In
his speech, which opens this
debate, George Soros argued that misunderstandings and misconceptions are
shaping history in important ways.
This is true in general, of course, and it
is true in specific ways within the eurozone.
Proponents
of the euro expected that under a single monetary policy and in the absence of
currency risk, economies would converge as capital, goods and people would move
more freely. An implicit assumption, never properly examined, was that national
economic institutions would also become more similar. As Jean Pisani-Ferry tells it, in the early 1990s,
part of the European elite selected central banks as a good candidate for
merging into one tightly knit system, since they were already operating more or
less in the same way; whereas welfare systems or industry policy were markedly
different. It was perhaps thought that these other institutions would follow
suit, eventually.
What
seems to have happened, however, is that the monetary union actually served to
mask and therefore preserve institutional differences in most other levels of
the economy – in business strategies, in wage setting, in fiscal planning.
Under the illusion of harmony, imbalances were allowed to get out of control.
Mismatched
rationalities
As
an example, consider the differing approaches to saving and investment of some
typical actors within the EU.
A
northern European pension fund would want to hold assets that produce a
positive cash flow stream at some future period. There may be many layers of
holding between the fund and the ultimate assets in the 'real economy', but the
investor was always assuming that these 'real' assets would generate cash in a
fairly predictable manner.
A
Mediterranean household, on the other hand, may have had the view that a house
has an inherent economic value which is not reducible to cash flows. This can
be a deep conviction, forged by the experience of many generations, who may
have seen financial assets vanish in times of crisis or inflation, while houses
have been reliable stores of value.
A
Greek employee, furthermore, may have believed that the safest asset for retirement
was a job in the public sector, since it guaranteed a comfortable pension.
Since her counterparty was the state, she could assume that her future cash
flow was secure. Even private sector pensions seemed secure, regardless of how
well each pension fund was managed, because there was an implicit state
guarantee.
In 2001, a reformist minister tried to avoid bankruptcy of the
pension system by tightening up the rules, at which time a leading trade
unionist notoriously remarked: “The pension system can never go broke; the
Greek state would have to go broke first” (the cunning of reason, incarnate).
So future cash flow from 'real' assets was never a major aspect of Greeks'
collective or individual life plan.
In
the eurozone, actors of the first type (northern investors in financial assets)
ended up investing massively in the non-financial assets preferred by actors of
the other two types (in real estate and in state-backed entitlements) rather
than in actual cash generating businesses. Their savings had been created in
industry, but they were re-invested in far away bricks and in other peoples'
laws.
Two
other types of actor mediated this investment process: banks and governments.
Everybody considered them stable and knowledgeable enough to be able to match
the expectations of creditors at one end of the chain to those of debtors at
the other end. But these mediators had their own institutional priorities,
which did not include being efficient international and intertemporal
matchmakers. And they were not
compatible even with their own kin.
Banks in the core had very different
balance sheets from banks in the south, which came to depend heavily on
interbank borrowing to fund long-term assets.
Governments in the core had very
different strategies for sustaining growth from some peripheral governments:
trade surpluses were paramount for some, domestic consumption for others.
Mainstream
economics tends to view such differences between creditors and debtors and
between surplus and deficit economies as reflecting nothing more than
intertemporal choice: creditors defer consumption and local investment in order
to have more income from international investment in the future, while debtors
prefer to consume and invest locally more now, and accept that they will have
to pay out more in the future. The two are supposed to have the same
rationality in different sequence.
Within
one country, that may be a reasonable assumption. When we make economic
decisions, we use shortcuts and heuristic devices to narrow our range of
options and to assess them. Our rationality is bounded, and the bounds of
reason are shaped to a large extent by culture and by institutions. Within the country, debtor and creditor are
constrained by the same institutions, have access to the same enforcement
mechanisms, probably share a common culture; and if, despite all this, their
expectations are mismatched, there is a central authority to intervene and
arbitrate. A useful body of work on this is on “varieties of capitalism”, which has explored
how in each advanced capitalist economy different aspects of the system,
involving different actors, complement each other: structure of finance,
distribution of property, mechanisms of wage setting, welfare systems and processes
of innovation. Economies are successful if these aspects work well together,
though they may be quite different from other successful economies.
Across
countries, rationalities are likely to differ. When investors are aware of
this, they are cautious and take limited risks abroad. When, for whatever
reason, they overlook such differences, pain ensues.
One
way to interpret the structural weakness of the eurozone is that actors with
mismatched rationalities interacted persistently and on a large scale, under
the misconception that they were
matched. The scale and duration of the mismatch was magnified by the illusion
that common European institutions were forcing a convergence of rationalities:
fiscal discipline was mandated by Maastricht,
monetary prudence by the ECB.
In
the example of savings and investment given above, both sides were wrong in the
mismatch. It may well be that German policy is rightly dictated by the future
needs of their aging population; therefore that current account surpluses are
necessary, so that they can acquire assets abroad that will fund German
pensions in ten or twenty years, when there will no longer be enough working
age Germans to support the welfare state.
If that is the objective, then they should be investing in future cash
generating businesses, i.e. in parts of emerging dynamic economies. Investing
in economies that are struggling to fund their own pensions now will not fit
the bill -- except if the investments are picked carefully to enhance the
future productive capacity of the receiving country.
Recipients
of finance were also wrong, of course.
Having a different view of time and cash flow from that of an industrial
or a financial player, they judged an opportunity by the ability to attract
finance now, rather than by the ability to pay back later. As long as creditors
seemed happy, this attitude seemed justified. A building would always be as
valuable as today, a state would always be able to refinance. Historical
experience suggests that they were as right on this, or as wrong, as the
'rational' northern investors who thought they could predict the value of
financial assets ten years hence.
Strategies for
stability
If this analysis of mismatches and misunderstandings is correct, what does it imply for the future architecture of the eurozone?
One
obvious answer, much discussed, is that a stable eurozone requires much
stronger central control of governments and of banks, i.e. of the two
categories of institution that mediate most of the international flows of
capital. Hence, the fiscal compact, and the very recent decision to centralize
bank supervision.
This
could of course enhance stability, but it will not be enough. Prudent banks and
prudent governments are no guarantee that there will be no persistent current
account deficits and no internationally fuelled bubbles. As Martin Wolf has argued about Spain, good bank supervision (which Spain
had) and stricter lending rules could just result in lending coming directly
from abroad; this is not something that can be prevented under current EU
rules.
In
the long run, the architecture of the eurozone will have to deal with
institutional diversity and with mismatched rationalities across countries at
the level of firms, of households and of institutional investors .
One
radical approach is to try explicitly to restrict national current account
deficits and surpluses within the euro zone. The European Commission has taken
a tentative step in that direction with the Macro-Economic
Imbalance Procedure. As a concept, this is very
bold; but it is as yet hard to see how it can be enacted. The precedent of
recent bail-outs suggest that for deficit countries "corrective
action" would consist of standard reforms to improve competitiveness
(flexibility in the labor market, ending closed-shops, etc). Such reforms would
influence the current account indirectly and very slowly. They will probably
not be enough, in the context of so many cultural and institutional differences.
If
current account balances are to be taken seriously as a policy target (and I
believe they should be), there seem to be four types of strategy for dealing
with institutional diversity, and they are not mutually exclusive.
(a) Convergence: Comparable institutions
should have comparable targets and regulation. Ideally, they should also
'think' and act in the same way. The crisis has already led governments to
agree on a strategy of convergence for fiscal policy and for banks.
How
deep this convergence will be remains to be seen. Will the existence of a
central supervisory body be enough? Will it set only high-level targets, or
will it insist that micro-level practices be harmonized as well? For example,
will Greek banks be allowed to discount post-dated cheques -- which is a
practice unknown in the north, but admirably suited to the Greek microeconomy?
Should there be convergence of other important
institutions, such as pension systems? If not, it may be impossible to justify
politically the ECB as lender of last resort to governments. If nationals of
country A retire at 62 and others at 67, and if the pension system of country A
needs state support, would other taxpayers accept this? High-level deficit
targets will not be enough to convince voters to accept such different levels
of social benefit across countries.
(b) Targeted
diversification: For some institutions, national differences could be accepted and
fostered. Farms and farmers have always been protected in the EU, in ways that
favor some national types over others.
Current orthodoxy is that all other businesses should operate in
conditions of competition, equal across countries, constrained only by common
EU rules on issues such as the environment. That is the theory, but in practice
many rules, such as labour legislation, vary greatly across countries; which
means that equally able entrepreneurs will be successful in some places and not
in others.
Some
of the different national rules have been shaped by local collective
bargaining, others by the national political process, still others by informal
national norms. If they were to be harmonized truly, every country would have
to relinquish their own processes. This could only happen in a fully federal
European Union.
As
we are not there yet, and may never be, there is a strong case for accepting
not just different national practices, but also different levels of
productivity and different forms of
protection to some local industries. This case has been made by Dani
Rodrik more generally in The
Globalization Paradox. Perhaps the EU should
start thinking again in terms of industrial policy, aiming to keep some sort of
trade balance among member states. Of course there are a myriad arguments
against this, but to claim that common conditions of competition can exist
across countries in the absence of strong political integration is pure
hypocrisy.
A
mild form of industrial policy would be the so-called new Marshall Plan that is
being discussed for the bailout countries. In this, EU institutions would fund
directly specific investment projects, in infrastructure but also perhaps in
tradable-sector businesses. If this happens, this could be an important first
step in accepting the principle of targeted diversification.
(c) Transnational integration:
One
way to deal with different rationalities is to internalize them into a single
organization. This is the case with foreign direct investment (FDI), where
international investors directly engage with local labour (and other actors)
and work out rules that combine both cultures. Successful multinational
enterprises have been doing this for decades. If capital flows within the
eurozone had been mostly FDI, it is unlikely that current account imbalances
would have led to such bubbles.
Northern
savers would have much to gain in terms of future income if they could mobilize
southern resources into joint productive enterprises. The common currency was
supposed to boost this type of investment, but this has been crowded out by
investment in financial instruments, where each side retains the freedom to act
according to its peculiar rationality. Should we now have an active policy to
promote FDI?
And
should we perhaps start thinking about other transnational institutions?
Perhaps about transnational collective bargaining in specific industries, or
transnational pension funds?
(d) Transparency: If most international
transactions are to remain at arms length, as they will, then mismatches could
be avoided, to some extent, if creditors and debtors had a better grasp of each
other's modus operandi. This requires, first and foremost, much more detailed
and useful quantitative information about institutions in each country.
Multilateral
agencies such as Eurostat and OECD have been providing international
statistical tables, doing their best to compare sometimes very diverse source
material. Rating agencies, such as Fitch and Moody's, narrowly focused on
financial assets, have supposedly delved deeper into assessing the dynamics of
risk. Yet anybody who has followed the public dialogue about who works longer
hours, or who retires at a later age, or which enterprises are more productive,
can attest that confusion reigns.
We
should think about creating a common European information space, where
transactions at a micro level within each economy are registered and monitored
by pan-European institutions. This could cover, e.g., all public spending
decisions, all pension liabilities, all labor contracts, all permits, etc, at
fine detail. It would require creating common databases of rules and numbers.
Technically
the task is now feasible. Politically, it would be defended in terms of
democratic accountability. National political elites have had it too easy
hiding their clientelist practices from their electorates by controlling the
flow of information. Supranational independent monitoring bodies would be
useful counterweights, and they would be serving both the national demos, and the
nascent European one.
The European demos
Of
the four strategies outlined above, convergence is where all the debate is
focused at the moment. National political elites are directly threatened by it,
but common people also do not see how they can shape it.
Should it be
controlled by governments, by multilateral institutions, by the European
Parliament, or by new international forms of deliberation and participation?
However it is done, however necessary it may be, many will feel that they have
lost power and agency in the process.
The
answer for regaining agency for individuals, unions, and civil society
organizations may lie in the other three strategies.
The
latter two (transnational integration and transparency) are building blocks
towards a European demos that do not directly detract from national democracy.
They would actually empower new local forces, against the "jealous
domestic political classes", who, as Tony Curzon-Price has
argued,
have been excluding Europe from the political
and democratic table.
As
for targeted diversification, it could allow for local rationalities to survive
and perhaps thrive as building blocks of a strong European economy, rather than
as vestiges from an inefficient past that should be phased out.
The
four strategies together are what we need to build a more stable, balanced
eurozone, where growth can be coordinated and development diversified.
Diversity of institutions will be as much part of the European demos as
uniformity. There is no simple formula for moving ahead.
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