A sensible IMF back-down
In April, the International Monetary Fund positioned itself to go head-to-head with the UK government over its fiscal stance. The fund said it wanted Britain to consider slowing deficit reduction and Olivier Blanchard, its chief economist, said the country was “playing with fire”.
A month later, the considered view of the IMF is much more nuanced. Here are the five things you need to know about the fund’s retreat.
Inflation report in five bites
If you read today’s Bank of England inflation report, you will notice some welcome changes. More will follow on this blog about the improvements in BoE transparency. In the meantime, the five things you need to know about the bank’s economic outlook are: Read more
How to raise growth 2014-style
The FT’s US economics editor Robin Harding had an excellent scoop this week on the US plans to change the calculation methodology for the national accounts in a move that will lift US GDP by 3 per cent in July. Even better, he explained that the changes to the way the US statistics authorities plan to count intangible investment and military procurement were not a unilateral act, but part of a United Nations coordinated approach. What effect would this have on Europe, I wondered.
Well, after a root around Eurostat’s website, the UK’s ONS methodology pages and some academic articles, I am really excited. The bottom line for people with better things to do is that Eurostat reckons GDP in most EU countries will also go up by about 2 to 3 per cent. The amount depends on the quantity of R&D expenditure carried out (good for Germany, Sweden and Finland, bad for Greece) and amount of military kit purchased every year (good for France and the UK). With some exceptions, every EU country has to put in place the new European System of Accounts by September 2014. But it gets even more interesting. Read more
A positive surprise on UK growth
After almost five years of disappointing services output, Britain’s shops, restaurants, car dealerships and airlines have come to the rescue of George Osborne. They have also saved the country from deeply misleading “triple-dip” headlines, although output is still 2.6 per cent below its 2008 peak.
The preliminary estimate of gross domestic product rose 0.3 per cent in the first quarter. As my column today argued, we should not pay much attention to this figure, since the cash estimates of GDP, which come later, are more relevant to the economy’s predicament. But there are some implications of this positive surprise and I list them here in order of importance. Read more
BoJ revolution: five things you need to know
The Bank of Japan delivered a statement of intent on Thursday. Under its new governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, the central bank intends to eliminate the persistent deflation of the past 15 years within a two-year horizon. The FT news story provides the main details, save to say that in planning to double the monetary base (notes and coins, plus electronic money created by the BoJ) by the end of 2014, Mr Kuroda means business. Central bank communication does not often use words such as “massive”. Here are five answers to the big questions. Read more
The ONS gets left behind
In late February, the Office for National Statistics decided to classify the Treasury’s raid on the Bank of England’s accumulated interest payments from quantitative easing as a receipt for the public sector.
You can have a long and reasonable argument on whether the raid, euphemistically called a “cash management operation”, is a good idea. But I argued a few days later that the treatment of an internal public sector transfer of money as government revenue in the headline figures was a poor decision by the Office for National Statistics. There was no world in which the underlying public finances had been improved by the move, I argued.
As a journalist I was appalled that Britain’s independent statistical authority was setting out a legalistic argument for an economic question and for a set of statistics that were not governed by international conventions. I felt the statistics for borrowing and debt could not be trusted any more.
As a member of the public, I wrote to the chairman of the UK Statistical Authority, the statistics watchdog, to ask for a review of the ONS decision (email reproduced below). Today, I received a reply from Andrew Dilnot, the UKSA chairman (also reproduced). I am delighted to say the UKSA thinks I raised important points and has set up a short review. Read more
Developing countries should not be tempted to stimulate their economies this year in the face of weak growth, the World Bank warned on Wednesday even though the world faces another challenging year.
In forecasts that suggest 2013 will see only marginally stronger growth than last year, the Bank recommends that poor and middle-income countries concentrate on fundamental drivers of prosperity rather than attempt a quick fix.
Measuring inflation (not that wonkish, really)
Having written rather outspoken columns about conceptual errors in the Retail Prices Index and criticising the UK statistical authorities for ducking the challenge of rectifying these errors, quite a few people have asked for some numeric examples about the scale of the problem so they can understand better how it arises.
(People who want the real gory detail should look at professor Erwin Diewert’s report)
The first thing to note is that contrary to well-intentioned explainers such as this one from the BBC, or the otherwise-rather-good editorial in today’s Times newspaper, the problem in the calculation of the RPI is not to do with the difference between geometric averages and arithmetic averages. It is really about the deficiencies of one particular arithmetic average, the Carli index.
Don’t just believe me, play with this spreadsheet, (Price indices). I will also help you to use it with a few worked examples. The worked examples are extremes, but they serve to show the important biases of different ways of calculating inflation. Read more
The IMF and multipliers, again
Last week, the International Monetary Fund published a working paper by Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh revisiting the estimates of the effect of austerity that caused such a stir in the October World Economic Outlook. Many people took the box in the WEO as proof of the absurdity in attempts at deficit reduction.
At the time, I published an article and a technical blog in the FT, casting some doubt on the robustness of the IMF’s work. It also caused a minor stir. I included all the data so people could play around with the numbers themselves if they wished.
In December, another part of the IMF published a working paper using different methodology, which found much smaller multipliers. It is not the first time that different parts of the fund disagree. It will not be the last.
What does the new working paper say and what conclusions should we draw?
The ONS website – aaaargh again
When the Office for National Statistics relaunched its website last year, a geek like me was distraught as it had failed to make navigation of the UK’s generally wonderful statistics easier. “The new ONS website – aaaargh,” I commented.
Today, I gave evidence on the communication of statistics to the Public Administration Select Committee and to test whether the website had improved materially I thought I would pick a relevant question, to which I wanted to find an answer as a member of the public and as an expert user of the website. The question was: Is unemployment higher or lower now than in 1995?
This is the website journey (for lay and expert users) I described in the Committee, which I think is accurate and depressing. I don’t think a non-expert could find the interesting answer (at the bottom of the post) and an expert has to take a long journey to get there. The result should be immediate on clicking on an unemployment link on the homepage or on typing in the relevant 4-digit code for experts. Again, the ONS website – aaaargh.
Member of the public Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
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