Despite all the negative reactions to fiscal austerity, some econs still beleive it is the need of the hour in Europe.
Raghu Rajan summarises the true lessons from the crisis - The West Can’t Borrow and Spend Its Way to Recovery. He says Keynesians are trying to get best of both worlds:
According to the conventional interpretation of the global economic recession, grow th has ground to a halt in the West because demand has collapsed, a casualty of the massive amount of debt accumulated before the crisis. Households and countries are not spending because they can’t borrow the funds to do so, and the best way to revive growth, the argument goes, is to find ways to get the money flowing again. Governments that still can should run up even larger deficits, and central banks should push interest rates even lower to encourage thrifty households to buy rather than save. Leaders should worry about the accumulated debt later, once their economies have picked up again.
This narrative—the standard Keynesian line, modified for a debt crisis—is the one to which most Western o⁄cials, central bankers, and Wall Street economists subscribe today. As the United States has shown signs of recovery, Keynesian pundits have been quick to claim success for their policies, pointing to Europe’s emerging recession as proof of the folly of government austerity. But it is hard to tie recovery (or the lack of it) to specific policy interventions. Until recently, these same pundits were complaining that the stimulus packages in the United States were too small. “We told you to do more.” And the massive fiscal deficits in Europe, as well as the European Central Bank’s tremendous increase in lending to banks, suggest that it is not for want of government stimulus that growth is still fragile there.
He says the problem is not because of lack of demand. But of distorted supply:
In fact, today’s economic troubles are not simply the result of inadequate demand but the result, equally, of a distorted supply side. For decades before the financial crisis in 2008, advanced economies were losing their ability to grow by making useful things. But they needed to somehow replace the jobs that had been lost to technology and foreign competition and to pay for the pensions and health care of their aging populations. So in an eªort to pump up growth, governments spent more than they could aªord and promoted easy credit to get households to do the same. The growth that these countries engineered, with its dependence on borrowing, proved unsustainable.
The solution is also reforming supply-side:
Rather than attempting to return to their artificially inflated gdp numbers from before the crisis, governments need to address the underlying flaws in their economies. In the United States, that means educating or retraining the workers who are falling behind, encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation, and harnessing the power of the financial sector to do good while preventing it from going off track. In southern Europe, by contrast, it means removing the regulations that protect firms and workers from competition and shrinking the government’s presence in a number of areas, in the process eliminating unnecessary, unproductive jobs.
Well, there was some belief in Rajan’s ideas till austerity was not implemented. After austerity, it is clear things are far more complex. Europe in particular is all over the place…
