The bad news for visitors to the United States is that the crackdown on terrorism means you are fingerprinted at immigration. The good news is that the government has decided to sweeten the pill by sending its grumpy staff back to charm school.
The officer at Washington’s Dulles airport could hardly have been sweeter. Discovering that I was in town to cover the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings, she launched into an analysis of the US economy. Her conclusion? Yes, things were a bit better but the whole shebang was dependent on a strong housing market, and that would be put in jeopardy should Alan Greenspan raise interest rates. There would be a multiplier effect throughout the rest of the domestic economy, with construction and retailing hit hard, she said.
It’s not every day you can discuss the finer points of Keynesian theory with the person scouring your passport and, while this conversation didn’t say much for the United States’s productivity record, it was a fascinating insight into the unease underlying the recovery in the world’s biggest economy.
The durability of the global economy was one of the three big issues at the get-together of the bank and the IMF, for while growth is stronger than was envisaged six months ago, concern about the durability of the expansion stretches from airport immigration queues to those running the global economy. Publicly, policymakers insist everything is going swimmingly: Saturday’s G7 communique said prospects were ”favourable”.
Privately, there are misgivings. One policymaker said the half-full way of looking at things was that the current performance was better than predicted, the half-empty way of looking at things was that there were downside risks. The short term looks fine, in other words; but there may be choppy water further out.
Fears of an immediate crisis looked misplaced. The global economy now has two locomotives — the US and China. According to the IMF’s world economic outlook, the US will be the fastest growing economy in the G7 this year at 4,6%, while China will grow at 8,5%, helping to drag the rest of the Pacific rim, Japan especially, in its wake.
This may be as good as it gets. The US’s recovery from the shallow recession of 2001 has been unspectacular by historical standards but has required a colossal amount of policy loosening. Anybody who believes demand management doesn’t work should look at the US.
The real question is what happens when the policy stimulus is removed. Tax cuts have been crucial in boosting consumption, while the Fed’s cheap money policy has helped to replace a stock market bubble with a housing bubble. The IMF believes that a pricking of the property bubble would do severe damage to US growth, reducing gross domestic product (GDP) by a total of 8% over a number of years. By contrast, the collapse in share prices wiped 4% off the GDP. Will that happen? Alan Greenspan appears to think it might, which is why he is reluctant to push up interest rates.
In China’s case, the government is trying to cool down the economy, using controls on credit to choke off demand for borrowing. As Stephen King of HSBC bank notes, China is adopting the sort of approach to economic management favoured in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, when currencies were anchored against the dollar but used credit controls to regulate unemployment and inflation.
As a result, China is less prone to economic or financial crisis than those emerging countries where financial liberalisation means hot money can flow out as quickly as it flows in. For the time being, the climate looks benign, with debt spreads low. The concern is that when interest rates in the US start to rise, spreads will widen and lead to a fresh wave of 1990s-style collapses.
All of which leads to a second area of debate — the future of the Bretton Woods institutions as they approach their 60th birthday. The feeling in some G7 countries — Britain and the US in particular — is that the global community should have had a rethink about the IMF and the World Bank when they reached their half century, but the issue was ducked.
But as one senior official said, the IMF was set up to help with post-war reconstruction in the West and to see countries with fixed exchange rates through balance of payments difficulties. With freely convertible exchange rates in every developed country, this is a different world. The last Western country the IMF lent to was Britain in 1976.
Instead, the IMF concentrates on lending to developing countries, where its work overlaps with that of the Bank. Those countries where the writ of the Bretton Woods institutions has never run large — China, for one — or where countries have abandoned austerity in favour of expansion — Argentina and Russia — have benefited as a result.
A question in the world economic outlook is why some African countries work better than others. It concludes that the reason Botswana and Mauritius grew more quickly has nothing to do with their willingness to liberalise their trade policies, but was the result of higher quality institutions.
This refreshing honesty on the part of the IMF’s economists doesn’t mean that the West is about to stop using poor countries in Africa as test beds for liberalisation and privatisation. As Action Aid pointed out last week, the Bank and the IMF are ”still pushing developing countries to implement risky and unproven economic reforms through conditions attached to aid”.
While it agrees that it is right for donors to ensure that aid is going to those it is intended to help, Action Aid’s research suggests that donors are often putting themselves at the heart of the domestic decision-making process, often insisting on privatisation of water and electricity as the price of help. The bank and the IMF need streamlining so that they can rethink their approach to what really works in development.
One conclusion of this weekend’s events is that the rich countries are happier to deliver homilies to poor nations than they are to act themselves. The shameful way in which Spain’s Rodrigo Rato has been lined up as the new IMF managing director is indicative of the double standards that infect the running of the global economy. Rato’s appointment was a stitch-up, which no amount of weasel words about consultation can disguise.
British Finance Minister Gordon Brown obviously thought that developing countries should be grateful that he arranged for Rato to fly into Washington to tell African ministers how he was really committed to development. They would be even more grateful if Brown were to tell them when Britain intends to meet its commitment to raise its aid budget to the United Nations’s target of 0,7%.
One success for Brown is that the White House’s desire to write off Iraq’s $90-billion of external debt has made the US more amenable to a comprehensive review of debt relief. Yet the situation on development was summed up by the bank’s president, Jim Wolfensohn, when he pleaded for money to finance the education-for-all initiative. We’ve had all the excuses, he said, ”now we need the dough”.
The dough could be a long time coming. Finance ministers are loquacious enough when it comes to describing the plight of poor people in Africa and can emote passionately about needless deaths from malaria or children deprived of an education. They tend to be a bit more hard-hearted when it comes to ponying up the cash. — Â