رشد سریع و یا رکود: انتخاب سیاست اقتصادی

Why has the American economy performed so poorly in the past decade, especially in comparison with the two prior decades? This paper makes the theoretical and empirical case that a series of economic policy decisions provides the most satisfactory explanation and that policy reform will restore good economic performance. The paper also considers alternative explanations including the idea of a new secular stagnation unrelated to policy and the view that the deep financial crisis inevitably delayed recovery from the recession.

Among his many innovative contributions to econometric modeling, Lawrence Klein was a pioneer in exploring the reasons for policy differences between models and the economists who build and estimate them. The Model Comparison Seminar that he ran during the 1980s, for example, helped economists understand why the impacts of changes in fiscal and monetary policy were different from model to model. I will always be grateful to Professor Klein for inviting me to join his Model Comparison Seminar and to add to the mix a new kind of model with rational expectations and sticky prices which I was developing at Stanford in the 1980s. The model was an estimated version of what would come to be called a “new Keynesian” model, and the other models in the comparison would thus logically be called “old Keynesian.” They included such famous workhorse models as the Data Resources Incorporated (DRI) model, the Federal Reserve Board's model, the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates (WEFA) model, and Larry Meyer's Macro Advisers model. It was probably the first systematic comparison of old and new Keynesian models and was an invaluable opportunity for someone developing a new and untried model. The performance comparison results were eventually collected and published in a book (Klein, 1991a). In the opening chapter of that book Klein (1991b) reviewed the comparative performance of the new and old Keynesian models, noting differences and similarities: “The multipliers from John Taylor's model…are, in some cases, different from the general tendency of other models in the comparison, but not in all cases….Fiscal multipliers in his type of model appear to peak quickly and fade back toward zero. Most models have tended to underestimate the amplitude of induced price changes, while Taylor's model shows more proneness toward inflationary movement in experiments where there is a stimulus to the economy.” Klein was thus shedding light in why government purchases multipliers were so different – a controversial policy issue that is still of great interest to economists and policy makers as they consider and evaluate the stimulus packages of 2008 and 2009 and other recent policies. In this paper I review the role of policy in economic performance in recent years. Although the paper is not technical, much of the results are based on the type on empirical modeling and comparison research that Lawrence Klein favored, including “New Keynesian versus Old Keynesian Government Spending Multipliers,” in which John Cogan, Tobias Cwik, Volcker Wieland and I evaluated recent policy (Cogan, Cwik, Taylor, Wieland 2010).

The purpose of a medical diagnosis is to determine the proper way to treat an illness, and the same is true of an economic diagnosis. If the diagnosis of what ails the economy outlined in this paper is correct, then the treatment is clear: implement more predictable, less discretionary policies. For monetary policy this means returning to a more rules-based policy as in the 1980s, 1990s and until around 2003. This means ending QE and getting back to positive (thought still likely low) interest rates implied by current economic conditions. This kind of policy worked very well for the decades of the great moderation and it will work well again. There have been debates over what kind of monetary rule to use, but there is plenty of research and experience to choose from. For fiscal policy, a more predictable policy would come from a return to a regular order in formulating U.S. budget policy in which the President submits a budget (which balances in a reasonable span of time), the Senate and House put their alternative proposals together, and a budget is negotiated and signed into law. The federal budget plan recently put together by Senator Patty Murray and Congressman Paul Ryan and approved by President Obama represents progress, and it is promising in this respect. For the longer-term, fiscal policy reforms to increase predictability must include entitlement reform that brings spending into line with the growth rate of the economy and tax reform that lowers tax rates and broadens the base. For regulatory policy, the simple idea of using cost–benefit analysis would go a long way to reducing the uncertainty. In the case of the financial sector, the bailout and “too big to fail” problem is still there, and can be addressed by increasing capital requirements and reforming the bankruptcy code to allow for an orderly bankruptcy for large financial institutions rather than bailouts. In the area of trade policy, it is important to negotiate and implement trade opening agreements – the rule of law for international trade. In the area of education, it is most important to ensure educational opportunity in the poorest, most disadvantaged areas of the country, a policy reform consistent with the overall diagnosis. Fig. 1 illustrates the task facing policy makers and provides a framework for thinking about such policy reforms. Starting at the lower left, the red line shows the history of real GDP from 2007 through 2013. The deep 2007–09 recession – the downturn in GDP – is clearly visible. So is the very slow recovery of GDP.The blue line shows a 2.5% trend for real GDP. This is approximately the average growth rate from 2000 until the recession began, and thus may be taken as a rough estimate of what the economy's potential was going into the recession. The gap between trend GDP and real GDP thus represents one measure of lost output. If the current recovery was like previous recoveries, then real GDP would already be at trend GDP. Instead the gap remains very large. The dark red line continues the approximately 2.5% average growth rate experienced since the start of the recovery. It is a continuation of the stagnation experienced recently. The dashed lines give an illustration of the benefits of a policy reform program. There are two inter-related paths. First, the recovery speeds up. If it speeds up to 4 percent – shown by the first dashed line – then it will be 2019 before the economy has returned to normal. Second, the long-run growth path would speed up. The dashed blue line shows trend GDP growth at 3.0%, or 0.5 percent higher than the recent 2.5% trend. These lines represent a reasonable goal for economic growth with a policy reform program. Policy makers tend to think of the problem of getting real GDP back to trend as being addressed by short-run “demand-side” policies (like stimulus packages) and the problem of increasing long-term growth as being addressed by “supply-side” policies. I disagree with this view. A return to more predictable rules-based policies may seem like a long-term policy, but it can also help get the economy back to trend faster. Either way, the choice between economic growth and economic stagnation is an economic policy choice.