The Council on Foreign Relations’ Brad W. Setser has produced a couple of interesting blogposts on Germany’s fiscal policies of late. The first one, titled “Germany Cannot Quit Fiscal Consolidation,” was published at the end of August. On September 18th, the second one appeared, titled “The Global Cost of the Eurozone’s 2012 Fiscal Coordination Failure.”

The latter is more limited in scope and draws heavily on a recent report by the Banque de France. Setser elaborates on the rather obvious point that the eurozone’s attempt at fiscal austerity in the years 2011–13, when the currency union experienced the second leg of its double-dip recession, was counterproductively harsh:

The consolidation observed between 2011 and 2013, based on the overall change in the primary structural balance of general government, is now estimated by the European Commission at almost 2.9% of potential GDP…the fiscal effort was 1.5 percentage points of GDP in 2012. (Banque de France 2017)

Corroborating the Banque de France’s analysis, Setser points out correctly that there was no sound economic case for Germany to embark on austerity just at the time when it also demanded this form of self-sacrifice, in the name of the “credibility” of the euro regime, from its euro partners. If anything, Germany should have continued with at least mildly expansionary fiscal policy to keep the eurozone’s recovery on track and enable its internal rebalancing. Setser chides the Banque de France for not mentioning that France, too, could have somewhat lessened and delayed its own fiscal tightening to support the regional growth momentum at a critical time.

It is certainly very interesting that the Banque the France today finds the courage to present an argument that implies a severe critique of Germany’s fiscal folly. Perhaps it felt inspired by the fresh spirit of the republic’s new president. Perhaps open debate will also help official Europe to finally catch up with the realities of truly enormous collateral damages caused by its flawed policy doctrines of “growth-friendly” austerity and structural reform. As it stands, the eurozone is at high risk to repeat past mistakes as soon as its current stream of good luck runs out.

The more recent blogpost also echoes Setser’s main concern analyzed in the earlier blogpost of late August: global rebalancing. continue reading…

It took a very long time. Too long. But just in time for the recent G20 meeting in Hamburg on July 7-8, The Economist’s cover page story featured Germany’s persistent current account surpluses as the world community’ new “German problem”; supposedly an issue of foremost interest to the G20. In fact, Germany has run up current account surpluses exceeding 4 percent of GDP in each and every year since 2004. For the last couple of years Germany’s surpluses even exceeded 8 percent of GDP. Running at over 250 billion euros annually, Germany is the world champion in what is often portrayed as a global competition by the German media and body politic, and not without pride. At close to 300 billion US dollars last year, China’s surplus of 200 billion dollars only came in as a distant second.

Just as with Germany’s, China’s external surpluses had started to skyrocket at the time of the global boom of the 2000s. It reached a peak at over 400 billion in 2008, amounting to close to 10 percent of China’s GDP at the time. Since then China’s current account surplus has roughly halved and amounts to less than 2 percent of China’s GDP today.

At least in that regard, China is a good global citizen. Reducing and containing “global (current account) imbalances” has indeed been one of the agreed upon objectives of the G20 from the time the group of leading countries took fresh prominence in the context of the global crisis. At the 2009 Pittsburgh summit, the G20 leaders conceived the group’s “Framework for Strong, Sustainable, and Balanced Growth.” While other countries have generally significantly reduced their current account deficits or surpluses, respectively, since the crisis, Germany is the conspicuous outlier as the country’s current account surplus has leaped into its unchallenged lead position of today.

The Economist was rather late in pointing this out so prominently on its cover page just prior to the G20 Hamburg summit. Perhaps it is too hard today to miss the writing on the wall that is a signature piece in Donald Trump’s “America first” strategy to global issues. The US president may get some of the details wrong about Germany’s trade and may also be wrong in bringing a sharp bilateral angle to the matter. But, globally, the situation is simply undeniable: Germany is the world champion of large and persistent current account surpluses. The country is in continuous breach of the “rules of the game” without showing any signs of discomfort about an “achievement” that much of the country even takes pride in. continue reading…

The Economist‘s analysis of Germany’s job market miracle of the past ten years offered in “What the German economic model can teach Emmanuel Macron” is more balanced than the usual accounts one hears in Germany itself. Germans are in love with the idea that structural reform of their labor market and persistent budgetary austerity were solely responsible for the German economy’s superior performance in recent years. The Economist highlights that Germany was fortunate enough to embark on its route for national salvation – the decisive lowering of its labor costs relative to its European partners – at a time when the world economy and global trade were booming, when China was craving German capital goods, and German companies were restoring their special relationship with a region reemerging from behind the iron curtain. No doubt France and its struggling euro partners are facing a far less benign regional and global environment today.

The Economist would have done well to remind us that despite enjoying a more favorable economic context, Germany became known at the time as “the sick man of Europe/the euro.” Between 1996 and 2006, Germany managed to almost persistently suffocate domestic demand to such an extent that the economy was growing, if barely, on exports alone: the background to Germany’s 8.5 percent-of-GDP current account surplus today. As for France, the bar is much higher today, not only because of stagnant export markets, but also for the fact that France is a far more closed economy than Germany. In other words, there is more to suffocate in terms of domestic demand, but less to gain in terms of exports. In short, the chances of France getting seriously sick by mimicking Germany are very high indeed.

Also, if Europe’s second-largest economy were to embark on the deflationary path earlier trodden by Germany, bear in mind here that the European Central Bank is already in a quagmire. After overcoming many obstacles, legal and intellectual, the bank is applying its full weaponry today in trying to move Eurozone inflation back closer to its 2 percent price stability norm – while facing the prospect of soon running out of ammunition in terms of the fast-shrinking German public debt available for purchase on the market.

And this directs the attention to the true challenge that France and Europe are facing today: German public debt is shrinking fast because Germany runs a sizeable budget surplus. Quite obviously – as the vast imbalance between private saving and investment reveals, which is closely related to the surge in inequality in Germany –this is only made possible by the fact that Germany runs a massive external surplus: the counterparts to which are current account deficits and rising debts of other countries. The upshot of all this is that France and Europe have a zero chance to rebalance for as long as Europe’s largest economy refuses to rebalance too; which means that Germany’s evangelized, but greatly distorted, narrative of its own success will need some fine-tuning too.

For the sake of Europe, let us hope that Angela Merkel’s newfound wisdom that “we Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands” means that Germany is finally getting ready for a decisive course change to its own economic affairs. Failure to do so, leaving France out in the cold under Emmanuel Macron, would bring Marine Le Pen back into the limelight much sooner than in five years’ time.

The corrosive social and economic effects of what have now become ‘normal’ unemployment levels require new solutions, and trade without full employment exacerbates the problem.

Global unemployment is expected to surpass 200 million people for the first time on record by the end of 2017, according a recent ILO study, and limitations of official statistics suggest that the problem is much larger. As conventional measures increasingly fail to produce tight labor markets and jobless recoveries become the norm, economists grapple with this new reality by calling it secular stagnation and by adjusting upwards the rates of unemployment deemed ‘natural’ — but the human, social and economic costs of this growing problem are rarely considered in economic modeling.

The Problem: A Global Unemployment Epidemic

Mainstream economic theory considers some level of unemployment to be ‘natural’ (i.e., unresponsive to policy remedies without creating some other problem like inflation), but it largely ignores the harsh human, environmental, and economic costs of unemployment. In fact, some of the best work on this question comes from disciplines outside of economics.

It’s not hyperbole to note, for example, that unemployment kills. Literally. Research shows that one in five suicides is related to unemployment, and joblessness causes 32–37 percent excess mortality for men. And while for women the impact is less clear, we know that there are robust and lasting negative effects from unemployment on social participation and social capital – all prerequisites for a fulfilling and productive life at home and in the workplace. The deep negative impact of unemployment on individuals’ mental and physical health is well-established. And joblessness has been found to have strong scarring effects on life satisfaction.

The link between crime and unemployment is also well-established. Certain criminal activities vary with the business cycle, and studies have found significant and sizable impact of unemployment on the rates of specific violent and property crimes. The connection between youth unemployment and crime is particularly troubling in the context of the ILO’s findings that 74 million young people are unemployed globally (one third of their overall global unemployment estimate). Other studies suggest that the actual number of jobless youth around the world may be six or seven times the ILO estimates.

Unemployment doesn’t just harm the unemployed. It also harms their children and families. It exacerbates infant mortality, depression, alcohol consumption, and the spread of infectious disease. And joblessness is a root cause of human/child trafficking and global sexual and labor exploitation.

This list only scratches the surface of the insidious effects of unemployment. While the ‘natural’ unemployment rate is embedded in virtually every forecasting model used by government and industry, none of them account for the extraordinary social and economic costs of the epidemic that this ‘natural rate’ actually represents.

The Solution: A Global Marshall Plan for the Unemployed continue reading…

by Daniel Alpert

A practically unnoticed phenomenon underpins the negative U.S. economic data trends we saw in Q4 2015 and the enormous increase in market volatility in the first week of 2016: the United States’ global competitors are—once again—using vast pools of low-wage, underutilized labor, a huge excess of domestic production capacity, and/or the ever-stronger U.S. dollar, to grab whatever share of demand they can in order to maintain/recover growth in a sluggish global economy.

While the plummeting price of energy—the result of insufficient global demand and huge new oversupply from North America itself—has cut America’s energy deficit to a level less than 20 percent of its 2008 peak, the overall current account deficit of the U.S. grew rapidly in 2014 and, more alarmingly, in 2015.  The nation’s current account is the sum of the balance of trade (goods and services exports less imports), net income from abroad and net current transfers.

But here’s the brutal bottom-line: the non-energy portion of the U.S. current account deficit, relative to GDP, has ballooned by 236 percent since its low in December 2013, during which period the energy deficit fell by 57 percent.

The U.S. economy is showing weakness in Nearly Everything But Employment (“NEBE”) and even its salutary pace of job formation is plagued by an unusual level of temporary and low wage hiring, painfully low labor force participation and very low levels of nominal wage growth. Consumption is therefore not rising in a manner anywhere near the rise in headline job formation. And the demand-push inflation that one would normally expect to have emerged with the creation of 5.6 million jobs over 24 months is nowhere to be found.  In fact, the U.S. is joining the rest of the world in a persistent pattern of alternating deflation and disinflation (“lowflation”).

The substantial slowdown in China, the evident failure of Abenomics in Japan, the collapse of the Brazilian and Argentinian economies, and a failure of the eurozone to get off the mat despite the “anything it takes” monetary posture of the European Central Bank, have all contributed to declining global aggregate demand for all sorts of production. This has been reflected particularly acutely in the energy and other commodities sectors.

All of the foregoing constitute a bitter pill for the United States economy which, better than any other, was able to substantially reduce its trade deficit from the end of the recession through 2013 and to lever its size, its willingness to engage in extraordinary monetary easing early and often during and following the Great Recession, and its inherent resiliency to produce at least a tepid recovery while other regions slowed or remained mired in slump.

After all its deft maneuvering, the U.S. is once again being inundated by cheap imports and seeing its ability to export severely impaired, because of a combination of its competitors’ internal deflation and efforts (direct and indirect) to devalue their currencies relative to the U.S. dollar and each other’s.  This is vastly constraining U.S. economic growth and may result in its contraction at some point during 2016.

This nearly universal beggar-thy-neighbor behavior has all the makings of a very serious global economic disruption and proceeds from the same global economic imbalances that we saw before, during and after the Great Recession; the vast oversupply of labor, production, and capital relative to aggregate demand for all three.

Where is this coming from? continue reading…

Jan Kregel, the Levy Institute’s director of research, was recently interviewed by the Buenos Aires Herald regarding Argentina’s economic prospects and its ongoing situation with the “vulture funds.”

On Argentina’s policy challenges:

So there are no alternatives to devaluation?

Argentina has one net advantage. As a result of the vulture funds it’s relatively insulated from the global crisis. Now it has a decision to make on how it is going to respond. China and Brazil didn’t have a choice but Argentina does. There has to be an exchange rate adjustment and it will be difficult because everybody else is doing the same thing. You can do it on a gradual basis but you would be doing it in a non-gradual context, taking the real as an example.

The government claims that a devaluation isn’t necessary and can be replaced by a larger consumption thanks to counter cyclical measures. Do you agree?

If you continue to go counter-current, that means the exchange rate will remain low. The country has a big opportunity to do import substitution due to the global context. Now is the moment to support domestic industry. The question is if you do that by increasing consumption or by more direct policies to stimulate manufacturing industries. You should first do the second, that will then boost consumption.

Argentina saw huge economic growth in the first years of Kirchnerism but now the economy has slowed down. What are the reasons for that?

When I was working at the UN, I used to come to Argentina and present reports at the Economy Ministry. The first question I asked officials is how long they thought Argentina could grow at eight percent. Usually the response was, why I thought that was a problem. Everybody actually believed that eight percent was something that could go on forever—that’s the reason behind Argentina’s current situation. Still, Argentina survived the world economic crisis much better than any other developing country.

And on the vulture funds:

Can the legal conflict with the holdouts be solved?

The most reasonable thing is to do nothing and let it sit there. The current US administration doesn’t support the claims of US investors and if the issue would go to any other court it is unlikely that it would be resolved. If you want to change something you just have to wait for the people who did it to die. Griesa is not very young and eventually has to retire.

Read the entire interview here.

The pseudo-debate about whether Keynesians and other fellow travellers ought to be embarrassed when governments that engage in fiscal austerity nevertheless experience positive economic growth rates has become a distraction.

For countries like the US and the UK, it is possible under current circumstances for governments to implement budget cuts and still see their economies grow. But the truth of that statement is not fatal to the Keynesian-inspired critique of austerity policies; it is not by any means the end of the story. The more meaningful question is this: What would have to happen in these economies for significant growth to occur in the midst of budget tightening?

Finding an answer to that last question is one of the strengths of the approach to thinking about the economy pioneered by Wynne Godley, and fleshed out further in the Levy Institute’s strategic analysis series. This approach also provides a clear understanding of how deeply irresponsible it is to cut government spending under present economic conditions: because the danger, given the state of the US and UK economies, is not just that budget cuts might slow down the economy, but that they might not.

Let’s look at the United States in particular. In their just-released report, Dimitri Papadimitriou, Greg Hannsgen, Michalis Nikiforos, and Gennaro Zezza point out that, with the exception of a short cycle in the ’70s, “there has been no other recovery in the modern history of the US economy in which government spending decreased in real terms.”

The Congressional Budget Office is predicting that the budget deficit will continue to shrink over the next few years, from 2.8 percent of GDP in 2014 to 2.4 percent in 2018. At the same time, the authors note, the CBO is telling us that GDP will grow at 2.8 percent, 3 percent, 2.7 percent, and 2.1 percent in 2015, ’16, ’17, and ’18, respectively. If we assume that both of those forecasts (for the budget deficit and GDP growth) come true, what would the rest of the economy need to look like?

The United States has run current account deficits, which act as a drag on economic growth, for decades. And despite the recent increase in net exports of petroleum products, which has helped keep the US trade deficit from returning to its sky-high precrisis levels, there is little reason to think that the external deficit will substantially improve over the next few years (if anything, the authors argue, it is likely to get worse. There’s more on recent developments in the foreign sector beginning on p. 6 of the report).

That being the case, GDP growth rates of the sort projected by the CBO can only come to pass on the basis of a rise in private sector spending. In fact, Papadimitriou et al. show that private sector spending would have to expand so much that it would exceed private sector income for the first time since the crisis. In other words, growth would depend on rising private indebtedness.

If the dollar continues to appreciate further and the economies of US trading partners end up performing worse than the IMF expects (a very real possibility, the authors point out, given the optimism of IMF forecasts), this increase in private sector spending over income — and thus the increase in the private debt-to-income ratio — would have to be even larger. Here’s what that would look like (in the chart below, “Scenario 1” corresponds to slower growth among US trading partners [by 1 percent of GDP annually], “Scenario 2” to a 25 percent appreciation of the dollar over the next four years, and “Scenario 3” to a combination of the two):

If private spending doesn’t blow up in this way, the CBO’s optimistic growth projections won’t come about. But if growth does occur, it can only do so (given the external deficit) through a process that raises the debt-to-income ratio of the private sector. As the authors point out, this is precisely the same process that led to the Great Recession and its aftermath.

What’s worse, the state of income inequality in the United States is such that this increase in private debt will be borne disproportionately by households in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution. Unlike the federal government, which can service its debt through mere keystrokes, US households cannot sustain rising debt ratios of the sort portrayed in the chart above (though the amount of public hand-wringing spent on the debt of the former, as compared to the latter, would suggest the opposite). As Papadimitriou et al. write:

“Increased borrowing of one kind or another can often be sustained for a long time … but eventually, retrenchment takes place relative to incomes. The consequences of any further retrenchment in debt-financed consumer spending would be felt throughout industries that produce for the US consumer, and again, as we noted above, the recovery in real private domestic consumption is already weak relative to any previous recovery.”

To bring this back to the tired discussions surrounding austerity policies: yes, it is possible for the United States to have both tight budgets and rising GDP over the next few years. Fiscal conservatism doesn’t make economic growth impossible in the near term — it makes it impossible to grow without increasing financial fragility. In the absence of a significant increase in net exports, keeping the government budget on its current track will lead to either stagnation or an acute crisis.

Austerians in the United States and elsewhere have been allowed to portray themselves as the champions of steely-eyed realism and prudence. In reality, unless their budget proposals come attached with some workable plan to substantially reduce trade deficits, they are courting private-debt-driven financial crises. In any meaningful sense, they are the true practitioners of fiscal irresponsibility.

Greg Ip had a couple of pieces on currency wars and gyrations in the Wall Street Journal last week (here and here), essentially arguing that talk about currency warfare is much beside the point and that exchange rate gyrations are merely benevolent side-effects of monetary policies that will inevitably make the whole world better off. The Financial Times had an editorial on the ECB’s QE and the euro plunge that ran along the same lines, bluntly declaring that “any criticism from outside the eurozone that the fall in the single currency will kick off a global currency war [was] misplaced.” And Bloomberg summed it all up by proclaiming that the whole currency war talk is a “load of baloney,” fearing that the currency war nonsense talk might lead to trade restrictions, which would do real harm.

While the Financial Times sees no cause for alarm at all it seems, Greg Ip’s alarm bells would only go off if China were to retaliate by weakening the renminbi.

So there appears to be a consensus that all is currently for the best in all possible currency worlds. As ever so often, the consensus may be seriously off track here.

Consider Greg Ip’s main point, which is that monetary easing cannot do any harm by weakening a currency because it simply forces other central banks to follow suit, which eases the global monetary stance, which is all for the good. Well, the argument fails to distinguish situations in which all countries share common monetary policy requirements from situations in which that is not the case. The former kind of situation prevailed right after the Lehman bankruptcy, when the Federal Reserve’s easing provided the scope for a global monetary easing. This benevolent alignment didn’t last very long, however, as the U.S. monetary stance proved to be excessively easy for numerous countries in the emerging world — countries that may today be held back by the financial fragilities that were created at that time. Fast forward, recovery in the U.S. appears to be leading the world economy today, creating the opposite kind of challenges. So is the Federal Reserve prodding everyone else to tighten too, to the benefit of the world? Or are the ECB’s QE adventures prodding the Federal Reserve to change course, to the benefit of the world and the U.S.? If neither is the case, will the resulting exchange rate gyrations really benefit the wider world — unless China devalues its currency, that is?

The new consensus overlooks that it matters to the global economy whether important countries are mainly driven by domestic demand growth or mainly freeload on net exports.

The evolution of current account imbalances and contributions of net exports to GDP growth in the key countries featured in talks about currency wars is revealing.

The U.S. had persistent negative net exports GDP growth contributions and a rising current account deficit prior to the crisis of 2008-09. The crisis then halved the U.S. current account deficit. And post-crisis QE and dollar depreciation saw U.S. domestic demand growth stimulate (disappointingly meager) U.S. GDP growth while net exports made a broadly neutral contribution as the U.S. current account deficit was contained overall. Suffice to mention that U.S. energy production was an important swing factor in this outcome. The U.S. non-energy external balance has deteriorated with the U.S. recovery.

Japan ran huge current account surpluses prior to the crisis. As the favored carry-trade currency, the yen was cheap at the time. When crisis struck, the yen appreciated sharply at first, and Japan’s current account imbalance has since disappeared as net exports made negative GDP growth contributions in the last four years. More recently, the yen’s appreciation was partly reversed by means of QE starting in 2013 when the Japanese authorities also initiated a program to stimulate domestic demand.

The eurozone had a broadly balanced external position prior to the global crisis. Internally, however, diverging competitiveness positions led to huge imbalances, which then imploded. As the eurozone authorities’ policy response suffocated domestic demand, positive GDP growth contributions from net exports were the currency union’s only lifeline. The eurozone has a surging current account surplus, the biggest in the world today, with Germany and the Netherlands as the lead stars.

It is true that China had by far the biggest current account surplus prior to the global crisis. But China has also gone through by far the biggest rebalancing since. China’s current account surplus halved in absolute terms; in relative terms it plunged from 10 percent of GDP to roughly 2 percent within a short period of time. In fact, the country has experienced quite persistent negative GDP growth contributions from net exports since the crisis.

In essence, in the years since the global crisis, China was the number one global growth engine, while the eurozone was the world’s outstanding drag on growth, undermining a proper recovery. Germany’s bilateral trade and current account balances vis-à-vis China are in surplus today.

The latest monetary policy initiatives and currency gyrations should be read against this background. The consensus suggests that euro devaluation through the ECB’s belated QE is just fine, a measure for the general good of the world. Apparently the plunging euro is not designed to augment and sustain the eurozone’s freeloading on external growth; it is not the mechanism by which the eurozone exports its homemade mess to innocent bystanders. By contrast, as Greg Ip states explicitly, if the Chinese authorities were to devalue the renminbi, that could be seen as beggar-they-neighbor policy, an attempt to steal demand from their trading partners. Apparently, China is obliged to provide positive growth stimuli to the global economy and must not try to contain the damage that eurozone freeloading has on its development.

Surely Dr. Schäuble and Germany’s export industry can only applaud the new consensus. Never mind the shallow double standards on which it rests. Or do we all begin to adopt the kind of logic that prevails in Dr. Schäubles “parallel universe”* — making it yet another German export success?

* Back in September 2013, Dr. Schäuble famously suggested (see my comment) that critics of the brilliant eurozone crisis management undertaken under his stewardship were living in a “parallel universe where well-established economic principles no longer apply.” Eurozone crisis management has been so brilliant that the world now enjoys its fruits at a super-competitive euro exchange rate. Bravo! More cheerleading please.

In a recent speech at the Levy Institute conference on “The Eurozone Crisis, Greece, and the Experience of Austerity” held in Athens, Mr. Yves Mersch, a member of the Executive Board and General Council at the ECB, made it clear that the success of the troika plan for the Greek economy requires the current account balance to improve as the public deficit is reduced. In his own words,

To facilitate an export-led recovery, this trend [decreasing competitiveness] has to be corrected and there is no way this can be achieved in the short run other than by adjusting prices and costs. I know the difficulties that such adjustment creates and the criticisms that are leveled against it. But we are in a monetary union and this is how adjustment works. Sharing a currency brings considerable microeconomic benefits but it requires that relative prices can adjust to offset shocks.

The troika requests for a reduction in costs have been met by Greeks, as our first chart shows.

Indeed, nominal wages(1) have fallen by 23 percent from their peak in the first quarter of 2010, and real wages(2) have fallen by 27.8 percent over the same period.

While it is true that prices started to fall later than wages, and therefore the improvement in competitiveness has been limited, its impact on exports is doubtful.

The chart above shows that nominal exports of goods have somewhat improved, but if we decompose exports of goods using the Eurostat database by SITC categories, we learn that most – if not all – of the increase in exports of goods is related to oil products(3). Indeed, recent news indicates a fall in non-oil exports.

Summing up, internal devaluation has so far had negligible effects on Greek exports, while the fall in the purchasing power of wages has added to the fall in domestic demand generated by fiscal austerity, and thereby contributed to the unprecedented crisis in Greece.

Our July projections have so far been on track, and we predict that even if prices keep falling, as advocated by the troika plan, the response of the current account will be too slow to compensate for fiscal austerity. Strategies to increase employment and income are urgently needed.

Notes:
(1) The wage index is taken from the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ElStat).
(2) Real wages are obtained by deflating the wage index by the Overall CPI published by ElStat, seasonally adjusted in Eviews and converted to quarterly frequency.
(3) We use the SITC category “Mineral fuels, lubricants and related materials” for our measure of oil-related exports.

Dimitri Papadimitriou, in Reuters’ “Great Debate” series:

The U.S. needs an export strategy led by research and development, and it needs it now. A serious federal commitment to R&D would help arrest the long-term decline in manufacturing, and return America to its preeminent and competitive positions in high tech. At the same time, increasing sales of these once-key exports abroad would improve our also-declining balance of trade.

It’s the best shot the U.S. has to energize its weak economic recovery. R&D investment in products sold in foreign markets would yield a greater contribution to economic growth than any other feasible approach today. It would raise GDP, lower unemployment, and rehabilitate production operations in ways that would reverberate worldwide.

…

For our R&D/export model, we posited a modest infusion of $160 billion per year — about 1 percent of GDP — until 2016. We saw unemployment fall to less than 5 percent by 2016, compared with CBO forecasts that unemployment will remain over 7 percent. Real GDP growth — instead of hovering around 3.5 percent, by CBO estimates, on the current path — gradually rose to near 5.5 percent by the end of the period.

Read it here.

The research underlying these proposals and projections can be found in the Levy Institute’s most recent US macroeconomic analysis: “Rescuing the Recovery: Prospects and Policies for the United States”