Tag: Canada

Accountability, Banking, Economics, Measurement, Political economy, Uncategorized, Uncertainty

Why we need better central bank accountability

Jacqueline Best

As pundits debate whether the US Federal Reserve will raise interest rates again this summer or fall, we are reminded of just how much of the economy’s direction hinges on central bankers’ decisions.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the power of central banks has grown, as they have used unorthodox tools to stimulate the economy, taken a greater role in financial regulation, and put themselves in more politically sensitive positions, including the tough debt negotiations with Greece.

In spite of this powerful role, central bankers are remarkably insulated from democratic oversight. As a recent “Buttonwood” column notes in The Economist, “Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi are very important players in the world economy, arguably more important than the US President or the German chancellor. And yet they are not elected; if voters do not like the job they are doing, they cannot get rid of them.”

There is a great deal at stake in decisions about monetary policy, as I suggest in a recently published article in Ethics & International Affairs. Central banks not only define the broad direction of the economy but also create winners and losers. Consider, for instance, the disparate reactions of a prospective first-time home buyer and a retired couple living on their savings to the prospect of yet another drop (or increase) in the interest rate.

Central bank independence in its current form is relatively recent. Elected leaders exercised considerable influence over monetary policy in the post-war era, seeking to achieve the right “trade-off” between full employment and inflation. It was only in the 1980s that policymakers moved away from this kind of Keynesianism and embraced the ideas of Milton Friedman, who advocated the creation of an independent monetary authority.

Friedman and other economists believed that if governments were given any discretion over monetary policy they would adopt inflationary policies because these were more likely to be popular with the electorate. They argued that the only way to ensure price stability was to radically limit the government’s influence over monetary policy by making central banks autonomous and requiring them to stick to a simple rule, such as an inflation target. By the late 1990s, central banks in over thirty countries had gone down this path and were using some form of inflation targeting.

The current model of central bank governance does provide for a certain kind of accountability—but only a very narrow one. Ensuring accountability generally involves three elements: broadly-agreed upon standards, information on whether they are met, and sanctions if they are not. Because the principle of central bank independence involves a very limited set of standards—specifically, the achievement of an inflation target—and very few opportunities for sanction, the main mechanism for accountability is provided by publishing information about the bank’s activities. Hence we have seen the rapid expansion of central banks’ commitment to providing more and better information about their models and decisions in recent years.

Unfortunately, while this informational form of accountability may have worked during the stable years of the “Great Moderation” (from the mid-1980s to the 2008 crisis), it is no longer up to the task in the volatile post-crisis era.

Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz and US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen have both suggested that growing economic uncertainty has reduced the effectiveness of simple models and rules. What these bank governors have not acknowledged (unsurprisingly) is the challenges that this growing uncertainty poses for existing forms of accountability.

If uncertainty limits the effectiveness of rule-based policy, then it ultimately requires greater discretion on the part of policymakers. This is not a problem in itself (here I would disagree with those Republican lawmakers who would bind the Fed even further with more stringent rules). More discretion does, however, require a more robust form of accountability.

There are three basic principles that should underpin any such reforms.

1) Fostering more deliberation and dissent

While the informational model of accountability obligates decision-makers to explain their actions, it reduces this process to a simple publication of data. What is missing is the back and forth of question and answer—the process of genuine debate and deliberation. By the mid-2000s, central bankers were being treated like oracles, with Alan Greenspan as the most revered among them. There must be more room for dissent—both among those with the power to set monetary policy and in the wider society that is affected by those policies.

2) Ensuring that central banks are answerable to the wider public

Because financial issues are complex and their impacts are often diffuse, monetary policy questions rarely become salient enough to mobilize public action. In this context, the power of sanction actually shifts away from the two groups to whom central bankers should be accountable—the government and the public—and toward financial actors, who can impose very serious sanctions on central banks if they disagree with their policies. Without overly politicizing monetary policy, we need to find creative ways of ensuring that central banks are more accountable to the wider public.

3) Broadening the objectives against which their actions are judged

One way of ensuring that monetary policymakers are accountable to the public is to ensure that the issues that affect citizens are reflected in the standards that guide bank policy. At present, most of these issues are not officially on the agenda, which is constrained by the goal of achieving a very low level of inflation.

A number of commentators have recognized this dilemma and have suggested that today’s inflation targets may no longer be appropriate. A recent Federal Reserve working paper suggests that increasing the current inflation target and supplementing it with a nominal GDP target makes economic sense. Such moves to broaden the objectives used to guide central bank decisions would also go some way toward increasing their accountability.

As central banks take on an increasingly powerful role in our political and economic lives, it is time to find new ways of ensuring that they are more fully accountable.

This blog first appeared on the Carnegie Council’s Ethics & International Affairs website.

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.

Banking, Canada, Finance, International development, Risk, Uncertainty

Canada needs to do a better job of managing financial uncertainty

Jacqueline Best

Published in the Hill Times, May 25, 2015

As Canadians, we pride ourselves on how well our financial regulations coped with the 2008 financial crisis. Given this attitude, it’s not surprising that Canadian policymakers have avoided a major overhaul to our regulations in response.

Yet we need to make sure that this pride in our system does not lead to complacency. Rather than just looking backwards to how the Canadian financial system performed in the last crisis, we also need to look forwards and recognize how much the global economy is changing.

Those changes take two key forms. First, the economy has become much more uncertain since the crisis. And second, a number of other countries have raised the bar for financial regulation. If Canadians don’t catch up with these two major shifts, we may well find ourselves in trouble.

Whether we look at the International Monetary Fund’s latest Global Financial Stability Report, or the Bank of Canada’s recent Financial System Review, it is clear that both the global and national economies have become increasingly uncertain. That uncertainty defines some of the most important aspects of our economy, whether we look at the likely medium-term impact of the decline in oil prices, the potential for a hard landing in an overheated housing market, or the possibility that Canadians will wake up one day and realize that their household debt level is unsustainable.

This environment of profound uncertainty poses serious policy challenges.

In the good old days of the so-called “Great Moderation” from the mid-1980s to the financial crisis, policymakers were able to focus on what Donald Rumsfeld famously described as “known unknowns”—the kinds of risks to which policymakers could assign definite probabilities. Today, we are faced instead with a great deal of “unknown unknowns”—the kinds of uncertainty that resists formal modeling, as Bank of Canada Governor, Stephen Poloz noted in a recent paper.

How should we regulate financial markets in the face of this kind of uncertainty? Very carefully. As it becomes increasingly difficult to predict what kinds of complex risks the economy might face, we need to err on the side of caution.

As good Canadians we might assume that we already have some of the most cautious financial regulations around. Yet this is no longer the case.

Yes, Canada has implemented the capital adequacy standards set out in the Basel III accord very quickly. Yet our government has treated those requirements as the gold standard, when they were designed to be a bare minimum. On the other hand, the United Kingdom and the United States are in the process of implementing more demanding standards, including adopting higher and stricter leverage ratios. While Canada was one of the only countries with a leverage ratio requirement before the crisis, we now starting to look relatively lax.

Even more striking is the fact that Canada, unlike every other major country, has no central body responsible for coordinating efforts to manage systemic risk. The Canadian regulatory universe is fragmented, with important pieces of the regulatory puzzle managed by half a dozen agencies plus a multitude of provincial authorities. The Bank of Canada does an admirable job of identifying potential sources of systemic risk, but they have few tools for acting on them.

Canadian authorities have engaged in macroprudential regulation in recent years—most notably through their efforts to cool the housing market down. Yet, as a recent IMF report points out, those efforts have unintentionally encouraged those who no longer qualify for prime mortgages into the under-regulated world of “shadow lending,” potentially increasing systemic risk. In order to manage an uncertain economy, someone needs to be able to look at the system as a whole: to connect the dots that link regulations governing consumer credit, mortgages, interest rates, big, small and “shadow” banking institutions.

What about the usual financial sector response that more regulation will cost Canadian financial institutions, and thus the economy, more generally? We should have learned by now that the cost of another crisis would be much greater still. Given the triple threat of uncertain oil prices, a volatile housing market and rising consumer debt, another crisis would likely hit us harder than the last one. It’s worth being well prepared for that kind of risk.

Posted on the CIPS Blog June 5, 2015. 

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.

Global governance

The public is back — but not as we knew it

Jacqueline Best

In sharp contrast to neo-liberal ‘hands off’ attitudes that shaped its past policies, the Harper government is considering a much greater public role in the economy, strategically targeting certain key sectors. Meanwhile, in response to growing concerns about the implications of cyber attacks, there has been a move to increase the requirement for private companies to collaborate with the government in cases of severe cyber-security breaches. For instance, Bill S-4, the Digital Privacy Act, proposes to make it mandatory for federally regulated businesses to report significant breaches to the federal privacy commissioner.

These are just two examples from a long list of cases—in areas ranging from international finance to development, international security  and environmental governance—in which public actors, concerns and processes  seem to be playing an increasingly important role in our lives.

This is particularly striking after a couple of decades of neoliberal governance that extolled the virtues of the market, and that led many experts to think that the public—and particularly the state—had irrevocably lost its privileged position. In recent years, however, everywhere we look we seem to find examples of public intervention.

Based on these examples, we could be tempted to conclude that the public is back with a vengeance. But is it? Yes and no. As our book, The Return of the Public in Global Governance argues, the public is indeed back, but not as we knew it. Unless we transcend the conventional wisdom about the category of ‘public’, we cannot understand the dynamics and consequences of its apparent return.

For a long time, political scientists have regarded the public and private as separate spheres of social life, governed by different logics and associated with different sites. The problem with this perspective, our book demonstrates, is that it does not allow us to see that whether an actor is regarded as public or private depends much more on what they are seen to be doing as opposed to where they are located. This means that the boundaries between public and private are much more fluid than in the past, as actors move between them depending on their specific practices. It is only by transcending the view of the public as a distinct entity, and by conceptualizing it as a collection of historically specific power-filled social practices, that we can understand the nature and consequences of the contemporary ‘return of the public’.

Using examples drawn from international political economy, international security and environmental and social governance, contributors to this book demonstrate that in many instances the public is back—but it is not where or what it used to be.

Why is this happening now? The global financial crisis, changes in the field of security after 9/11 and climate change have all made it clear that a purely private market-led solution is not up to the challenge. Policymakers have been forced to recognize the need for a stronger public role. Yet rather than leading to a straightforward ‘return of the state’, these challenges have led to a more complex combination of public and private policy strategies.

For example, the financial crisis led to the regulation of certain areas of the ‘grey’ economy, but often using private market actors and processes to do so. In a similar vein, in response to an increasingly complex security environment, many states have sought to build up their security capabilities—but often by relying on private actors, including global security companies. These new policies have complicated previously taken-for-granted definitions of the public, as well as boundaries between the public and private.

Does this change matter? As the chapters in this volume show, contemporary forms of the public generate a series of difficult political dilemmas. A recurring theme of this book is that some recent transformations in the fields of security, international political economy and environmental governance have worrying implications. In particular, recent public practices provide a much thinner basis for legitimacy than do the democratic processes conventionally associated with the public domain. This suggests that the ways in which the public is being reconstituted in the 21st century may make it difficult for late-modern societies to protect key principles—such as the principles of representation and accountability—that lie at the heart of liberal democracy.

Jacqueline Best & Alexandra Gheciu

First posted on the CIPS Blog on September 7, 2014

Canada, Political economy

The austerity trap

Jacqueline Best

As the prognosis for the global economy gets darker by the day, we are hearing one word over and over: austerity.  The British government has announced that it will extend its austerity measures past the next election in 2015. In Canada, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has reiterated that the solution to the current economic crisis, both here and in Europe, is more “belt-tightening.”

But not everyone agrees about the virtues of austerity. Labour finance spokesperson Ed Balls called the British Government’s economic plans a “catastrophic error of judgment.” Two million British public sector workers are on strike over the effects of those austerity measures on their pensions. Closer to home, the former World Bank Chief Economist and Nobel-laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, recently told a Toronto audience, “Austerity is a suicide path.”

These critics are a diverse lot, including people affected by the cuts, Occupy activists, politicians of various stripes, and the leader of the International Monetary Fund. In different ways, they all point to some serious flaws in the current rush to austerity.  It’s worth looking at three of them:

1) The fallacy of composition (or: why Canadian debt isn’t just a bigger version of your family’s debt).

In a recent speech in Toronto, Flaherty noted that he’s applying to the federal government the same advice that he’s offering to Canadians: to tighten their belts and reduce debt. This sounds like it makes perfect sense. Except that it’s a classic error of logic that philosophers call the fallacy of composition: what is true of the parts is not necessarily also true of the whole.

Of course it makes sense for a Canadian family that has taken on too much debt to reduce it. But if all Canadian families at the same time reduce spending in order to pay off debt, then suddenly demand for goods drops, firms reduce production, and jobs are cut. As people lose jobs, it becomes much harder for households to reduce debt; in fact, they may have to take on more to pay the bills. And the risk to the economy is even greater if the federal government doesn’t step in to support demand but actually undermines it further by cutting back on vital services.

This same dilemma applies at the international level. Sure, Canada was able to get its act in order in the 1990’s through austerity measures (at great cost to our health system and infrastructure). But this was at a time when the Canadian economy and the global economy were in good shape.  And while we were cutting back, other countries were doing the opposite, taking up the slack. If everyone cuts back at the same time, there is no one left to keep the global economy going—making it likely that the outcome will be a deeper global recession and more, rather than less, debt in the long run.

2) The costs of austerity (or: why even the IMF thinks it’s a bad idea just now)

In a recent paper, IMF staff concluded that austerity measures do considerable damage in the short and longer term: “This conclusion reverses earlier suggestions in the literature that cutting the budget deficit can spur growth in the short term.” In other words, when someone tells you that austerity will stimulate short-term growth, they’re lying (or as Mark Blyth puts it in a brilliant short video on austerity, this is just about as believable as “a unicorn with a magic bag of salt.”)

What are the costs of austerity?  The IMF paper suggests that they include lower incomes in the short term and higher unemployment in the longer term. As more people become unemployed for longer, there is a real danger that unemployment will become entrenched. The costs of austerity are even higher in cases where a government can’t compensate by significantly lowering interest rates—as is the case today here and in Europe. Because of these very real costs, the IMF head, Christine Lagarde, is suggesting that countries like Canada and the UK not impose any immediate austerity programs while growth is fragile; instead they should be delayed until the economy is healthier. When even the IMF tells us not to impose austerity, and still the Conservative government insists on it, you have to wonder.

3) Inequality (or: whose belt are you tightening anyway?)

Not surprisingly, the IMF study also found that the costs of austerity are not equally borne by everyone. Reductions in wage income caused by austerity are three times larger than those from other kinds of income. It also notes that austerity will “add to the pain of those who are likely to be already suffering—the long term unemployed.” This means that working class people have to tighten their belts much more than others do, through job loss, reduced income and pensions, and the loss of services they rely on. As Blyth puts it: “This ‘common sense’ of austerity—of reducing public debt all at once through slashing services—involves a question of equity—who pays and who doesn’t. Those who made this mess won’t, while those who have paid for it already through the bailouts will pay again through austerity.”

Politicians proposing unpopular and foolhardy policies like to claim that ‘there is no alternative’. But there are alternatives, at least for those in Canada, the UK and other countries not struggling under the kind of crushing debt burden facing Greece. In his recent speech, Stiglitz proposed several suggestions, including investing in infrastructure and education (which would earn returns of 20-30%). The goal is not to reduce the amount that the government spends but rather to reduce government debt, which depends on the overall health of the economy. As Stiglitz notes, “Putting more people to work today means that over the next five to ten years the debt would be lower, GDP higher, the debt to GDP ratio immeasurably improved.”

Remember the unicorn next time you hear someone talk about austerity and growth in the same sentence.

First posted on the CIPS Blog on December 4, 2011.