Bad ideas never die — Greg Mankiw’s Alesina fairy tale

25 Jun, 2016 at 09:19 | Posted in Economics | Comments Off on Bad ideas never die — Greg Mankiw’s Alesina fairy tale

So what’s wrong with the economy? …

A 2002 study of United States fiscal policy by the economists Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti found that ‘both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending.’ They noted that this finding is ‘difficult to reconcile with Keynesian theory.’

Consistent with this, a more recent study of international data by the economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna found that ‘fiscal stimuli based on tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based on spending increases.’

Greg Mankiw

From Mankiw’s perspective ‘the Alesina work suggests a still plausible hypothesis.’

Hmm …

 

Austerity policies not only generate substantial welfare costs due to supply-side channels, they also hurt demand — and thus worsen employment and unemployment.The notion that fiscal consolidations can be expansionary (that is, raise output and employment), in part by raising private sector confidence and investment, has been championed by, among others, Harvard economist Alberto Alesina in the academic world and by former European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in the policy arena. However, in practice, episodes of fiscal consolidation have been followed, on average, by drops rather than by expansions in output. On average, a consolidation of 1 percent of GDP increases the long-term unemployment rate by 0.6 percentage point and raises by 1.5 percent within five years the Gini measure of income inequality.

Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and David Furceri