財政債務(国家借金)と経済成長と緊縮財政政策(財政赤字削減の政府予算削減政策)
OPINIÓN
El debate sobre la deuda, el crecimiento y la austeridad
Los profesores de Harvard rechazan las críticas sobre su estudio que vincula altos niveles de deuda con bajo crecimiento económico.
Carmen M. Reinhart y Kenneth S. Rogoff 27 ABR 2013 - 19:08 CET
OPINION
The debate about debt, growth and austerity
Harvard professors reject criticism of his study linking high debt levels with low economic growth.
Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff 27 ABR 2013 - 19:08 CET
In May 2010, we published a scholarly article entitled Growth in a time of debt, whose main conclusion, using data from 44 countries over 200 years, was that countries both rich and those in developing high levels of public debt, specifically, gross public debt equivalent to 90% or more of annual economic output of a country-were associated with growth rates considerably lower.
Taking into account the discussions that are taking place in the industrialized world, from Washington to London via Brussels and Tokyo, about the best way to recover from the Great Recession, this article, along with other research we have published, has been cited frequently-and often an exaggerated or distorted-by politicians, analysts and activists from across the political spectrum. Last week, three economists from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, published an article criticizing our findings. Successfully discovered a coding error in a spreadsheet that took us to miscalculate growth rates of highly indebted countries since the Second World War. But we also accused of committing "grave errors" arising from the "culling" of relevant data and a "weighing unconventional" statistics, which are a categorically reject accusations. (See Appendix accompanying this work, only available online, we explain the methodological issues and techniques are discussed.)
Our research, and even our merits and our integrity have been violently attacked in the newspapers and on television. The two have received emails full of hate, and even threatening, in some of which we are blamed for the dismissal of officials, public service cuts and tax increases. As a career academic economists (the only high-level public service we have provided has been in the research department of the International Monetary Fund), these attacks seem a sad commentary on the politicization of social science research. But our views are not what matters here.
The authors of the report published last week, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, they say that our "conclusions intellectual bulwark have served to support the austerity policy" and urge lawmakers to "reconsider the austerity plan both in Europe and in the USA ".
A reconsideration weighted austerity is the way legislators responsible for, but not for the reasons the authors. Their findings are less dramatic than they would like them to believe. Our 2010 study found that long-term, growth is about one percentage point lower when debt is 90% or more of gross domestic product. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts do not dispute this fundamental conclusion that several researchers have explained in more detail.
Academic studies on debt and growth have focused for some time to identify causality. Does high debt merely reflects lower tax revenues and slower growth? Or high debt hurts growth?
We have always felt that there is causality in both directions, and there is no valid rule for all times and all places. In a report released last year with Vincent R. Reinhart, analyze virtually every episode of prolonged high debt in advanced economies since 1800, and nowhere we stated that 90% was a magic threshold that transforms the results, as has been suggested by conservative politicians.
We did find that episodes of high debt (90% or more) were rare, lengthy and costly. There were only 26 cases in which the debt / GDP ratio exceeded 90% for five years or more, the high debt mean period was 23 years. In 23 of the 26 cases, the average growth was slower during the period of high debt in periods with a lower debt levels. In fact, the economy grew at an average annual rate of about 3.5% when the ratio was less than 90%, but only at a rate of 2.3% on average with relative debt levels higher.
(In 2012, the debt / GDP ratio was 106% in the U.S., 82% in Germany and 90% in Britain, in Japan the figure is 238%, but Japan is somewhat exceptional because they are the inhabitants those who own most of the debt is a creditor to the rest of the world.)
The fact that high-debt episodes last as indicating that should not be, as some liberal economists, just a few downturns in the economic cycle.
At this time is different, our history of 2009 on financial crises over eight centuries, we find that when the sovereign debt reached unsustainable levels, so did the cost of debt, assuming it was even possible to obtain loans. The current situation that faced Italy and Greece, whose debts date back to the early 1990s, long before the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 corroborates this view.
This politically charged discussion, especially intense in the last week or so, has equated falsely our finding of a negative association between debt and growth with an unequivocal call for austerity.
We agree that growth is a difficult goal to achieve in times of high debt. We know that cutting spending and raising taxes is difficult in an economy with slow growth and persistent unemployment. Austerity rarely works without structural reforms, such as changes in taxes, regulations and measures related to the labor market, and if poorly designed, can disproportionately affect the poor and middle class . Our usual advice has been avoiding withdrawal of fiscal stimulus too quickly, which is a position identical to that held by most mainstream economists.
In some cases, we have been in favor of a more radical proposals, among which includes debt restructuring (an expression raised to a default partial) public and private. Such restructuring helped resolve debt increased during the First World War and the Depression. And we have long been in favor of sovereign debt and repay principal debt of banks in the European periphery (Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain) to boost growth.
In the U.S., we advocate the reduction of mortgage principal in homes in which the mortgage is higher than the value of the house. We have also written about a plausible solutions involving moderately higher inflation and "financial repression" (reduce interest rates adjusted for inflation, actually equivalent to tax bondholders). This strategy contributed to the significant debt reductions that followed the Second World War.
In short, many countries around the world have a public debt extraordinarily high by historical standards, especially when taking into account the medical assistance programs and aid for the elderly. The elimination of these debt burdens typically involves a transfer, often painful, savers to borrowers. This time is no different, and the last academic mess should not divert our attention from that fact.
Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff are Harvard professors.
Translation of News Clips. Copyright The New York Times News Service 2013
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