O debate sobre se os EUA estão, ou não, em recessão: a opinião (fundada em números) de Robert Barro

Yes, The U.S. Economy Is Likely In Recession

Robert J. Barro

 Financial Advisor, Shrewsbury, NJ  – 2/08/2022

The latest figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) show that the U.S. economy has experienced two consecutive quarters of negative real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth. That accords with a popular definition of a recession. But economists have noted that any official declaration of a U.S. recession must come instead from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which carefully assesses various monthly macro economic indicators observed over extended periods.

 

Given the intensity of this debate in the media, one might think that the popular and official assessments often contradict each other. But that is not the case. Since 1948, and prior to the current episode, BEA data on real GDP reveal ten periods with two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth—in 1949, 1954, 1958, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1991, 2009, and 2020—all of which correspond to the NBER’s eventual declaration of a recession.

 

 In other words, the “two-consecutive-quarters” metric has had no false positives since 1948. If one takes the eventual NBER verdict as truth, one must also accept that two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth have consistently forecasted a recession for the past 74 years.

To be sure, there have been a couple of cases since 1948 in which the NBER has declared a recession without an associated two-quarter fall in real GDP: namely, the mild recessions of 1960-61 and 2001. These were false negatives, where the absence of two consecutive quarters of declining GDP did not guarantee the absence of a recession. But, of course, this consideration is not pertinent for 2022.

 

Going back to before 1948, there was a false positive in 1947, when consecutive quarters of GDP decline did not result in the NBER declaring a recession. But in this case, the NBER presumably (and reasonably) was accounting for the fact that the GDP reduction in 1946-47 was driven by the demobilization from World War II. It recognized that with the release of economic resources due to decreased military spending, the economy was operating well despite a fall in real GDP. In any case, this consideration also does not apply in 2022.

 

The NBER’s business-cycle analysis goes beyond real GDP to consider monthly data on personal income, employment, consumer expenditure, wholesale and retail sales, and industrial production. But while the benefits of considering monthly data are clear, it is not obvious that this array of variables is otherwise superior to GDP, which is already a broad economic measure that weights sectors in accordance with their contributions to production and income generation.

 

Now calculations consider a wide array of high-frequency data, but only to the extent that they help forecast (or “nowcast”) real GDP. A good research strategy for business cycles, then, is to focus on the size and duration of movements in real GDP itself, as the economist James D. Hamilton does in his Econbrowser Recession Indicator Index. In any event, the inferences about recessions from GDP data are similar to those presented by the NBER.

 

One argument that has come up in the current debate is that the US GDP numbers for the first two quarters of 2022 may eventually be revised up to the point that they will no longer show two consecutive declines. (My calculations above are based on the latest available revised data on real GDP.) Such revisions are possible, of course; but they are unpredictable.

 

Out of all the GDP data revisions since 1965 (available from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), the only time that one of the 10 aforementioned cases of two-quarter GDP declines was changed was in 1980. Because the initial data for the third quarter of 1980 did not show a GDP fall, this case would not be classed as a two-quarter GDP decline based on the initial data. But this modification would not alter the takeaway from seeing a two-quarter fall in GDP.

 

Another argument, offered by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, is that the strong U.S. labor market precludes the NBER from designating the current downturn as a recession. But while it is true that employment is one of the data series that the NBER consults, there is no reason to think that this variable—even if it remains strong—will single-handedly determine the ultimate call of a recession. Although employment usually falls during a recession, there have been several cases when payroll employment grew or remained roughly stable well after the start of an NBER-designated recession: from December 2007 to March 2008; January to April 1980; November 1973 to October 1974; and December 1969 to April 1970.

One clear advantage of the two-consecutive-quarter measure is that it is timely and does not require waiting for the NBER’s announcement that a recession has begun. Since the formation of the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee in 1978, the lag between the start of a recession (as gauged eventually by the NBER) and the announcement of the start of a downturn averaged seven months. This delay might be appealing to U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration if it goes beyond the midterm elections in November, but it is otherwise unattractive.

 

The bottom line is that, with the announcement on July 28 of a two-quarter GDP decline, we can be highly confident that the U.S. economy entered a recession early in 2022.

 

Robert J. Barro, professor of economics at Harvard University, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. 

 

Desigualdade na América Latina: paper de Jeffrey Williamson (NBER)

Concordo com o Professor Jeffrey Williamson, um dos mais prestigiosos historiadores econômicos, ou melhor, economistas historiadores da atualidade. Estou lendo agora o seu livro de 2013:

Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind

que é uma tentativa de explicar nosso atraso pelo fechamento de oportunidades de inserção na industrialização durante a segunda revolução industrial. Pode ser que tenha funcionado para a Índia, mas não estou muito convencido quanto à América Latina justamente, que me parece ter perdido oportunidades por erros próprios, que alguns países vem tentando corrigir agora (mas o Brasil ainda não entrou nessa). Se fosse por proteção, como explicam para o caso americano, deveríamos ser uma potência industrial, o que está longe de ser o caso.
Vamos ver este paper agora...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

NBER
Latin American Inequality: Colonial Origins, Commodity Booms, or a Missed 20th Century Leveling?
Jeffrey G. Williamson
NBER Working Paper No. 20915
Issued in January 2015

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it’s the Iberian colonists’ fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin America compared with Asia and most rich post-industrial nations and assume that this must always have been true. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions which help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. The recent leveling of inequality in the region since the 1990s seems to have done little to erode that pessimism. It is important, therefore, to stress that this alleged persistence is based on an historical literature which has made little or no effort to be comparative, and it matters. Compared with the rest of the world, inequality was not high in the century following 1492, and it was not even high in the post-independence decades just prior Latin America’s belle époque and start with industrialization. It only became high during the commodity boom 1870-1913, by the end of which it had joined the rich country unequal club that included the US and the UK. Latin America only became relatively high between 1913 and the 1970s when it missed the Great Egalitarian Leveling which took place almost everywhere else. That Latin American inequality has its roots in its colonial past is a myth.

Para ler na íntegra o ensaio :  http://www.nber.org/papers/w20915.pdf

Controles de capitais no Brasil: um estudo do NBER

Não muito efetivos, e o que fica é só paranoia do passado...

Capital Controls in Brazil – Stemming a Tide with a Signal?

Yothin Jinjarak, Ilan Noy, Huanhuan Zheng

NBER Working Paper No. 19205

Issued in July 2013

NBER Program(s):   IFM 

Controls on capital inflows have been experiencing a renaissance since 2008, with several prominent emerging markets implementing them. We focus on Brazil, which instituted five changes in its capital account regime in 2008-2011. Using the synthetic control method, we construct counterfactuals (i.e., Brazil with no policy change) for each of these changes. We find no evidence that any tightening of controls was effective in reducing the magnitudes of capital inflows, but we observe some modest and short-lived success in preventing further declines in inflows when the capital controls were relaxed. We hypothesize that price-based capital controls’ only perceptible effect is to be found in the content of the signal they broadcast regarding the government’s larger intentions and sensibilities. Brazil’s left-of-center government’s willingness to remove controls was perceived as a noteworthy indication that the government was not as hostile to the international financial markets as many expected it to be.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w19205.pdf?new_window=1

Presidente do Ipea: arrotando pretensoes indevidas

Participei, no dia 24, do lançamento desta obra do IPEA:

Brasil em Desenvolvimento: Estado, Planejamento, Políticas Públicas
(Brasília: Ipea, 2011, 3 vols.) (ver este link)

Na ocasião, o bizarro presidente do Ipea, na certa vitimado por alguma mania de grandeza em tudo e por tudo indevida, e entusiasmado com mais essa demonstração de contribuição ao saudosismo econômico, chegou a afirmar que não existia, no hemisfério americano, nem mesmo nos Estados Unidos, "nenhuma instituição comparável ao Ipea".

De fato, talvez não exista. Mas existe melhor, e o fato de o presidente do Ipea encher a boca para cantar as loas do Ipea mostra apenas que ele é um ignorante, um pretensioso, um narcisista vazio, ou tudo isso ao mesmo tempo.

Ele provavelmente desconhece -- seja por preconceito, seja por anti-imperialismo primário, seja por ignorância mesmo, ou mais provavelmente por uma combinação de todas essas "qualidades" -- a existência do NBER, o National Bureau of Economic Resarch, do Império, justamente.

Não querendo depreciar o Ipea, que já conheceu dias e presidentes melhores, basta lembrar alguns dados, retirados do site do NBER:

The NBER is the nation's leading nonprofit economic research organization. Eighteen of the 33 American Nobel Prize winners in Economics and six of the past Chairmen of the President's Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER. The more than 1,000 professors of economics and business now teaching at colleges and universities in North America who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields. These Bureau associates concentrate on four types of empirical research: developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior, assessing the economic effects of public policies, and projecting the effects of alternative policy proposals.

Ou seja, o NBER faz mais ou menos o que o Ipea faz, mas faz muito melhor, com menos gente, menos custo e menos alarde.
E quantos funcionários tem o Ipea? Provavelmente mais de mil, todos estáveis, como acontece no Estado brasileiro. Quanto custa o Ipea para o Brasil? Não sei, mas não deve ser pouco...
Em comparação, eis o NBER:

The NBER is governed by a Board of Directors with representatives from the leading U.S. research universities and major national economics organizations. Other prominent economists from business, trade unions, and academe also sit on the Bureau's Board. James Poterba is the NBER's President and Chief Executive Officer. In addition to the Research Associates and Faculty Research Fellows, the Bureau employs a support staff of 45. The Bureau's main office is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has a branch office in New York City.
(As contas do NBER estão neste link.)

Ou seja, o NBER tem apenas 45 funcionários, que se ocupam, no mais das vezes, de organizar os encontros de seus pesquisadores e de preparar os trabalhos aprovados para publicação.
(O staff do NBER está aqui.)

Quanto à produção intelectual do NBER, seria até covardia compará-la com a do Ipea, sobretudo em termos de rigor acadêmico, seriedade metodológica, utilidade para o país (o deles...).
O Ipea está empenhado em fazer o Brasil retornar aos anos 1950 e 1960, ou seja, meio século atrás, pois parece que suas atuais lideranças são muito afinadas com as ideias dos cepalianos, furtadianos, prebischianos e outros keynesianos saudosistas.

Um outro Ipea é possível (até mesmo desejável)...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida