Matt Nolan

Should we be pleased to have a tight labour market?

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Over at no right turn, they seem to believe that economists sour reaction to the low unemployment figure is ridiculous. After all, a low unemployment rate implies that people have jobs, and a secure income, which is of course valuable to society.

They seem to believe that if we accept a little more inflation we can keep this low level of unemployment, and society will be better off. However, in this doesn’t hold. As an economist would say, in the long-run there is no trade-off between inflation and unemployment. If we accept higher inflation now, then in the future unemployment will rise to its natural rate, and we will be stuck with a higher rate of inflation.  The unemployment level is a problem now because it is lower than the NAIRU implying that the upward pressure on wages is too strong, and as a result the price level will increase.

Now government policy should be focused on decreasing the natural rate of unemployment. If the government can help improve the function of the market, they can make sure that in the long-run, unemployment will be lower. One of the things the government can do to make sure the market functions better, is keep price growth low, so that firms and buyers are more certain of the price level, and savers (whose money gets invested into firms) have more incentive to say (and so there is more investment). So who knows, maybe there is a long-run relationship between inflation and unemployment, lower inflation leading to less unemployment!

Matt Nolan

Floating GST rates?

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So supposedly, the RBNZ has suggested a floating GST rate as a way of controlling inflation. Now this seems silly too me for two reasons:

1) GST is a tax, as a result this would either have to be implemented through fiscal policy (and so would not work, as governments cannot commit to just focusing on inflation), or you would have to give the Bank the right to tax (as the Bank is not elected by the people this is uncomfortable)

2) The level of GST affects the price level, so if the economy is running strongly and you prop it up, you push up the price level.

Now the first criticism is self-evident, however it is a normative problem with the scheme, implying that there might be some theoretical merit. The second criticism is positive. Now, I am not saying that changing the GST tax will cause inflation, as inflation is the rate of change in the price level. Changing the GST tax will change the price level, but not change the rate at which the price level grows, in fact increasing GST will take money out of the economy, slowing growth in the price level and thereby slowing inflation.

So a floating GST tax would slow inflation, however lets think about why we want to slow inflation. We want to reduce volatility in the price level, to give people certainty. Volatility in the price level is bad as the majority of people cannot properly hedge against it. Now by having the GST tax increase and fall we are adding volatility to the price level, causing one of the problems that monetary policy is supposed to solve. It just seems a bit silly.

Matt Nolan

Immigration and inflation

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I have just been flicking through the NZX submission on monetary policy, thanks to a link kindly provided by Lucy.

While I disagree with most of the submission (for the reasons I gave yesterday about higher interest rates being structural), I was happy to see that they discussed immigration.

Now immigration is an interesting issue, ignoring any social issues (i’m an economists after all), I’m going to focus on the link between immigration and inflation. According to Rebus legal perth lawyers, one of the main reason why the overall economy could have a massive downfall and the country could go into the state of depression is due to lack of immigrants. A recent study showed that most of the top CEOs of the county are not the originals of the land but are the descendants of on immigrants who came to the country and got it to a great position where it now stands on.

Some people say immigration causes inflation, as it increases the demand for goods and services, driving up the price. Other people say that immigration drives down inflation by increasing labour supply, and thereby driving down real wage demands, preventing wage inflation.

Now the way I see it is that immigration increases demand and supply. After all labour is an input to production, but once labour has been paid they turn into consumers, who purchase the goods. As a result, whether inflation rises or falls with immigration depends on the productivity of the immigrants. If we bring in a whole lot of untrained, unproductive workers it will cause inflation. If we bring in workers that have the highest marginal product (so in the places where firms are begging for labour) then it should decrease inflationary pressures.

It seems incredibly simple, the difficult issue is actually identifying and bringing in skilled, hard working labour. However, i’m not sure that cutting immigrant numbers when we have shortages of unskilled and skilled labour is a good idea. I’m sorry RBNZ, but I think the NZX is right on this one.

Matt Nolan

RBNZ, NZX and equity markets

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The NZX wants the RBNZ to pay more attention to the way the equity market behaves when the bank change the official cash rate.

Now I can’t find a copy of the submission anywhere, but the above stuff article at least tells us that the NZX would like policy goals to be focused on long term economic growth. Now I think the ultimate goal of the RBNZ is long term economic growth, however the Bank believes that the way to do it is to provide an environment with a high degree of price stability.

The NZX counter-argument is that the narrow focus of RBNZ policy leads to higher equilibrium interest rates, which increases the cost of capital for firms, retarding long run economic growth.

Now I have some sympathy with the idea that our equilibrium interest rate is too high, however I think we have to figure out why interest rates seem to be, on average, higher in NZ than in the rest of the developed world. The RBNZ acknowledges the fact that New Zealand seems to have higher equilibrium interest rates than other develop nations, but they see this as a result of New Zealand’s poor net investment position. As it is the result the Bank doesn’t see monetary policy as the problem, the problem is structural.

The question I have to ask then is, why is our net investment position so bad (current account deficits damn it) and how do we get out of it?

P.S. If anyone knows where I can find copies of the submissions to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee, please tell me in the comment section. I can only seem to find the Reserve Bank one.

Matt Nolan

Creative destruction

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I’ve always had a soft spot for the idea of creative destruction, even though my understanding of the it is well below par.

I found the following article interesting, in the way it used the idea of job creation and destruction to describe the process of changing unemployment.  It gives us a good idea about the massive flows associated with input changes in the labour market.

Using this concept, it describes how the composition of employment in NZ is changing, with more highly paid, high value jobs being created, at the expensive of low value, low skill jobs.  In my opinion, and the opinion of the article, this is a good thing.  What do you think?

Matt Nolan

What is the RBNZ talking about

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“New Zealanders have been showing early signs of moderating their borrowing.”

Does anyone know what these early signs are. From what I can tell, the growth in household borrowing is at record highs, in fact todays M3 data confirms that. If anything, household borrowing seems to be accelerating, I’m sure it will slow eventually, but why did the RBNZ say that if they didn’t mean it.

My suspicion is that the RBNZ wanted to talk the exchange rate down. They said that the level of our exchange rate was the result of New Zealanders borrowing too much, and buying things from overseas. As a result, higher interest rates will stop New Zealanders doing this, helping the exchange rate.

Now that is a load of crap. Our Reserve Bank needs to take a big long look at itself, and realise that it has been acting like a 14 year old girl who got a pimple just before the big ball. Stop making excuses for our inflation and just deal with it! I wish the Reserve Bank governor was a computer.