Category: Theory

Canada, Economics, Inequality, Political economy, Theory

Rebuilding the middle class: The Liberals have a chance to rectify their past economic mistakes

Jacqueline Best

As the new Liberal government starts to put its economic plan into action, its commitment to paying attention to the evidence (unlike its Conservative predecessors) should provide them with both comforting and cautionary tales.

On the one hand, there is ample evidence to support the Trudeau government’s plan to allow for short-term deficits in order to reinvest in infrastructure and rebuild the middle class. On the other, the data also points to a rather more inconvenient truth: the trend towards growing inequality actually started on the Chrétien Liberal government’s watch.

A recent report by TD Economics notes that while the top 20% of income earners have gained 30% since 1976 (most of that since 1994), the middle 20% have only seen an increase of about 5% in that time. More tellingly, the report suggests that it was only in the mid-to-late 1990s that the level of inequality in Canada began to take off “when governments stopped leaning against income inequality.”

During the campaign, Justin Trudeau demonstrated his willingness to take on board new economic thinking and break with the old Liberal Party’s obsession with paying down the debt at any cost. Although the Trudeau Liberals’ willingness to run a small fiscal deficit in the short-term was ridiculed by the Conservatives and challenged by the NDP during the election campaign, it is actually entirely consistent with much mainstream economic policy thinking today.

A recent discussion note by economists at the International Monetary Fund (not exactly known as a bastion of left-wing thinking) warned governments like Canada against imposing austerity measures in order to pay down their debts more quickly. The authors note: “While debt may be bad for growth, it does not follow that it should be paid down as quickly as possible.” In fact, “If fiscal space remains ample, policies to deliberately pay down debt are normally undesirable.”

Or, to borrow former NDP leader, Jack Layton’s, well-known phrase (as noted in a column by Andrew Coyne last March) there is little point in paying down your mortgage faster when your house is falling down from badly-needed repairs.

This reminder of Layton’s common-sense wisdom should tell us two things. First, and most obviously, the NDP lost its way in its efforts to seem economically credible enough to govern. While there is no question that the party had far less political leeway than the Liberals to challenge what has become a Canadian obsession with balanced budgets and debt-reduction, by setting aside the more hopeful ambitions of Layton’s NDP, Mulcair and his advisors ended up in the odd position of being more conservative than the IMF (not to mention Andrew Coyne).

Second, we need to remember that it was the Chrétien and Martin Liberals, not the Conservatives, who made debt reduction a centrepiece of their economic policy in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The first cuts made in the 1990s were designed to reduce what had become a genuinely unsustainable deficit. Back then, Canada faced a milder version of Greece’s recent dilemma, with bond markets increasingly suspicious of the government’s credit-worthiness.

Yet what started as a strategic response to external pressures soon became an end in itself: the running of surpluses to pay down the debt became a mantra—part of the brand of the Liberal Party itself.

As we now know, that policy had its own very serious human costs.

I remember well the moment when the Liberal government stopped leaning against inequality and started to dismantle the same social policies that Pierre Trudeau’s government had built. I was a parliamentary intern in the House of Commons from the Fall of 1994 to the Spring of 1995 (in fact, one of my fellow interns was Arif Virani, who has just been elected as a Liberal MP for Parkdale-High Park). I watched a Liberal party that had campaigned on the left move sharply right. I watched smart, progressive politicians like Lloyd Axworthy overseeing the erosion of our social infrastructure, and I tried to understand why.

That experience shaped the rest of my career. I decided to go back to university and become a professor of international political economy in order to try to understand why countries like Canada could believe that they had to destroy their social fabric in order to survive economically—and how we could prevent this happening again.

In the twenty-plus years since I first sought to understand how Canadians can foster a caring and just society in a competitive and often unstable global economy, I have not come up with any easy answers.

But I do know that a Liberal government that is genuinely open to learning from the evidence, and committed to paying attention to inconvenient truths, will not reproduce the same mistakes that it once made.

Rising inequality hurts all of us. Recent research has shown that more unequal societies don’t grow as quickly, as many members of society find themselves unable to invest in their education and training, decreasingly overall productivity.

As the TD Economics report notes, the factors that allowed us to avoid the more radical hollowing out of the middle class seen the United States in recent years can no longer be counted on, as the commodity boom comes to an end and the hot housing market starts looking increasingly like a bubble about to burst (or at best deflate). Without creative government action, we are at risk of falling into a vicious cycle of lower growth, cuts to programs, further inequality and even lower growth.

While some might argue that the Bank of Canada’s recent downgrades to the economic outlook should push the Liberals back into their old austerity mode, that zero-sum game no longer holds water. As middle-class jobs come under even more pressure, leaning against inequality can help us all.

This was originally posted on the CIPS Blog.

Canada, Failure, International development, Measurement, Risk, Theory

What counts as policy failure — and why it matters

Jacqueline Best

When things go wrong in politics, the word ‘failure’ gets bandied around a lot. In recent weeks, we’ve heard about the failure of Canadian drug policy (as admitted by Stephen Harper), the failure of Canadian diplomatic efforts to get Barack Obama on board for the Keystone XL Pipeline (as declared by his critics), and the failure of European leaders and the ‘troika’ to find a long term solution to the problems posed by the Greek economy (as acknowledged by most sensible commentators).

These declarations of failure, of course, are not uncontested. In each case, there are those who would challenge the label of failure altogether, and others who would lay the responsibility for failure on different shoulders. Labeling something a failure is a political act: it involves not just identifying something as a problem, but also suggesting that someone in particular has failed. These debates about failures are crucial ways in which we assess responsibility for the things that go wrong in political and economic policy.

The most interesting debates about policy failure, however, occur when what’s at stake is what counts as failure itself.

When we say that something or someone, has failed, we are using a particular metric of success and failure. Formal exams provide the clearest example of assessment according to a scale of passing and failing grades. In most cases, such metrics are taken for granted. (Even if some students might not agree that my grading scale is fair, I am generally very confident when I fail a student.) But sometimes, if a failure is serious enough, or if failures are repeated over and over, those metrics themselves come into question. (I did once bump all the exam grades up by five percent in a course because they were so out of line with the students’ overall performance.)

In politics, these contested failures force both policymakers and the wider community to re-examine not just the policy problems themselves but also the measures that they use to evaluate and interpret them. These moments of debate are very important. They are very technical, focusing on the nuts and bolts of evaluation and assessment. Yet they are also fundamental, since they force us to ask both what we want success to look like and to what extent we can really know when we’ve found it.

In my recent book, Governing Failure, I trace the central role of this kind of contested failure in one particular area: the governance of international development policy. Policy failures such as the persistence of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Asian financial crisis and the AIDS crisis raised very serious questions about the effectiveness of the ‘Washington Consensus’, and ultimately led aid organizations ranging from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to the (then) Canadian International Development Agency to question and reassess their policies.

The ‘aid effectiveness’ debates of 1990s and 2000s emerged out of these contested failures, as key policymakers and critics questioned past definitions of success and failure and sought to develop a new understanding of what makes aid work or fail. In the process, they shifted away from a narrowly economic conception of success and failure towards one that saw institutional and other broader political reforms as crucial to program success.

International development is not the only area in which we have seen a significant set of failures precipitate this kind of debate about the meaning of success and failure itself. The 2008 financial crisis was also seen by many as a spectacular failure. The crisis produced wide-ranging debates not just about who was to blame, but also about how it was possible for domestic and international policymakers and market actors to get things so wrong that they were predicting continued success even as the global economy was headed towards massive failure.

In the aftermath of that crisis, there was a striking amount of public interest in the basic metrics underpinning the financial system. People started asking just how risks were evaluated and managed and how credit rating agencies arrived at the ratings that had proven to be so misleading. In short, they wanted to understand how the system measured success and failure. Many of the most promising efforts to respond to the crisis—such as attempts to measure and manage systemic risk—are also aimed at developing better ways of evaluating what’s is and isn’t working in the global economy, defining success in more complex ways.

Of course, not every failure is a contested one. Many have argued that the reasons for the failure of Canadian drug policy are less contested than Harper has suggested. Critics note that the Conservative government’s unwillingness to take on board the lessons of innovative policies such as safe injection sites goes a long way towards explaining this policy failure.

On the other hand, some failures—such as the failure not just of Greece but also of much of Europe to restart their economies—should be more contested than they currently are. The International Monetary Fund did begin opening up this kind of deeper discussion when its internal review of its early interventions in Greece suggested that the organization had been too quick to promote austerity. Yet the narrow terms of the troika’s conversations about the future of Greece suggests that there is an awful lot of room for more creative thinking about the path towards policy success, not just in Europe but around the world.

These kinds of debates about how we define and recognize success and failure can be crucial turning points in public policy. They force us, at least for a moment, to set aside some of our easy assumptions about what works and what doesn’t, and to ask ourselves what we really mean by success.

This blog post first appeared on the CIPS blog on March 6, 2015.

Failure, Global governance, International development, Measurement, Political economy, Results, Risk, Theory

Hedging bets: our new preoccupation with failure

Jacqueline Best

Nobody likes to admit failure—least of all government-funded development organizations in hard economic times. Yet recent years have seen a number of prominent development agencies confess to failure. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) admitted its failure to recognize the damage that its overzealous approach to austerity would cause in Greece. The World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, has adopted the idea of Fail Faires from the information technology industry, where policymakers share their biggest failures with one another. The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Chief Innovation Officer also expressed some interest in organizing a Fail Faire, and the agency eventually did hold an “Experience Summit” in 2012.

This interest in failure is central to a broader shift in how development organizations—and other national and international agencies—have begun to work. As I argue in my new book, Governing Failure, these organizations are increasingly aware of the possibility of failure and are seeking to manage that risk in new ways.

This preoccupation with failure is relatively new. The 1980s and early 1990s—the era of ‘structural adjustment’ lending—was a time of confidence and certainty. Policymakers believed that they had found the universal economic recipe for development success.

The 1990s marked a turning point for confidence in the development success ‘recipe’. Success rates for programs at the World Bank began to decline dramatically’ critics started to label the 1980s a ‘decade of despair’ for sub-Saharan Africa; and both the AIDS pandemic and the Asian financial crisis reversed many gains in poverty reduction. These events made policymakers more aware of the uncertainty of the global environment and of the very real possibility of failure—lessons only reinforced by the recent financial crisis.

What happens to policymakers when they are more aware of the possibility of failure? On one hand, they can accept the fact of uncertainty and the limits of their control, becoming creative—even experimental—in their approach to solving problems. Or they can become hyper-cautious and risk-averse, doing what they can to avoid failure at all costs. We can see both reactions in international development circles.

A major shift in development practice over the past two decades has been the recognition that political ‘buy-in’ matters for policy success. As development organizations tried to foster greater country ownership of economic programs, they became quite creative. By reducing conditionality and delivering more non-earmarked aid to countries’ general budgets, development organizations shifted more decision-making responsibility to borrowing governments in an effort to create an open-ended and participatory process more conducive to policy success.

But development organizations also took a more cautious turn in their response to the problem of failure. The social theorist Niklas Luhmann first introduced the idea of ‘provisional expertise’ to describe this cautious trend in modern society. He pointed to the increase in risk-based knowledge that could always be revised in the face of changing conditions.

Risk management has become omnipresent in development circles, as it has elsewhere. No shovel turns to build a school without a multitude of assessments of possible risks to the project’s success, allowing the organizations involved to hedge against possible failures.

An even more prominent trend in development policy is the current focus on results, which is particularly popular in the Canadian government. Few organizations these days do not justify actions in terms of the results that they deliver: roads built, immunizations given, rates of infant mortality reduced.

At first glance, this focus appears to be anything but cautious: what greater risk than publishing the true results of your actions? Yet it is not always possible to know the results of a given policy. The problem of causal attribution is a thorny one in development practice, particularly when any number of different variables could have led to the results an organization claim as its own.

Some agencies such as the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) have tried to get around this problem through sophisticated counterfactual analysis and the use of control groups in their aid programs. Yet even MCC staff members recognize that designing programs in order to gain the best knowledge about results can come at the expense of other priorities.

If donors can count as successes only those results that can be counted, they may well find themselves redefining their priorities to suit their evaluation methodology—and their political needs. In most cases, results are donor-driven: they are not calculated and published for the benefit of the recipient country but for the donor’s citizens back home, who want to know that their taxes are being spent wisely. So building roads and providing immunizations suddenly becomes more attractive than undertaking the long, slow, and complex work of transforming legal and political institutions. Caution wins out in the end.

Which kind of approach to failure is winning out today: experimentalist or cautious? Sadly it seems that the earlier experiment with country ownership has lost momentum, in part because the forms of participation involved were so much less meaningful than had been hoped. At the same time, the results agenda has only become more numbers-driven in the last few years. As agencies have grown more risk-averse after the global financial crisis, they have sought to make results-evaluation more standardized—and ultimately less responsive to the particular needs of local communities.

There is still hope, as the recent admissions of failure by major development organizations suggest. Yet the very fact that that the USAID event was ultimately named an ‘Experience Summit’ rather than a ‘Fail Faire’ is telling: even when leaders admit to failure, it appears that they can’t resist hedging their bets.

This blog post draws from my recent book, Governing Failure: Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Global Development Finance, published by Cambridge University Press.

Earlier versions of this essay appeared on RegBlog.org and the CIPS blog.