interstate migration and job transitions in the United States.\”

In another recent study, Brandon Pizzola and Alexander Tabarrok discuss \”The Undertaker\’s License\”

The Institute for Justice and the Cato Institute are known for taking takes libertarian positions. Thus, in these partisan times, it seems worth noting that reform of occupational licensing is an issue with some bipartisan support.

Two centuries ago in 1817, the great economist David Ricardo published his most prominent work: \”On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.\” Among many other insights, it\’s the book that introduced the idea of \”comparative advantage\” (especially in Chapter 7) and thus offered a way of thinking about the potential for gains from trade–both between countries and within areas of a single country–that has been central to economic thinking on these topics ever since. In Cloth for Wine? The Relevance of Ricardo’s Comparative Advantage in the 21st Century, Simon Evenett has edited a collection of 15 short essays thinking through how and when comparative advantage applies to modern economies. The book is published by the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Press, in association with the UK government Department for International Trade.

Most people have no difficulty with the idea that two countries can at least potentially benefit from trade if each one has a productivity advantage in a certain good. There are places in the Middle East where finding oil doesn\’t seem to involve a lot more than jamming a sharp stick into the ground. Those places should produce and export oil. The United States has vast areas of fertile soil. Those places should produce and export corn and wheat.

But an immediate issue arises. What about areas that don\’t seem to have a productivity advantage in any area? How can they possibly benefit from trade? Ricardo\’s theory establishes the point that the key factor in what areas or nations will choose to export or import is not whether there is an overall productivity advantage, but instead where that productivity advantage is greatest–or where the productivity disadvantage is smallest. It is the \”comparative\” advantage that matters.

In my own Principles of Economics textbook (which of course I recommend for quality and value), I offer a homely example to build some intuition for this idea, involving whether it is useful for a group of campers to specialize in certain tasks. I wrote:

\”[C]onsider the situation of a group of friends who decide to go camping together. The friends have a wide range of skills and experiences, but one person in particular, Jethro, has done lots of camping before and is a great athlete, too. Jethro has an absolute advantage in all aspects of camping: carrying more weight in a backpack, gathering firewood, paddling a canoe, setting up tents, making a meal, and washing up. So here’s the question: Because Jethro has an absolute productivity advantage in everything, should he do all the work?

\”Of course not. Even if Jethro is willing to work like a mule while everyone else sits around, he still has only 24 hours in a day. If everyone sits around and waits for Jethro to do everything, not only will Jethro be an unhappy camper, but there won’t be much output for his group of six friends to consume. The theory of comparative advantage suggests that everyone will benefit if they figure out their areas of comparative advantage; that is, the area of camping where their productivity disadvantage is least, compared to Jethro. For example, perhaps Jethro is 80% faster at building fires and cooking meals than anyone else, but only 20% faster at gathering firewood and 10% faster at setting up tents. In that case, Jethro should focus on building fires and making meals, and others should attend to the other tasks, each according to where their productivity disadvantage is smallest. If the campers coordinate their efforts according to comparative advantage, they can all gain.\”

This way of phrasing the situation clarifies the essential economic issue: not who is most productive at various tasks, but how to allocate all of the available productive power across a range of tasks in the most efficient way. In that problem, everyone has a role to play. Even a party with productivity advantages in every area will have areas where their advantage is smallest; conversely, a party who is least productive at every single task will have an area in which the productivity disadvantage is least. Focusing on those areas will provide gains from trade.

Of course, the camping example is just conceptual way of framing how division or labor and trade among friends can potentially provide gains. It leaves out many real world complications, which are the focus of many of the essays in this book. How large are the gains from trade? How will the gains be distributed across the parties involved in the trade? Does trade provide additional gains over time through heightened competition and incentives for innovation? How will trade affect the distribution of income? What are the underlying reasons why countries differ in their profiles of productivity across activities, and to what extent can those reasons be altered by public policy? What happens when comparative productivity levels shift, so some industries no longer need the same number of workers?  Do the potential gains from trade in goods also apply to gains in services? Do the potential gains apply to a global economy with \”value chains\” of production that cross and re-cross national borders? How do economies of scale fit into the picture? What about trade in similar-but-not-identical branded products, like cars? What is the appropriate reaction when countries erect barriers to trade or when there are persistent patterns of trade surpluses and deficits?

Ricardo actually had thoughts and analysis about a surprisingly large number of these questions, and the essays in this book take up most of the rest of them. Here, I just want to note a few points that seemed worth particular emphasis.

One is that although Ricardo\’s theory of comparative advantage never disappeared, and has been a mainstay of basic principles of economics for 200 years, there was a period of some decades when it seemed less relevant to the facts of international trade. As Jonathan Eaton explores in his contribution to this volume, Ricardo\’s basic example of comparative advantage involved one factor of production (labor) and different technology across countries linked to differences in productivity of labor. By the middle of the 20th century, the focus was on models that had a number of different factors of production, and thus chose different methods of production, although they shared access to the same technology. By the 1980s, emphasis had shifted to models of how large firms would trade similar but not identical goods across countries: for example, international trade in cars or airplanes or machine tools.

But perhaps surprisingly, as economists looked at data on international trade with many different products, and explored models where countries differed in technology and productivity, they were led back to a Ricardian framework. Eaton and his frequent coauthor Samuel Kortum were leaders in this modelling. In an essay discussing this approach in the Spring 2012 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, they wrote in the abstract:

\”David Ricardo (1817) provided a mathematical example showing that countries could gain from trade by exploiting innate differences in their ability to make different goods. In the basic Ricardian example, two countries do better by specializing in different goods and exchanging them for each other, even when one country is better at making both. This example typically gets presented in the first or second chapter of a text on international trade, and sometimes appears even in a principles text. But having served its pedagogical purpose, the model is rarely heard from again. The Ricardian model became something like a family heirloom, brought down from the attic to show a new generation of students, and then put back. Nearly two centuries later, however, the Ricardian framework has experienced a revival. Much work in international trade during the last decade has returned to the assumption that countries gain from trade because they have access to different technologies. These technologies may be generally available to producers in a country, as in the Ricardian model of trade, our topic here, or exclusive to individual firms. This line of thought has brought Ricardo\’s theory of comparative advantage back to center stage.\”

In short, when it comes to the modern analysis of international trade, Ricardo is back! Of course, this isn\’t the only approach or only set of questions. Indeed, one of the problems in thinking about the effects of international trade is that the patterns of international trade are deeply interwoven with other political, historical and social variables, so extrapolations are hard. For example, it would probably be unwise to believe that if the nations of Africa or Latin America or Asia sought to form a \”Union,\” it would work out in the same ways (for better or worse) as the European Union. The laws about international trade are not the only relevant differences across regions.

Indeed, there is a long-standing argument in economics over whether trade leads to economic growth, or whether economic growth leads to more trade, or whether other external factors (like improved technology and transportation) affect both.

One other essay in this volume that especially caught my eye is by Ernesto Zedillo, and his title reveals his theme \”Don’t blame Ricardo – take responsibility for domestic political choices.\” He writes:

\”In the case of politicians opposed to international trade, the arguments put forward vary a lot, from the subtle to the grotesque, but all have in common the deflection of responsibility for domestic policy failures to external forces as the cause of those failures. The most extreme case of such deflection is to be found in the rhetoric of populist politicians, from both the left and the right. More than any other kind, the populist politicians have a marked tendency to blame others for their countries’ problems and failings. Foreigners who invest in, export or migrate to their country are the populist’s favourite targets to explain almost every domestic problem. That is why restrictions – including draconian ones – on trade, investment and migration are an essential part of the populist’s policy arsenal. Populists praise isolationism and avoid international engagement, except with their foreign populist cronies. The ‘full package’ of populism frequently includes anti-market economics, xenophobic and autarkic nationalism, and authoritarian politics. Populists display their protectionism and xenophobia as proof of their ‘authentic patriotism’ and excel at manipulating the public’s nationalistic sentiments to execute their retrograde economic and political agenda, which invariably includes a strong rejection of open markets.

\”Unfortunately, asserting a causal relationship between globalisation and domestic ills is the rule rather than the exception even in countries governed by moderate democratic leaders, left or right. It is a rare event that a government confronting serious domestic problems would look first into its own policy failings rather than external causes in dealing with their citizens’ demands for effective solutions. Blaming imports, foreign capital volatility and migrants would seem always preferable to explain phenomena such as slow GDP growth, external disequilibria, stagnant wages, and high unemployment. Taking responsibility for domestic policies – or the lack of thereof – that may be at the root of such problems, even if the latter is flagrantly the case, would seldom happen without first trying to point to external factors as the culprits for the unwanted conditions.\” 

To put this point in a US context, think of issues like the extraordinarily high costs of the US health care system,  the disappointing performance of K-12 education, the low levels of investment in infrastructure, stagnant spending on research and development as a share of GDP, the looming problem of rising spending on government entitlement programs, problems with the individual and corporate tax code, concerns about the competitiveness of certain sectors of the economy, the appropriate level financial regulation, and the challenges of adapting to changes in robotics, artificial intelligence, and other technological changes. These issues (and others that could be added) make a tall pile of problems; in contract, the contribution of international trade to the US economic issues is pretty small. But it\’s always a lot easier to criticize the neighbors than to clean up the mess in your own front yard.

One of the stories that economists tell each other about the idea of comparative advantage (mentioned in a couple of these essays is from 1969 Presidential Address by Paul Samuelson, The Way of an Economist,\” published in International Economic Relations: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Economic Association Held at Montreal (and available via the magic of Google Books, quotation is from p. 9):

\”[O]ur subject puts its best foot forward when it speaks out on international trade. This was brought home to me years ago when I was at the Society of Fellows at Harvard along with the mathemetician Stanley Ulam. Ulam, who was to become the originator of the Monte Carlo method and a co-discoverer of the hydrogen bomb, was already at a tender age a world-famous topologist. And he was a delightful conversationalist, wandering lazily over all domains of knowledge. He used to tease me by saying, `Name me one proposition in the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.\’ This was a test that I always failed. But now, some thirty years later, on the staircase so to speak,  an appropriate answer occurs to me: The Ricardian theory of comparative advantage; the demonstration that trade is mutually profitable even when one country is absolutely more — or less — productive in terms of every commodity. That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.\” 

It is of course a little disheartening to me that Paul Samuelson, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, had difficulty coming up with an economic idea that was both true and nontrivial! But it does make a better story that way. I sometimes say to students that understanding the idea of comparative advantage–both its strengths and its limitations–is one of the dividing lines separating those who actually know some economics from those who don\’t.

Sometimes if you can justify putting a bigger dollar sign in front of a problem, then you can also justify giving it more attention. This is a useful function of \”The Underestimated Cost of theOpioid Crisis,\” a report recently published by the Council of Economic Advisers (November 2017).  As background, here\’s a figure showing the rise in opioid-related deaths–more than doubling in the last decade.

Total deaths from opioid overdoses have climbed very close to the number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents, which totaled over 37,000 in 2016. Here\’s the age distribution of the opioid overdose deaths. They are not concentrated among elderly Americans, but rather in the 25-55 age bracket.

As the CEA report points out, the most prominent recent study of this topic in 2016 calculates the costs of opioid problems by measuring the costs of fatalities in terms of lost potential earnings. Thus, the biggest change in the CEA report is to put a monetary value on the deaths. The report notes:

\”Among the most recent (and largest) estimates was that produced by Florence et al. (2016), who estimated that prescription opioid overdose, abuse, and dependence in the United States in 2013 cost $78.5 billion. The authors found that 73 percent of this cost was attributed to nonfatal consequences, including healthcare spending, criminal justice costs and lost productivity due to addiction and incarceration. The remaining 27 percent was attributed to fatality costs consisting almost entirely of lost potential earnings. … Using conventional estimates of the losses induced by fatality routinely used by Federal agencies, in addition to making other adjustments related to illicit opioids, more recent data, and underreporting of opioids in drug overdose death certificates, CEA finds that the overall loss imposed by the crisis is several times larger than previous estimates.\”

Ten years ago, December 2007, was the start of the Great Recession. Have US housing markets recovered? My go-to source for regular updates on the US housing market is \”Housing Markets at a Glance,\” a monthly chartbook published by the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Here are some snapshots from the most recent (November 2017) issue.

The total value of US housing can be broken down into homeowners\’ equity and the mortgage debt still outstanding. As this figure shows, during the fall in housing prices from 2006 to 2011, the total value of US housing fell by about $7 trillion–a fall of roughly 30%. Of course, the fall in housing prices didn\’t reduce the debt that people already owed (the blue line), so it mainly shows up in home equity (the yellow line), which falls by about 50%. Home equity is usually larger than outstanding debt, but that relationship reversed itself for a few years. However, the total value of US housing has now risen again and exceeds its level in 2006, while the amount of housing debt has actually declined a bit.

Here\’s a figure showing the corresponding annual change in home prices, using two housing price index (HPI) measures, one from CoreLogic and one from Zillow.

Unsurprisingly, the sharp decline in home mortgages led to severe stresses for households. This figure shows the share of home loans in serious delinquency or actual foreclosure. At its worst, about one-tenth of all mortgage loans in the entire US were more than 90 days delinquent or in foreclosure.

A much larger number of households were not delinquent on their mortgage, but found themselves \”underwater\”–that is, what they owed on the mortgage was more than the house would have been worth in a sale. In 2009, about one-fourth of all US homes with a mortgage had negative equity.

The economic story behind these charts–the loss of value, price meltdown, delinquencies, and negative equity–is cataclysmic.  The charts also provide some evidence on what was happening behind the scenes in mortgage finance. To understand these figures, it\’s useful to know that most mortgages are now \”securitized,\” meaning that they are financed by investors who purchase financial securities based on the underlying mortgage.  These investors can be banks, pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, or others. The process of securitization can happen through the \”government-sponsored enterprises\” of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae, or they can happen through the private sector with \”private-label\” securities.

One big change the years just before the melt-down in housing prices was that the private-label securities expanded substantially, and in particular expanded into subprime and Alt-A mortgages, which are riskier than the usual \”prime\” mortgage. (Alt-A is a risk category in-between prime and subprime.)

This share of the housing market going to these private-label securities, which had been rising slowly in the late 1990s, spiked for few years. But in the heat of the housing crisis, they melted away. Now the government-sponsored firms almost totally dominate mortgage-backed securities. Of course, they survive because they received huge federal government bailouts, as well as a promise that the government would stand behind them in the future.

In the aftermath of the housing market meltdown, and the near-demise of private-label mortgage-backed securities, it\’s no surprise that it\’s become harder to get a mortgage loan. Indeed, one can make a case that the market is still in overreaction mode. This index offers a calculation of the share of owner-occupied home purchase loans that are likely to default. It separates out the risk that it is due to borrowers not repaying, and the product-risk that is due to higher-risk loans being made.

Thus, you can see the arrival of the larger share of subprime and Alt-A loans arriving in the market–and how the product risk they brought with them pushed up the risk of default. The Urban Institute estimate is that time from about 2001-2003 can be viewed as \”Reasonable Lending Standards,\” which implies that the very low level of expected defaults in recent years is part of an ongoing overreaction to what went so badly lwrong.

There\’s of course a lot more to this story of the Great Recession. But it does support a concern that when financial regulators see a large and rapid build-up of a new kind of high-risk loan, they should seriously consider putting on the brakes. And it\’s a reminder to investors that when asset prices shoot up rapidly, as housing prices did in the early 2000s, it\’s wise to start thinking about how to ensure a soft landing.

\”China\’s rise: The wealth of a nation (not ours)

Fisheries are a standard example for economists of the \”tragedy of the commons.\” For any individual fisherman, it makes sense to catch as many fish as possible. However, if all fishermen act in this way and if the number of fishermen grows substantially over time, the underlying common resource can become depleted and unable to renew itself. In fact, this scenario has actually taken place with the world\’s natural fisheries, where production peaked a couple of decades ago and has been stagnant or declining since then. The just-published OECD Review of Fisheries: Policy and Summary Statistics 2017  notes: \”Production of wild-caught fish in OECD countries is considerably below its peak in the late 1980s and continues to decline.\”

There are two ways out of this box. One way is to figure out a method of limiting what fishermen catch, which would over time allow natural fishing stocks to rebuild so that the total catch could be greater in the medium- and long-run. I\’ve written about proposals and analysis along these lines in
\”Saving Global Fisheries with Property Rights\” (April 12, 2016) and\”More Fish Through Less Fishing\” (May 10, 2017). The obvious difficulty is while would be in the broad interest of a fishing industry to have limits on what can be caught, so that the resource is preserved, the practical issues of determining who should be allowed to catch how much and enforcing such decisions can be difficult.

The other approach is to have the fish-production migrate away from wild catch, and move toward \”aquaculture,\” in which a certain body of water is no longer a common resource, but instead is owned by a fish producer. Aquaculture appears to be on is way to surpassing natural catch. As the OECD report notes:

\”Global aquaculture production already exceeds the volume of catch from wild fisheries, if aquatic plants are included. Annual average aquaculture growth in OECD countries has accelerated and now averages 2.1% per year. Globally, it is even more rapid, at 6% per year. Moreover, average prices of aquaculture products are increasing …\”

Most of the OECD report is a point-by-point overview of what is happening in individual countries. There is lots of \”reviewing and revising,\” and \”advancing reforms\” and \”latest major policy developments.\” But at least to me, it\’s revealing that \”Countries are also working actively to promote the sustainable development of aquaculture, which is seen as the primary source of future growth in fish production.\” This emphasis suggests that the process of rebuilding natural stocks of fish has a long way to go.

There is also a chapter on government support for the fishing industry. In most countries, other than China, fishermen are not supported directly, but instead the industry received indirect support equal to about one-sixth of its annual production. The OECD report notes:

\”The Fisheries Support Estimate (FSE) Database now inventories budgetary support to fisheries that totals USD 13 billion (EUR 11.7 billion) in 33 countries and economies in 2015. For the first time, data for the People\’s Republic of China (hereafter, \”China\”) is included in the database, revealing the scale of policies in this important fishing nation. Nearly 88% of all support transferred to individual fishers recorded in the database originates in China. In a positive development, China has announced plans to progressively reduce this subsidy. For most other countries and economies in the database, support to general services to the sector, rather than transfers to individual fishers, dominate. Governments invest a significant amount of resources to this kind of support, which includes management, enforcement, research, infrastructure and marketing. On average, these expenditures by government equal 16% of the value of landings: that is, USD 1 in every 6 earned by the sector. While some governments recoup these costs from fishers, this approach is not commonly applied and accounts for only a small percentage of the total outlay on general services to the sector.\”

The geography and policy issues fisheries is in many ways more national and regional than truly international. But the broader management of ocean resources and ecology is a global issue, with fisheries as one measure of the health of this ecosystem.

One traditional stereotype of the US economy is that it includes a high degree of physical mobility of workers and families: between states, between rural to urban areas, between suburbs and inner cities, and so on. In theory, this mobility offers possibilities for adjusting to economic shocks and for seeking out opportunities, which in turn part of what makes a fluid and flexible market economy work. But in fact, Americans are moving less. David Schleicher discusses the issue in \”Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation,\” appearing in the Yale Law Journal (October 2017, 127:1, pp. 78-154). He writes (footnotes omitted):

\”Leaving one’s home in search of a better life is, perhaps, the most classic of all American stories. … But today, the number of Americans who leave home for new opportunities is in decline. A series of studies shows that the interstate migration rate has fallen substantially since the 1980s. Americans now move less often than Canadians, and no more than Finns or Danes. … [M]obility rates are lower among disadvantaged groups and that mobility has not increased despite becoming “more important” to individual economic advancement.

\”More troubling still, Americans are no longer moving from poor regions to rich ones. This observation captures two trends in declining mobility. First, fewer Americans are moving away from geographic areas of low economic opportunity. David Autor, David Dorn, and their colleagues have studied declining regions that lost manufacturing jobs due to shocks created by Chinese import competition. Traditionally, such shocks would be expected to generate temporary spikes in unemployment rates, which would then subside as unemployed people left the area to find new jobs. But these studies found that unemployment rates and average wage reductions persisted over time. Americans, especially those who are non-college educated, are choosing to stay in areas hit by negative economic shocks. There is a long history of localized shocks generating interstate mobility in the United States; today, however, economists at the International Monetary Fund note that “following the same negative shock to labor demand, affected workers have more and more tended to either drop out of the labor force or remain unemployed instead of relocating.”

\”Second, lower-skilled workers are not moving to high-wage cities and regions. Bankers and technologists continue to move from Mississippi or Arkansas to New York or Silicon Valley, but few janitors make similar moves, despite the higher nominal wages on offer in rich regions for all types of jobs. As a result, local economic booms no longer create boomtowns. Economically successful regions like Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, and Boston have seen only slow population growth over the last twenty-five years. Inequality between states has become entrenched. Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag have shown that a hundred-year trend of “convergence” between the richest and poorest states in per-capita state Gross Domestic Product (GDP) slowed in the 1980s and now has effectively come to a halt.\”

Schleicher makes the argument that state and local economic policies (and a few federal ones) are major contributors to this lack of mobility. More broadly, he argues that state and local policy is often much more strongly affected by those voters already in place who prefer stability, rather than by those who have not yet moved to the area and might prefer evolution and growth.

\”[S]tate and local (and a few federal) laws and policies have created substantial barriers to interstate mobility, particularly for lower-income Americans. Land-use laws and occupational licensing regimes limit entry into local and state labor markets. Differing eligibility standards for public benefits, public employee pensions, homeownership tax subsidies, state and local tax laws, and even basic property law doctrines inhibit exit from low-opportunity states and cities. Building codes, mobile home bans, location-based subsidies, legal constraints on knocking down houses, and the problematic structure of Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy all limit the capacity of failing cities to shrink gracefully, directly reducing exit among some populations and increasing the economic and social costs of entry limits elsewhere.  ….

\”A number of these policies changed substantially in ways that made populations stickier during the period when mobility fell. It is not clear whether these legal changes caused declines in mobility, or simply failed to push back against “natural” changes that reduced mobility—such as an aging population, declining churn in employment, and decreasing diversity of employers by region due to the increasing economic dominance of the service sector. But state and local policies in part dictate where people move, particularly by keeping people out of the richest metropolitan areas and best job markets. Whether as a direct cause or as mere bystanders, state, local, and federal laws therefore bear some responsibility for declining interstate mobility…. In aggregate, these local and state policies play a substantial role in creating or failing to combat the central macroeconomic problems of our time: slow growth rates, increasing inequality of wealth and income, and the difficulties of balancing inflation and unemployment. …

However, state and local policies must answer to state and local needs, which are often in tension with broader national interests. … [T]he structure and process of state and local government decisionmaking often overrepresents the voices of those local residents who care the most about stability and the least about growth.  State and local governments have few incentives to consider broader national economic implications when writing zoning codes or establishing public pension rules. … Where local or state governments have the power to limit entry or reduce exit, the harm to agglomerative efficiency, and thus national economic output, is substantially increased.

Mobility has traditionally been a way of smoothing the transitions that are a part of any dynamic and growing economy. Of course, lack of mobility isn\’t all that\’s ailing US labor markets. But I think it\’s a meaningful contributor.

The Office of Financial Research, within the US Department of the Treasury, was created by the  Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (commonly known as the Dodd-Frank act), to provide analysis and data  for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, another creation of the same law. It\’s Financial Stability Report 2017 discusses some \”key vulnerabilities\” of the financial system.

Cybersecurity Incidents. \”Cybersecurity incidents rank near the top of our threat assessment because of the potential for disruption of operational and financial networks, and the damage such disruptions could cause to financial stability and to the broader economy. Cyber incidents can affect financial stability if defenses fail.\”

Resolution Risks at Systemically Important Financial Institutions. The term \”resolution risk\” refers to what process will begin if a big financial institution becomes insolvent. The regulators are still struggling to address some possible issues. \”The treatment of derivatives held by a failing financial firm continues to present a conundrum for policymakers seeking to balance contagion and run risks against moral hazard concerns. Tools for orderly resolution of failing systemic nonbank financial firms remain less developed than for banks, despite the material impact of some nonbank failures in the past and the growing importance of nonbanks, particularly central counterparties (CCPs), in the financial system.\”

A Single Bank Deals with all Treasury Securities. The Treasury market will soon be more dependent on a single bank for the settlement of Treasury securities and related repos. A service disruption, such as an operational risk incident or even the bank’s failure, could impair the liquidity and functioning of these markets because some customers will need time to move their operations elsewhere. It could also disrupt other markets that rely on Treasuries for pricing and funding. The 2007-09 financial crisis showed the damage that can be done if activity in short-term funding markets is constrained. Dealers in Treasury securities use clearing banks to settle Treasury cash transactions. Since the 1990s, these services have been provided by two clearing banks, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BNY Mellon). With JP Morgan Chase’s announcement in July 2016 that it intends to cease provision of government securities settlement services to broker-dealer clients, this business will be concentrated in a single bank. A disruption in BNY Mellon’s Treasury settlement could have broad implications for the Treasury market. It could disrupt trading in Treasuries. If settlement services were interrupted for an extended period, risks could spread further to markets that rely on the Treasury market for hedging and pricing.\”

Fragmentation of Stock Markets. In 1996, almost all stock trading happened on the main exchanges of the NYSE or Nasdaq. Now, NYSE and Nasdaq each run a number of separate exchanges, and there are 50 off-exchange stock markets. This fragmentation raises possibilities of  playing one market against another, or of liquidity failing in one market with effects cascading across other markets.

The Shift Away from LIBOR. The London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, has long been a benchmark for global financial transactions. But some will remember the scandal about a decade ago when it came to light that some traders had been making money by nudging the benchmark rate up or down. But LIBOR is no longer a good benchmark.

\”Interest payments on at least $10 trillion in credit obligations and more than $150 trillion in the notional value of derivatives contracts were linked to U.S. dollar LIBOR at the end of 2013. But LIBOR is unsustainable across a number of currencies. It is based on a survey of a shrinking pool of market participants and reflects transactions in a shrinking market. Most LIBOR survey submissions are based on judgment rather than actual trades, and the rate tracks unsecured transactions, which represent a small share of banks’ wholesale funding.\”

A transition is underway to a new benchmark rate, the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR), which will be generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But shifting over tens of trillions of dollars in transactions from one benchmark rate to another may bring some bumps.

Risks if Low Interest Rates and Volatility Increase Risk-Taking. \”The OFR has highlighted in each of our annual reports the risk that low volatility and persistently low interest rates may promote excessive risk-taking and create vulnerabilities. … The increase in already-elevated asset prices and the decrease in risk premiums may leave some markets vulnerable to a large correction. Such corrections can trigger financial instability when important holders or intermediaries of the assets employ high degrees of leverage or rely on short-term loans to finance long-term assets. … Equity valuations are high by historical standards. The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is at its 97th percentile relative to the last 130 years. … Real estate is another area of concern. U.S. house prices are elevated relative to median household incomes and estimated national rents, although these ratios are well below the levels observed just before the financial crisis. … Valuations are also elevated in bond markets. … Duration — the sensitivity of bond prices to interest rate moves — has steadily increased since the crisis.\”