Matt Nolan

April 12 Aussie unemployment rate drops: What about NZ migration?

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There seem to be concerns about the number of New Zealanders permanently heading over to Australia.  In the year to March 53,237 people permanently left NZ for Aussie, up 12,331 from March 2011.  To put this in perspective Australia accounted for 61% of all permanent departures – and annual departures to other countries were actually down 1,106 from a year earlier.  This is all via good old Stats NZ.

To me this is all much of a muchness – however one thing I do know is that the level of the Australian unemployment rate, and the gap between their UR and NZ’s has a strong impact on the level of permanent departures over there … unsuprisingly.

As a result, the drop in the Australian unemployment rate to 4.9% in April should be seen as a signal that we will see departures stay high for a while yet.  We can easily see this by just comparing the unemployment rate figures (which you can grab simultaneously off the OECD site):

In this environment, people are moving overseas to find work.  It’s not surprising, and in of itself doesn’t lead to any policy conclusions – we need to add a few more pieces before we can really start to say anything.  So this is just a little thing to keep in mind.

jamesz

Bad business decisions by CEO Key

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Asset sales are in the papers again today:

If New Zealand’s Government were a business, it would have no case to sell stakes in its energy generation firms… Sustento director and economist Raf Manji said. It was admirable for the Government to lower debt, but the numbers around selling stakes in energy firms to do so did not add up, he said.
…
No more important public good existed than energy, as it was essential to people and businesses, so it was dangerous to raise the firm’s focus on profits.

Much like Raf, I’m not ideologically opposed to the government selling assets. However, we clearly disagree about the rationale for selling energy assets. He makes two points: it’s a bad business decisions, and energy is a public good so public provision is required.

On the first point, economists have long argued that the country is not a large company and shouldn’t be treated as such. If we wanted governments to be highly leveraged investors to return a profit then they should probably stop taxing high productivity people and giving the money to people with lower productivity. I’d ditch the welfare system, too: a loss-making business if ever I saw one! Obviously the government’s not an investor trying to turn a profit so let’s focus on what can do to improve social welfare and equity. Raf’s second argument seems to implicitly acknowledge that by appealing to the government’s role in providing public goods.

The public goods argument is far stronger because it is widely acknowledged that public goods are under-provided by the public sector. The reason is to be found in the two defining characteristics of public goods:

  • One person’s use doesn’t decrease the quantity available for everyone else. For instance, however much I enjoy clean air in New Zealand, there is no less for you.
  • You can’t stop people from using it, so property rights over it become fairly meaningless. You can’t own clean air here and sell it, so there’s no private incentive to generate it. That’s why we need environmental regulations to deal with pollution.

What’s striking about these two characteristics of public goods is that energy fits neither of them! When I use energy, you can’t use that energy. When I don’t pay my power bill the power company can cut me off. So energy isn’t a public good and the arguments for public provision that apply to public goods don’t apply here.

Update: Matt and I have written about asset sales previously, as have Paul Walker and Seamus Hogan.

Matt Nolan

On supermarket petrol vouchers

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Yesterday I received a phone call asking why New Zealand supermarkets offer petrol vouchers with purchases, and whether consumers are really paying for it all anyway!

(Update:  I’ve been informed that they were actually discussing this on Close Up yesterday, and they were trying to say that for some reason people pay “more” – because people who don’t use the vouchers are cross-subsidising people who do use the vouchers.  This sort of issue fits into point 2 below – and I’m not convinced that we are seeing a welfare loss due to this, in fact I think even this view would lead to better outcomes for consumers … ignoring point 3 below which strongly shows why this is likely to be the case.)

I decided the best way to answer the question was to try and understand the reasons why supermarkets and petrol companies would set up an agreement where these vouchers are offered and there is some (unknown) transfer between supermarkets and petrol companies.

Now remember, for the supermarket and petrol companies to come to an arrangement, it must be in both of their interests.  They must decide that offering a voucher to consumers who shop at the supermarket increases the sum of total profit in both markets – if that occurs, then they can negotiate over any “surplus” gained when they set up the contract.

At first brush we might say that it must somehow make consumers worse off, because profits are higher then they were without the supermarket and petrol company coming to that arrangement.  But if we think a little deeper, we are going to find out this is not the case 😉

Off the top of my head I can pick out three reasons why this agreement exists:

  1. Assume a monopoly supermarket and petrol station to start with.  The first reason may be weird behaviour by consumers.  For some reason, the fact the voucher is offered gets them to spend more at supermarkets and petrol stations overall.  This is the least compelling explanation in my opinion – but it is the only one that could create the result of consumers genuinely being worse off.
  2. Price discrimination:  Stick with our monopolies.  Lets remember that some people drive, and some don’t.  People who don’t drive tend to live in big cities, and are often environmentally conscious – both factors correlated with higher incomes, and more inelastic demand for supermarket goods.  This tell us that, by offering petrol vouchers our monopoly supermarket can then increase prices – thereby imposing a form of implicit price discrimination.  And of course, price discrimination shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing!
  3. A prisoner’s dilemma:  Now our assumption of a monopoly has been ridiculous – we actually have a duopoly in the supermarket industry in New Zealand, and even greater competition in the fuel industry.  This gives us another way to justify the use of vouchers – competition.  Take our two supermarkets – if neither supermarket agreed set up a deal with a petrol station, they would both sit there making tidy profits.  However, if one of them offers vouchers, a lot of customers would go to that supermarket – making the supermarket offering the vouchers heaps better off, and the other one much worse off.  If both offer vouchers, then consumers once again don’t really care where they go – so the supermarket does better than in the case when their competitor offers vouchers and they don’t, but worse than in the case when no-one offers vouchers (due to the cost of the voucher).  In this case, it is in the supermarket’s interest to enter the scheme – as they make a higher profit by offering vouchers no matter what the choice of the other supermarket is.  But the existence of the scheme makes consumers undeniably better off!

Overall, this suggests to me that the existence of the petrol vouchers is adding to consumers welfare – and we should encourage any sort of scheme that increases competition in the marketplace 🙂

Matt Nolan

A cut to the OCR, why?

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Note:  This post is like a personal summary of information from the recent past – given that I have been too slack to write about international events here.  Sorry if it reads like a list 😛

I see that my workplace came out and said that they expect the official cash rate to be cut in June – by 25 basis points to 2.25%.  Unsurprisingly, I agree with the assessment of my colleagues.  However, a large number of other economists – whose views I also have a lot of respect for – believe that a cut is not on the cards, at least not yet.

So why is there a difference, why would a rate cut be justified (or not), and are there red flags to look out for?  Well James Weir answered all these questions in the Dominion Post so I don’t have to 😉

In my mind and in the Dom article, the combination of a persistently high currency (which holds down output and thereby inflationary pressure), low measured inflation, falling commodity prices, a weak labour market, and signs that the recovery in the housing market is not infallible all suggest that the appropriate level of the official cash rate is now lower.

Add to this the RBA’s willingness to cut their cash rate by 50 basis points due to bank funding pressures, the RBNZ’s warning on the OCR, and the fact that monetary conditions have been eased overseas (a primary driver of the relatively higher dollar – the Bank of Japan has been the latest, but lets not forget about the Fed’s willingness to hold rates at low levels until late-14) and I believe (and it seems my workplace does as well) that the “appropriate track” for the official cash rate is now lower, and so the Reserve Bank will be willing to cut to place us on a track that meets its inflation mandate and minimises volatility in the New Zealand economy 😉

It is perfectly reasonable to not agree with this view – and to say that the stimulatory impact of the rebuild in Christchurch and a broader recovery in  the housing and construction markets will see spare capacity get used up, and as a result there is not need to reduce the track for the cash rate.  It is this view that many of the banks are sticking to at present.

Now recent data has seen the market price in an 81% chance of an OCR cut in June, this combined with uncertainty in Europe following the Greek and French elections has seen the dollar fall sharply (the TWI has dropped since the start of last week).  If the currency experiences another sharp downward leg, it reduces the chance of a rate cut – think of it this way a lower currency will stimulate output in New Zealand given current prices, reducing unemployment and the output gap, meaning that the RBNZ needs to do less work to meet their mandate.

Update:  Eric Crampton offers comments here.

Matt Nolan

Missing the point on financial literacy

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I see that Brian Gaynor disagrees with an article written by a work colleague of mine.  Usually I wouldn’t care in the slightest, as when it comes to issues of social justice it is important to get all these important points of view around soical value out in the open.  However, given that Gaynor simultaneously missed the point of the article, and then went on to absolve investors of any responsibility for their patent stupidity in his piece – I felt that I should jot down my thoughts.

There is two things I agreed with Gaynor on, one that Benje Patterson actually mentioned in his article in the first place, and another thing that is patently obvious.  These are (1)  Finance companies provided poor information, were poorly run, and incentive structures were awful (2) the term greed is subjective.

Now, Patterson laid these things down – however, while, according to an interview in Action Alert Plus vs Motley Fool, Gaynor seemed to imply that Patterson was laying all the blame for finance company collapse on investors, he was actually making a much less controversial claim.  He was saying that investors have to take some responsibility for their own money.

Gaynor might not think that people who invested ALL their money in one finance company paying 0.5%pa more than a bank, and then hoping for the government to bail them out if things went wrong were greedy.  However, I’m different – I think this sort of behaviour defines greed.

But it was more than that, if you were trying to maximise your expected return, the decisions people were making were patently stupid.  Many of these people who have been better off to leave their kids sorting out their finances, as they would at least have had to add things up more recently while in class.  Now, Patterson believes, and I agree, that individuals are smart enough to know not to put all their eggs in one basket – and they are smart enough to see that what they were doing is a gamble.  However, a lack of financial education mean’t that individuals didn’t realise all the awesome alternatives that were available.

Patterson’s primary point was simply that, if we had improved financial literacy in recent decades, we wouldn’t have a bunch of people who put all their money in a finance company (which was equivalent to a roulette table).  It was their funds, and they have to take some responsibility for the fact they put the money there.

Now, were these companies immoral, lacking transparency, dishonest etc – hell yes.  Do we feel sympathy for people who were manipulated into losing all their money – hell yes.  Do we think basic financial literacy would have helped the situation – hell yes, that is why people use Goodwin Barrett.

And that is why I find Gaynor’s article so insulting – he is choosing to ignore the fact that people chose to put money in these companies and lost it all, and so he is ignoring one of the clearest, cleanest, and fairest solutions we could put in place in order to prevent this happening again.  In his determination to insult finance companies, he is willing to leave future investors vulnerable to future snake oil merchants – and that isn’t cool.

Matt Nolan

Mar 12: Weak labour market, what’s to be done?

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Although today’s labour market release made sense – it didn’t stop it being negative.

We saw the unemployment rate rise – which was statistic payback for the decline in December, that was due to a drop in the participation rate, which was due to a bunch of seasonal hiring not occurring in the December quarter and as a result those potential employees not entering the labour market 😛

Furthermore we saw hours worked remain weak.  This is consistent with the mix of a high exchange rate and low growth in output – with the dollar reducing the relative price of capital to labour.

All very exciting.  So what should we do.  Do we need to “get the exchange rate down”, “increase fiscal spending”, “print money”.

Well, I’d go back to the traditional economic view and ask “is the interest rate appropriate”.  Recent data is suggesting, in combination with moves overseas, that the official cash rate should be cut.  This is not an example of policy failure – it just shows us how exposed and vulnerable New Zealand is to the financial volatility overseas.

Sadly, as a small open economy this is just the way things are – and the best way we can deal with it is to have an inflation targeting central bank, a floating exchange rate, and a government that is willing to run countercyclical fiscal policy (so targets a balanced budget when they forecast the economy will be back at “potential”).  We have all these things, which has really helped us in recent years.