Ministers from developed and developing countries are gathered this week in Accra, Ghana’s capital, for the latest high-level forum on aid effectiveness. Learning from past successes and failures, reformers are pressing for more ownership by developing countries of aid relationships, more predictability of aid flows and less fragment­ation of aid delivery. This agenda is important. If implemented, these reforms would give the taxpayers of rich countries better value for money and increase the benefits of aid to people in poor ones. Aid cannot on its own cause development, but if properly delivered and well used it can be enormously beneficial.

However, one can have too much of a good thing. Some developing countries, most of them in Africa, have had high levels of aid dependence – in excess of 10 per cent of gross domestic product, or half of government spending – for decades. It is questionable whether this has been helpful.

There are various reasons to be concerned about high aid dependence, but the most worrying is the undermining of good governance by distortion of political accountability. Governments that are highly dependent on aid pay too much attention to donors and too little to their citizens. This might not matter if the interests of citizens and donors were identical. But all donors have some non-developmental motives and, even when they seek to promote development, they have their own priorities. The result is confused and shifting policies, volatile aid and spending and, as a result, slower growth.

I therefore propose that donors collectively set an upper limit on the amount of aid they give to any developing country. This limit should be 50 per cent of the amount of tax revenue that the aid-receiving government raises from its own citizens, by non-coercive means and excluding revenue from oil and minerals.

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By Martin Wolf 

We are all Americans now. By this I do not merely mean that the leadership of the US shapes the world in which we live. The world we live in is the world the Americans or, more precisely, the Anglo-Americans have made. The US will retain a huge influence. How will it use it? That is the question we should ask about the presidential election. The choice also seems clear: it is between those who expect a world of conflict and those who believe in seeking co-operation.

In a brilliant new book, Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations places today’s US in a tradition of global power which originated in the Netherlands of the 17th century, developed in the Britain of the 18th and the 19th centuries and continued in the US of the 20th century.* Theirs, he says, is the “Anglo-American” system.

What is this system? It has three central features: it is maritime; it is global; and it combines commerce with military power. The Anglo-Americans have a distinctive civilisation: civilian, yet bellicose, commercial, yet moralistic, individualistic, yet organised, innovative, yet conservative, and idealistic, yet ruthless. To its foes, it is brutal, shallow and hypocritical. To its friends, it is the fount of freedom and democracy.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Discussion from our forum members and contributors appears below.

By Martin Feldstein

The risk of a downward spiral of house prices is the primary danger facing the American economy. Because of the structure of securitised mortgage finance, this risk has the potential to cause a global financial crisis. Both of these problems will remain until a new policy brings stability to house prices.

The current decline of house prices is the natural result of the bubble that by 2006 had raised house prices to 60 per cent above their long-term trend. The sharp decline since then means that today’s prices are about 15 per cent above the trend level. But while a further 15 per cent decline may be inevitable, there is nothing to stop prices declining even further.

House prices that could overshoot by 60 per cent on the way up could also overshoot substantially on the way down. During the past 12 months, house prices across the nation fell by an average of 16 per cent. The large overhang of unsold homes continues to create pressure for further price declines. The record level of defaults and foreclosures continues to add to the stock of unsold homes. Potential house buyers who foresee continued foreclosures are reluctant to buy now because they anticipate future price declines.

A policy is needed that will permit the appropriate 15 per cent additional decline in house prices but end the risk of a further downward spiral. No such policy is now in place or on the legislative drawing board. The fear of continued mortgage defaults and house price declines is depressing the prices of mortgage-backed securities and of the derivative products based on them. This fall, in turn, is causing large losses at commercial banks and other financial institutions.

The remainder of this column can be read here.  Discussion from our forum members and contributors appears below.

With two wars still continuing and violence in Georgia dominating the foreign policy debate; and with the financial crisis and economic insecurity for families dominating the domestic debate, US international economic policy is receiving less attention in this presidential election year than usual. The limited attention it has received has focused on concerns about specific trade agreements, not broader questions of international strategy. That is unfortunate. The next administration faces the prospect of having to make the most consequential international economic policy choices in a generation at a time when the confidence of governments in free markets is being increasingly questioned.

The current distribution of regional economic power is unlike anything that was predicted even a decade ago. The rise of the developing world, its growing share in global output and far greater share of global growth, is perhaps a quantitative but not a qualitative surprise. The qualitative surprise is this: with almost all the industrial world in or near recession, much of the momentum in the global economy is coming from countries with authoritarian governments that are pursuing economic strategies directed towards wealth accumulation and building up geopolitical strength rather than improving living standards for their populations. China, where household consumption has now fallen below 40 per cent of its gross domestic product – which must be some kind of peacetime record – is the most extreme example. Similar tendencies, however, can be seen in other parts of Asia, Russia and other oil exporting countries.

Even before the slowdown in the industrial world, a striking feature of the global economy was the substantial net flow of capital from the emerging periphery to the industrial centre. Rising oil prices have geopolitical as well as economic consequences. The run-up in oil prices over the past year has generated more than $10bn (€6.8bn, £5.4bn) a week in extra revenues for Opec members. Asian export powers and oil exporters have enjoyed a vast accumulation of wealth, adding about $1,000bn a year in assets.

These shifts have affected almost every global economic issue. The pressure created by the investment of these surpluses was one of the big factors driving the excesses that preceded our financial problems. Concern about the flow of imports from countries that have pursued a strategy of export-led growth is a big reason for the protectionist backlash now being seen in the industrialised world. It is now recognised that meaningful efforts to address climate change require a framework that induces China and other emerging markets to co-operate.

It has become a cliché to suggest that the world’s institutional approaches to economic co-operation need overhauling to take into account the rising economic clout of emerging markets and the decline in dominance of the group of seven leading industrialised nations (G7). This is correct. The steps taken so far – the initiation of the G-20 during the 1990s and the adjustments of voting shares in international financial institutions – are valuable if insufficient. (more…)

As the petro-authoritarianism of Russia flexes its muscles and the economic prowess of China struts in Olympic glory, developing countries in the world might start rethinking about the lectures on democracy and development they have heard all these years from the West. This is at a time when advanced capitalist democracies are reeling under the shock of unregulated financial overreach and years of living beyond their means, a far cry from the end-of-history triumphalism of capitalist democracy of less than two decades back.

The Chinese case in particular is reviving a hoary myth of how particularly in the initial stages of economic development authoritarianism delivers much more than democracy. This is also backed by the memory of impressive economic performance of other East Asian authoritarian regimes (like those in South Korea and Taiwan in the recent past). The lingering hope of democrats had been that as the middle classes prosper in these regimes, they then demand, and in the latter two cases got, the movement toward political democracy.

But the relationship between authoritarianism or democracy and development is not so simple. Authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for economic development. That it is not necessary is illustrated not only by today’s industrial democracies, but by scattered cases of recent development success: Costa Rica, Botswana, and now India. That it is not sufficient is amply evident from disastrous authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere.

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Falling home prices increase affordability and are necessary to reduce bloated inventories of houses for sale, but expectations that prices will fall further keeps potential buyers on the sidelines. And this same uncertainty creates havoc in financial markets by driving up credit losses and making it nearly impossible with any degree of reliability to value a sizeable portion of the over $10 trillion of mortgage securities held by banks, investment banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and a wide array of global investors. This has plagued mortgage markets and pushed up mortgage rates even as the Federal Reserve has eased 325 basis points. A key channel through which the Fed’s monetary easing is supposed to stimulate the economy has been gummed up.

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By Jagdish Bhagwati

In the 1980s, Japan was feared in the US to be a lethal combination of Superman and the evil genius Lex Luthor in a classic case of what I have called the Diminished Giant Syndrome.

Members of Congress famously smashed a Toshiba radio cassette recorder on the steps of Capitol Hill in protest in 1987. Great Britain at the turn of the 19th century had been marked by similar diffidence, despair and recrimination when Germany and the US were emerging on the world scene. There, Sir Howard Vincent entered parliament festooned with mops, pails and brushes marked “Made in Germany”.

US hegemony survived the exaggerated threat from Japan. But the US is now once again a fearful giant. Many Americans see trade as a peril rather than an opportunity. This has turned the US from what the economist Charles Kindleberger famously called an “altruistic” hegemon into a “selfish” hegemon.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Debate from our panel of economists appears below.

Many commentators are looking for an increase in domestic demand in emerging markets to compensate for the slowdown in the US. Indeed, domestic consumption is picking up in several countries including China, while governments in Asia and the Middle East are turning to neglected public investment. Yet years of strong growth and cutbacks in public investment, which have restored economic health to emerging markets, have also eaten up excess capacity. Any increase in domestic demand, if it is not to result in bottlenecks and even higher inflation, will have to be accompanied by a shift in production from an external focus to an internal focus. This means that emerging market currencies will have to appreciate, and the weight of output will shift from traded goods such as T-shirts and electronics to non-traded goods such as real estate and health services over the next few years.

A shift from an outward focus to an inward focus will have to be accompanied by much more institutional discipline. With fewer constraints on underlying inflation, emerging market central banks will have to be more careful in targeting low inflation, especially as exchange pegs become less viable. Labour markets will have to be more flexible, while product markets will have to be deregulated far more if profitable productive growth is sought in the non-traded goods sector. With more expenditure flowing to assets such as housing, the financial sector will have to be careful not to precipitate booms and busts, and this will mean more reform as well as better supervision. Finally, governments will have to meet the greater demand for public investment without eroding fiscal discipline, maintaining greater caution as the cushion of large foreign exchange reserves diminishes and increases their vulnerability.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Debate from our panel of economists appears below.

My starting point was that one would not get very far in understanding how capitalism might be changed if one did not first understand what it was. In the end, I posted four pieces, which I hope will also be of some interest to readers of this forum. They are entitled “what makes profit-maximisation possible”, “what Bill Gates really means by creative capitalism”, “profit-maximisation as the sole goal of a corporation” and “corporate social confusion”. They can be found here.

One of the chief ways financial market participants make sense of events is by drawing parallels with the past. The subprime crisis, when it first erupted, was widely perceived as the most dangerous financial crisis since the 1930s. The implication was that it was critical to avoid the policy mistakes that transformed that earlier crisis into a macro­economic disaster. The lesson drawn was that it was important to avoid an excessively tight monetary policy.

Now, with inflation rising, the popular parallel is not the deflationary 1930s but the stagflationary 1970s. Again the implication is that it is important for policymakers to avoid past mistakes. In this case past mistakes mean a monetary policy that allows inflation expectations to become unanchored.

In fact both analogies are misleading, precisely because market participants and policymakers are aware of this history. Their awareness means that financial history never repeats itself in the same way. Biochemists can replicate their experiments because molecules do not learn. Central bankers lack this luxury.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Debate from our panel of economists appears below.