10 June 2019

Olivier Blanchard: Europe must fix its fiscal rules

The former IMF chief economist argues that eurozone policymakers should create a common budget, or at least overhaul the fiscal rules that have tied member-state governments' hands for no good reason, in order to face an environment of persistently low interest rates and below-potential output.

[...]while the need for a common eurozone budget from which to draw additional spending is more pressing now than in the past, this would entail risk-sharing among the member states, which is a politically difficult issue.

Still, there are other measures the eurozone could pursue, starting with a fiscal rule change. With interest rates so low, a 60% debt-to-GDP limit is not the right target (if it ever was to begin with). Not only should it be higher, but the requirement that member states that exceed the limit adjust back to it at a certain speed should be loosened. Moreover, because monetary policymakers have little room to maneuver, the European Union must grant governments more freedom to stimulate demand through fiscal policy. That means loosening the 3%-of-GDP limit on fiscal deficits, too.

To be sure, governments should not be given carte blanche; but they should not have their hands tied so tightly, either. What the EU needs is a new rule-making philosophy. The eurozone has gone so far in piling up constraints, on the assumption that governments will always misbehave or try to cheat, that the result is sometimes incomprehensible.

As a first step, the European Commission should stop micromanaging member states’ fiscal policies. The Commission should intervene only when a government is on a trajectory toward amassing truly unsustainable debt (which certainly can happen under irresponsible leadership). Otherwise, the Commission’s main job should be to provide information to the markets about the health of a member state’s economy and its likely path of debt.

This way, the markets would decide. Fiscal space, after all, is in the eye of the investor. Japan has a large public debt, but investors do not seem worried; Italy, where investors are now demanding a large risk premium, is another matter. The challenge for a member-state government, then, would no longer be to please the Commission, but to convince investors that it is operating responsibly with respect to the debt.

As a second step, the eurozone must improve its fiscal- and monetary-policy coordination. (In fact, it has always needed to do this; but now the matter is especially urgent.) At this stage, monetary policy cannot do the job alone. Stimulus must take the form of a fiscal expansion to make up for what the ECB cannot provide. Yet no country has an incentive to do this on its own, because, with member states so deeply integrated, some share of any fiscal expansion will inevitably be lost to spillover in the form of increased imports.

What is needed, then, is either a coordination device through which each country commits to a larger, self-financed fiscal expansion, or, preferably (but more controversially) a common budget, funded by euro bonds, which can then be used to finance higher spending in each country, when and if needed. [...]

Full article on Project Syndicate

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