Red Light, Green Light, Who Cares?

Interesting piece in the FT on Chinese inflation, and the persistent divergence between inflation as measured by the CPI and the GDP deflator. (The differences between price indices is something we could pay more attention to in general.) But I was struck by an odd juxtaposition. First, we get a quote from some analyst saying that the GDP deflator is overstating inflation:

In the last three months of 2010, the deflator made inflation out to be 7.3%, compared with 4.7% using the CPI. ... if the 7.3% inflation the GDP deflator calculates is an overestimation, this has to mean that real GDP growth is higher than the 9.8% Beijing officially clocked for the last quarter—which is dangerously high, strengthening the fear of overheating China bears have been raising of late.

 Then we get another analyst saying no, the deflator is understating inflation:

Our guess is that the GDP deflator which probably averaged over 10% last year is now running at around 11%. The natural implication of that, of course, is that real Chinese GDP could be much lower than officially stated. And that inflation, as a result, is indeed a much greater concern for authorities than is currently being implied.

So if inflation is lower than the official number, that's a reason to step on the brakes. And if inflation is higher than the official number, that's a reason to step on the brakes too.

 It's almost like support for austerity aren't really motivated by concerns about inflation (or interest rates). But what else could it be?

Western Capital to China: Please Keep Wages Down

In today's issue of the Financial Times, there's a remarkably blunt warning that "Rising wages will burst China's bubble." True, China has enjoyed strong growth while most of the rest of the world has endured deep depressions. But don't be fooled by such superficial measures. On the question that really counts, China is in trouble: "The Shanghai market is at less than half its all-time high, significantly underperforming the other three members of the Bric group."

Like Japan in the immediate postwar period, the piece argues, China has so far seen "workers flooding into the cities from the countryside, depressing wages and setting off a virtuous cycle of rising profitability and rising investment. In the mid-1950s, Japanese labour had taken 60 percent of total value added. in the miracle years, this ratio fell to 50 percent." Miraculous indeed -- but alas, it couldn't last. By 1980, the labor share "had soared to a plateau of 68 percent. These gains had to be fought for. In the 1970s, Japan's now dormant union movement was in its heyday. Profit margins were squeezed, and in real terms the stock market went nowhere for a decade." Oh noes! And despite seemingly abundant reserves of cheap labor, the same disaster could befall China. "Can workers grab a larger share of the economic pie before the urbanization process is complete? In Japan they did. ... If China were to follow Japan, the next stage would be labour strife and inflation. The best way to avoid that outcome would be a radical tightening of the current super-easy monetary policy. But that would risk a serious slowdown and probably necessitate a large revaluation of the renminbi."

So there it is. The important question about China's future is the value of financial assets. And the great threat to asset-owners is the likelihood of rising wages, which will come about through increasing organizing among Chinese workers. The only way to prevent that is pre-emptive tightening, even at the cost of slower growth. The case for austerity is seldom made that bluntly, certainly not for the rich countries, but I don't think the underlying motivation is much different. It's also noteworthy that big revaluation of the renminbi is presented here explicitly as part of a program to hold down Chinese wages. In other words, China faces a choice between higher wages and a higher currency. To China-competing firms and workers in the rest of the world, either would be just as welcome. But for masters of the universe with Chinese stocks in their portfolio, they look very different indeed.

(Incidentally, these questions -- the relationship between profitability, investment, demand, inflation and the politically-determined division of output between labor and capital -- are largely ignored by mainstream macro, saltwater as well as fresh, but are right at the center of structuralist, Marxist, post-Keynesian and other heterodox approaches to macroeconomics. If only there were some economics department interested in supporting those approaches.)

EDIT: There was a link on a Something Awful thread sometime around March 20 that's sending a lot of traffic to this post. Unfortunately, not being an SA member, I can't see the thread. Anyone want to tell me what it was, in comments?

A Bit More on China

Mike Konczal points me to this interesting piece by Walker Frost in The American Scene, on the Chinese currency peg. I asked earlier how much Chinese appreciation would boost US demand (more on that below). But there's a prior question, which is whether an end to Chinese currency intervention would lead to appreciation at all. As Frost points out, the dollar purchases by the central bank coexist with restrictions on private investment abroad and strong incentives for FDI by foreign firms. These policies increase net capital inflows and therefore tend to raise the value of the Chinese currency; the Chinese central bank then pushes it back down with its dollar purchases. It's far from clear which of these effects is stronger, and therefore, whether an across-the-board liberalization would lead the Chinese currency to rise against the dollar, or to fall. In short, we should see Chinese currency interventions not as part of an export-led growth strategy that requires a current-account surplus, but as part of an investment-led growth strategy that would otherwise tend to produce a current-account deficit. [1]

This is a point Anwar Shaikh has also made, when I've discussed this stuff with him. Don't talk about undervaluation, he says, that implies some known free-market equilibrium exchange rate, and there isn't one; talk about stabilization instead.

Another interesting discussion of the Chinese currency peg is in this Deutsche Bank report, which tends to confirm my skepticism about the effect of currency adjustment on US-China trade flows. They note that "RMB appreciation tends to ... reduce nominal wages in the export sector," confirming my sense that exchange rate changes don't reliably move relative costs. And they use an estimate of -0.6 for exchange rate elasticity of Chinese exports. I don't want to put too much weight on this number -- I'm not sure how it's derived -- and they don't give any estiamtes for US-China flows specifically; but given the well-established empirical fact that exchange-rate elasticity is unsually low for US imports, we have to conclude that the number for Chinese exports to the US is substantially lower. So if you believe the Deutsche Bank number for Chinese exports as a whole, my estimate of -0.17 for Chinese exports to the US is probably in the right ballpark. Which, again, means that even a very large Chinese appreciation would have only a trivial impact on US aggregate demand.


[1] The same goes for tariffs and other trade restrictions imposed by Latin American countries as part of import-substitution industrialization.

... and How About a Higher Yuan?

Another day, another Paul Krugman post blaming China for US unemployment. And maybe he's right. But it would be nice to see some numbers.

On the same lines as my earlier post about the effect of dollar devaluation on aggregate demand, we can make a rough estimate of trade elasticities to calculate the effect of a Chinese revaluation.

Unfortunately, there aren't many recent estimates of bilateral trade elasticities between the US and China. But common sense can get us quite a ways here. In recent years, US imports from China have run around 2 percent of GDP, and US exports to China a bit under 0.5 percent. So even if we assume that (1) a change in the nominal exchange rate is reflected one for one in the real exchange rate, i.e. that it doesn't affect Chinese prices or wages at all; (2) a change in the real exchange rate is passed one for one into prices of Chinese imports in the US; (3) Chinese goods compete only with American-made goods, and not with those of other exporters; and (4) the price elasticity of US imports from China is a very high 4.0; then a 20 percent appreciation of the Chinese currency still boosts US demand by less than 1 percent of GDP.

And of course, those are all wildly optimistic assumptions. My own simple error-correction model, using 1993-2010 data on US imports from China and the relative CPI-deflated bilateral exchange rate, gives an import elasticity of just 0.17. [1] If the real figure is in that range, then a Chinese appreciation of 20 percent will reduce our imports from China by just 0.03 percent of GDP -- and of course much of even that tiny demand shift will be to goods from other low-wage exporters.

I don't claim my estimate is correct. But is it too much to ask that Krugman tell us what estimates he is using, that have convinced him that the best way to help US workers is to foment a trade war with China?


[1] This is a real exchange-rate elasticity, not a price elasticity, so it accounts for incomplete passthrough and offsetting movements in Chinese real wages. It assumes, however, that changes in the nominal exchange rate don't affect inflation in either country; to that extent, it's more likely an overestimate than an underestimate