What Has Happened to Trade Balances in Europe?

It has gradually entered our awareness that the Greek trade account is now balanced. Greece no longer depends on financial markets (or official transfers, or remittances from workers abroad) to finance its imports. This is obviously important for negotiations with the "institutions," or at least it ought to be.

I was wondering, how general is this shift toward a positive trade balance. In the FT last week, Martin Wolf pointed out that over the past five years, the Euro area as a whole has shifted from modest trade deficits to substantial trade surpluses, equal to 3 percent of euro-area GDP in 2013. He does not break it down by country, though. I decided to do that.

Euro area trade ratios, 2008 and 2013. The size of the dots is proportional to total 2008 trade.

Here, from Eurostat, are the export-import ratios for the euro countries in 2008 and 2013. Values greater than one on the horizontal axis represent a trade surplus in 2008; only a few northern European countries fall in that group. Meanwhile, in seven countries imports exceeded exports by 10 percent or more. By 2013, the large majority of the euro area is in surplus, while not a single country has an excess of imports over exports of more than 5 percent. The distance above the diagonal line indicates the improvement from 2008 to 2013; this is positive for every euro-area country except Austria, Finland and Luxembourg, and the biggest improvements are in the countries with the worst ratios in 2008. The surplus countries, apart from Finland, more or less maintained their surpluses; but the deficit countries all more or less eliminated their deficits.

So does this mean that austerity works? Yes and no. It is certainly true that Europe's deficit countries have all achieved positive trade balances in the past few years, even including countries like Greece whose trade deficits long predated the euro. On the other hand, it's also almost certainly true that this has more to do with the falls in domestic demand rather than any increase in competitiveness.

This is shown in the second figure, which gives the ratio of 2013 imports to 2008 exports on the vertical axis, and 2013 exports to 2008 imports on the horizontal axis. (This is in nominal euros.) Here a point on the diagonal line equals and equal growth rate of imports and exports. Most countries are clustered around 15% growth in imports and exports; these are the countries that had balanced trade or surpluses in 2008, and whose trade ratios have not changed much in the past five years. Only one country, Estonia, has export growth substantially above the European average. But all the former deficit countries have import growth much lower than average. (As indicated by their position to the left of the main cluster.) It's evident from this diagram that the move toward balanced trade in the deficit countries is about throttling back imports, not boosting exports. This suggests that it has more to do with slow income growth than with lower costs.

Again, the sizes of the dots are proportional to 2008 trade volumes.

Still, the fact remains, trade deficits have almost been eliminated in the euro area. Liberal critics of the European establishment often say "not every country in Europe can be a net exporter" as if that were a truism. But it's not even true, not in principle and evidently not in practice. It turns out it is quite possible for every country in the euro to run a trade surplus.

The next question is, with whom has the euro area's trade balanced improved? Europe outside the euro, to begin with. The country with the biggest single increase in net imports from the euro zone is, surprisingly, Switzerland, whose deficit with the euro area has increased by close to 60 billion. Switzerland's annual trade deficit with the euro area is now 75 billion, about a quarter of the area's overall trade surplus. Norway and Turkey have increased their deficits by about 15 billion each. The rest of the increase in net exports are accounted for by increased surpluses with Africa (26 billion), the US (27 billion), and Latin America (35 billion, about half to Brazil), and a decreased deficit with Asia (135 billion, including a 55 billion smaller deficit with China, 30 billion smaller with Japan and 20 billion with Korea). Net exports to Australia have also increased by 10 billion.

Why do I bring this up? One, I haven't seen it discussed much and it is interesting.

But more importantly, the lesson of the Europe-wide shift toward trade surpluses is that austerity can succeed on its own terms. I think there's a tendency for liberal critics of austerity to assume that the people on the other side are just confused, or blinkered by ideology, and that there's something incoherent or self-contradictory about competitiveness as a Europe-wide organizing principle. There's a hope, I think, that economic logic will eventually compel policymakers to do what's right for everyone. Personally, I don't think that the masters of the euro care too much about the outcome of the struggle for competitiveness; it's the struggle itself -- and the constraints it imposes on public and private choices -- that matters. But insofar as the test of the success of austerity is the trade balance, I suspect austerity can succeed indefinitely.


UPDATE: In comments Kostas Kalaveras points to a report from the European Commission that includes a similar breakdown of changes in trade balances across the euro area. There's some useful data in there but the interpretation is that almost all the adjustment has been structural rather than cyclical. This is based on estimates of declining potential output in the periphery that I think are insane. But it's interesting to see how official Europe thinks about this stuff.

Three Ways of Looking at alpha = r k

Piketty's "first law of capitalism" is the accounting identity

α = r k

where α is the share of capital income in total output, r is the average return on capital, and k is the aggregate capital-output ratio.

As accounting, this is true by definition. As economics, what kind of economic behavior does it describe? There are three ways of looking at it. 

In the standard version, the profit share is determined by a production function, which is given by technology. The profit rate r* required by capital owners is fixed by technology in combination with time preferences. In this closure, k is the endogenous, or adjusting, variable.  Investment rises or falls whenever the realized profit rate differs from the required rate, thus keeping k at the level that satisfies the equation for r  = r*. 

In Piketty’s version, r is fixed (somehow; the mechanism is not clear) and k is determined by savings behavior and (exogenous) growth according to his "second law of capitalism": 

k = s/g

That leaves α to passively accommodate r and k. Capitalists get whatever the current capital stock and fixed profit rate entitle them to, and workers get whatever is left over; in effect, workers are the residual claimants in Piketty's system. (This is the opposite of the classical view, in which wages are fixed and capitalists get the residual.)

In a third interpretation, we could say that α and r are set institutionally -- α through some kind of bargaining process, or by the degree of monopoly, r perhaps by the interest rate set in the financial system. The value of the capital stock is then given by capitalizing the flow of profits α Y at the discount rate r. (Y is total output.) This interpretation is the natural one if we think of “capital” as a claim to a share of the surplus as opposed to physical means of production. 

This interpretation clearly applies to pure land, or to the market value of a particular firm. What if it applied to capital in general? Since claims on the surplus -- including claims exercised through nonproduced assets like land -- are not created by reserving output from consumption, aggregate savings would be a meaningless accounting construct in this case. (Or we could adopt a Hicksian view of saving in which it equals the change in net wealth by definition.) Looking at things this way also puts r > g in a different light. Suppose we think of the capital stock as a whole as something like the stock of a firm, which entitles the owners to the flow of profits from that firm. If the profits today are α Y and output is expected to grow at a rate g, what is the value of the stock today? If we discount future profits at r, then it is the sum from t=0 to t=infinity of α Y (1 + g)^t / (1 + r)^t, which works out to α Y / (r - g). So if we can take the rate of return on capital as the discount rate on future profits, then r > g is implied by a finite value of the capital stock.

We shouldn't ask what capital "really" is. It really is a quantity of money in a process of self-expansion, and it really is a mass of means of production, and it really is authority over the production process. But the particular historical questions Piketty is interested in may be better suited to thinking of capital as a claim on the social surplus than as a physical quantity of means of production. Seth Ackerman has some very interesting thoughts along these lines in his contribution to the Jacobin symposium on the book. 

What Adjusts?

More teaching: We're starting on the open economy now. Exchange rates, trade, international finance, the balance of payments. So one of the first things you have to explain, is the definition of real and nominal exchange rates:

e_R = e_N P*/P 

where P and P* are the home and foreign price levels respectively, and the exchange rate e is defined as the price of foreign exchange (so an appreciation means that e falls and a depreciation means that it rises).

This is a useful definition to know -- though of course it's not as straightforward as it seems, since as we've discussed before there are various possibles Ps, and once we are dealing with more than two countries we have to decide how to weight them, with different statistical agencies using different weightings. But set all that aside. What I want to talk about now, is what a nice little example this equation offers of a structuralist perspective on the economy.

 As given above, the equation is an accounting identity. It's always exactly true, simply because that's how we've defined the real exchange rate. As an accounting identity, it doesn't in itself say anything about causation. But that doesn't mean it's vaacuous. After all, we picked this particular definition because we think it is associated with some causal story. [1] The question is, what story? And that's where things get interesting.

Since we have one equation, we should have one endogenous (or dependent) variable. But which one, depends on the context.

If we are telling a story about exchange rate determination, we might think that the endogenous variable is e_N. If price levels are determined by the evolution of aggregate supply and demand (or the growth of the money stock, if you prefer) in each country, and if arbitrage in the goods market enforces something like Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), then the nominal exchange rate will have to adjust to keep the real price of a comparable basket of goods from diverging across countries.

On the other hand, we might not think PPP holds, at least in the short run, and we might think that the nominal exchange rate cannot adjust freely. (A fixed exchange rate is the obvious reason, but it's also possible that the forex markets could push the nominal exchange rate to some arbitrary level.) In that case, it's the real exchange rate that is endogenous, so we can see changes in the price of comparable goods in one country relative to another. This is implicitly the causal structure that people have in mind when they argue that China is pursuing a mercantilist strategy by pegging its nominal exchange rate, that devaluation would improve current account balances in the European periphery, or that the US could benefit from a lower (nominal) dollar. Here the causal story runs from e_N to e_R.

Alternatively, maybe the price level is endogenous. This is less intuitive, but there's at least one important story where it's the case. Anti-inflation programs in a number of countries, especially in Latin America, have made use of a fixed exchange rate as a "nominal anchor." The idea here is that in a small open economy, especially where high inflation has led to widespread use of a foreign currency as the unit of account, the real exchange rate is effectively fixed. So if the nominal exchange rate can also be effectively fixed, then, like it or not, the domestic price level P will have to be fixed as well. Here's Jeffrey Sachs on the Bolivian stabilization:

The sudden end of a 60,000 percent inflation seems almost miraculous... Thomas Sargent (1986) argued that such a dramatic change in price inflation results from a sudden and drastic change in the public's expectations of future government policies... I suggest, in distinction to Sargent, that the Bolivian experience highlights a different and far simpler explanation of the very rapid end of hyperinflations. By August 1985,... prices were set either explicitly or implicitly in dollars, with transactions continuing to take place in peso notes, at prices determined by the dollar prices converted at the spot exchange rate. Therefore, by stabilizing the exchange rate, domestic inflation could be made to revert immediately to the US dollar inflation rate. 

So here the causal story runs from e_N to P.

In the three cases so far, we implicitly assume that P* is fixed, or at least exogenous. This makes sense; since a single country is much smaller than the world as a whole, we don't expect anything it does to affect the world price level much. So the last logical possibility, P* as the endogenous variable, might seem to lack a corresponding real world story. But an individual countries is not always so much smaller than the world as a whole, at least not if the individual country is the United States. It's legitimate to ask whether a change in our price level or exchange rate might not show up as as inflation or deflation elsewhere. This is particularly likely if we are focusing on a bilateral relationship. For instance, it might well be that a devaluation of the dollar relative to the renminbi would simply (or mostly) produce corresponding deflation [2] in China, leaving the real exchange rate unchanged.

Here, of course, we have only one equation. But if we interpret it causally, that is already a model, and the question of "what adjusts?" can be rephrased as the choice between alternative model closures. With multiple-equation models, that choice gets trickier -- and it can be tricky enough with one equation.

In my opinion, sensitivity to alternative model closures is at the heart of structuralist economics, and is the great methodological innovation of Keynes. The specific application that defines the General Theory is the model closure that endogenizes aggregate income -- the interest rate, which was supposed to equilibrate savings and investment, is pinned down by the supply and demand of liquidity, so total income is what adjusts -- but there's a more general methodological principle. "Thinking like an economist," that awful phrase, should mean being able to choose among different stories -- different model closures -- based on the historical context and your own interests. It should mean being able look at a complex social reality and judge which logical relationships represent the aspects of it you're currently interested in, and which accounting identities are most relevant to the story you want to tell. Or as Keynes put it, economics should be thought of as

a branch of logic, a way of thinking ... in terms of models, joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. ... [The goal is] not to provide a machine, or method of blind manipulation, which will furnish an infallible answer, but to provide ourselves with an organised and orderly method of thinking out particular problems.

Much of mainstream macroeconomics assumes there is a "true" model of the world. Connected to this, there's an insistence -- shared even by a lot of heterodox macro -- on regarding some variables as being strictly exogenous and others as strictly endogenous, so that in every story causality runs the same way. In the canonical story, tastes, technology and endowments (one can't help hearing: by the Creator) are perfectly fixed, and everything else is perfectly adjustable. [3]

Better to follow Keynes, and think about models as more or less useful for clarifying the logic of particular stories.


EDIT: Of course not everyone who recognizes the methodological distinction I'm making here agrees that the eclecticism of structuralism is an advantage. Here is my teacher Peter Skott (with Ben Zipperer):

The `heterodox' tradition in macroeconomics contains a wide range of models. Kaleckian models treat the utilization rate as an accommodating variable, both in the short and the long run. Goodwin's celebrated formalization of Marx, by contrast, take the utilization rate as fixed and looks at the interaction between employment and distribution. Distribution is also central to Kaldorian and Robinsonian theories which, like Goodwin, endogenize the profit share and take the utilization rate as structurally determined in the long run but, like the Kaleckians, view short-run variations in utilization as an intrinsic part of the cycle. The differences in these and other areas are important, and this diversity of views on core issues is no cause for celebration.

EDIT 2: Trygve Haavelmo, quoted by Leijonhufvud:

There is no reason why the form of a realistic model (the form of its equations) should be the same under all values of its variables. We must face the fact that the form of the model may have to be regarded as a function of the values of the variables involved. This will usually be the case if the values of some of the variables affect the basic conditions of choice under which the behavior equations in the model are derived.

That's what I'm talking about. There is no "true" model of the economy. The behavioral relationships change depending where we are in economic space.

Also, Bruce Wilder has a long and characteristically thoughtful comment below. I don't agree with everything he says -- it seems a little too hopeless about the possibility of useful formal analysis even in principle -- but it's very worth reading.


[1] "Accounting identities don't tell causal stories" is a bit like "correlation doesn't imply causation."Both statements are true in principle, but the cases we're interested in are precisely the cases where we have some reason to believe that it's not true. And for both statements, the converse does not hold. A causal story that violates accounting identities, or for which there is no corresponding correlation, has a problem.

[2] Or lower real wages, the same thing in this context.

[3] Or you sometimes get a hierarchy of "fast" and "slow" variables, where the fast ones are supposed to fully adjust before the slow ones change at all.