Archive for the ‘International Economics and Development’ Category
A British Socialist Opts for Private Health Care
With the possible exception of the Scottish parliamentarian George Galloway (here he is saluting Saddam Hussein), no other politician in modern-day Britain has been as staunchly socialist as the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (a.k.a. “Red Ken”). The bane of Lady Thatcher in the 1980s and a fan of Hugo Chavez in the 2000s, “Red Ken” has been a poster child for the British left for decades. As far as he was concerned, no taxes were too high, no government intervention in the economy too excessive. It was with some glee, therefore, that I read that Red Ken is also a bit of a tax dodger – using apparently legal but not very “lefty” ways to limit his tax exposure. But wait, there is more… Ken has recently attacked the plans of the Conservative government to make the National Health Service (NHS is a monopoly public health provider) a little less socialist. “The people of our capital city deserve top quality care and demand our health care should not be broken up, sold off or be privatized by the back door,” he wrote. Lo and behold, it turns out that Red Ken has been benefiting from private health care for some years. Even by the low standards of contemporary politics, this is an extraordinary degree of hypocrisy.
Argentina’s Point of No Return
The most important development this week in Latin America is the decision of the Argentine government to seize control of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), the country’s largest oil company. On Monday, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced the expropriation of the controlling stake of YPF that is owned by the Spanish company Repsol. The Spanish government, backed by the European Union, has announced that it will take retaliatory measures against Argentina, noting that “all options are on the table.” The Economist Intelligence Unit has a very good analysis on the case and the implications for Argentina.
The big question after Fernandez’s overwhelming reelection last fall was whether she would deepen the economic model she and her late husband (and predecessor) implemented since arriving to power in 2003—marked by high government spending, tight economic controls on industries, and selective nationalizations of businesses—or instead change course given the growing signs of exhaustion: high inflation, growing fiscal deficit, increasing capital flight, fall in foreign direct investment, the weakening peso, etc.
Any doubt is now gone. With the nationalization of YPF, Argentina firmly joins Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia in the club of Latin American nations that espouse high-octane economic populism. In the upcoming months, we can expect more protectionist measures, further controls on the economy and, once the government runs out of the money that it seized in the past three years from the private pension funds and the Central Bank’s reserves, we should not be surprised if it moves to take control of the banks.
Things will only get worse for Argentina.
Time for Me to Defend My Work on Tax Havens
A few days ago, I explained why I’m a big fan of tax competition. Simply stated, we need to subject governments to competitive pressure to at least partially offset the tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend.
Tax havens play an important role in this liberalizing process, largely because they do not put themselves under any obligation to enforce the bad tax laws of other jurisdictions. They also use privacy laws to protect their sovereign control of what gets taxed inside their borders (this is what separates a “tax haven” from a more conventional low-tax jurisdiction). This means they are fiscal safe zones, particularly for people who want to protect their assets from the pervasive double taxation that exists in so many nations.
Not everybody agrees with my analysis (gee, what a surprise). To cite one example, the petty bureaucrats at the OECD got so agitated at me in 2009 (when I was offering advice to representatives of so-called tax havens while standing in a public lobby of a public hotel) that they threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail.
Now I have a new critic, though hopefully someone who would never consider thuggish tactics to suppress dissent. Ann Hollingshead writes for the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development, which (notwithstanding the name of the organization) seems to favor bigger government.
Anyhow, she wrote an article specifically criticizing my work on tax havens. So I figured it was time for a fisking, which means a point-by-point rebuttal. Here’s how she begins, and I’ll follow up her points with my responses.
Officially Dan Mitchell is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative public policy research organization, and a researcher on tax reform. Unofficially, he has (perhaps ironically?) called himself the “world’s self-appointed defender of so-called tax havens.”
No irony on my part. As I have openly stated, tax havens are a key part of tax competition, which is a necessary (though sadly not sufficient) process to restrain the greed of the political class.
Oddly enough, Mitchell and I agree on many of the facts about these havens. We both have observed, for example, that there are buildings in Delaware and the Cayman Islands that house thousands of corporations. Mitchell concludes there is nothing wrong with either; I conclude there is something wrong with both. Mitchell also agrees that the United States“could be considered the world’s largest tax haven.” On that topic, he’s even cited my paper on non-resident deposits in secrecy jurisdictions. In his comment, he does not take issue with my methodology or my results, but rather concludes that my finding that the United States is the largest holder of non-resident deposits “makes the case for pro-market policies.” I, on the other hand, have argued that these findings support across the board reform, rather than that limited to traditional offshore financial centers.
Fair enough. We both recognize that the United States is a big tax haven. But we have different conclusions. I think it is unfortunate that only non-resident foreigners can benefit from these policies, while Ann wants to crack down on small low-tax jurisdictions such as Monaco, Bermuda, Liechtenstein, and the Cayman Islands, as well as big nations such as the United States. Sadly, Ann’s side has somewhat prevailed, and many of the havens have agreed to become deputy tax collectors for nations with bad tax law.
So how is it that two (relatively intelligent?) people can draw such different conclusions? I would argue our differences lie not in our facts, or perhaps even our economics, but in our underlying philosophical and theoretical differences.
I guess I should be happy that she holds out the possibility that I’m “relatively intelligent.”
Paul Krugman’s Distorted Views on Inequality in Latin America
When it comes to discussing Latin America, Paul Krugman has a tortuous relationship with facts. Let’s take a look at a post he wrote last week on inequality in the region. Krugman claims that Latin America’s decline in inequality in the last decade is due to the region “partially turning its back on the Washington Consensus” (a term that has misleadingly become short hand for free market policies). Is that the case?
First, note how the graph in Krugman’s post actually shows inequality going up in Latin America during the 1980s, before the implementation of policies related to the Washington Consensus (which for most countries begins in the early 1990s), and then sharply declining before the arrival of what he calls the “new policy approach” of left-of-center governments. The rise of inequality in Latin America in the 1980s coincides with the periods of hyperinflation that crippled the economies of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru, and Bolivia. Central banks in Latin America were all too busy in those years financing the acute fiscal imbalances of their central governments through the emission of money. And Latin American countries were deep in the red precisely because their bloated public sectors became unsustainable, leading to the serious debt crisis of 1982. Thus, it was an inflationary spree, caused by the crisis of big government, that exacerbated inequality in the region. Of course, Krugman fails to mention this.
Can we assign the recent decline in inequality in Latin America to any specific ideology? A recent study by Kenneth Roberts of Cornell University on the politics of inequality in Latin America looked at inequality trends from 2000 to 2010 and found that “countries that experienced net declines in inequality were governed by diverse administrations of the left, centre, and right, including non-leftist governments in Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama.” According to Roberts, “there was no strict correspondence between declining inequality and either the ideological profile of national governments or any specific set of redistributive initiatives.”
Second, it’s quite a stretch to state that Latin America as a region moved away from the Washington Consensus. I’m not going to dwell here on the virtues of all the policy recommendations identified by John Williamson back in 1989 or discuss the extent to which they were actually implemented by the various Latin American governments. However, even though some countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina have turned their backs on responsible macroeconomic policies in the last few years, most governments in the region, including those called “left of center,” still implement macroeconomic policies related to the Washington Consensus such as freer trade, fiscal and monetary discipline, and attraction of foreign direct investment.
It is telling that despite the serious deterioration in economic freedom in countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Argentina economic liberty has actually increased—slightly—in Latin America as a region in the last decade. According to the Economic Freedom of the World , Latin America went from a regional average grade of 6.56 (out of 10) in 2000 to 6.62 in 2009. Implying that Latin America has somehow turned its back on market-friendly policies is misleading.
Third, Krugman looks at the economic performance of Latin American governments based on their ideological affiliation, suggesting that social democratic regimes have a better record than non-left-of-center governments. However, the study on which he bases his post relies too heavily on analyzing governments by their ideological labels, rather than looking at their actual economic policies. This can be very misleading. For example, during the period covered by the study (2000s), Chile is ranked as left of center, even though during that decade the country increased its level of economic freedom, moving up in the ranking of the Economic Freedom of the World index from 28th place in 2000 to 5th in 2009.
Finally, Krugman finished his post questioning Chile’s free market model and private pension system (even though the study he was referencing categorizes Chile as “left of center” and thus credited that ideological camp for Chile’s healthy economic indicators). Krugman doesn’t provide evidence to substantiate his criticism other than making a presumable reference to the recent student protests in Chile. If he looked at the facts, he would see a different picture. He would find that Chile is the country with the most impressive record in poverty reduction in Latin America (the poverty rate fell from 45 percent in the mid-1980s to just 15 percent in 2011), that it has tripled its income per capita since 1990 to $16,000 (the highest in Latin America), and that it is set to become the first developed nation in Latin America within a decade. What is it about this record that Krugman finds so annoying?
China Old and New
The developing scandal and opaque power struggle surrounding fall princeling Bo Xiali, once thought to be a shoe-in for a top party position, reminds us of the old China. The fate of a nation of 1.3 billion people has been decided by relatively few men in Zhongnanhai, Beijing’s leadership compound. Bo’s ouster appears more likely to strengthen those dedicated to maintaining a system of stable authoritarianism than those hoping to promote political liberalism, but the outcome may still be better than the alternative.
Although in this way the “new” China doesn’t look very different from the perpetual back room machinations under Mao Zedong, the communist Humpty Dumpty really has fallen off the wall, never to be put back together again. After all, during the Cultural Revolution no one looked to citizens of the People’s Republic of China to enhance the profits of upscale New York City retailers. Today, Chinese travelers are spending some of their country’s expansive export earnings in America.
Over five days in January, a group of visitors to New York was treated to a private concert with the pianist Lang Lang at the Montblanc store, cocktails and a fashion show attended by the designers Oscar de la Renta and Diane Von Furstenberg, and a tour of Estée Lauder’s original office.
They were not celebrities. They were not government officials. They were Chinese tourists with a lot of money.
The most important relationship of the 21st century is likely to be that between the United States and China. Both countries have a big stake in emphasizing cooperation over confrontation. But a prosperous, even democratic PRC still could pose a significant geopolitical challenge to America. After all, nationalism knows no ideological bounds, wealth enhances military potential, and vote-seeking politicians have been known to harness the whirlwind of demagoguery to win. Nevertheless, a China where the majority of citizens are still desperate to climb the income ladder and the elite are enjoying their privileges is far less likely to intentionally blow up the international system that has moved their nation from poverty to prosperity.
Whether out of ideological conviction or political convenience, Bo was seen as pushing for a return to Maoist values. However, most Chinese seem to believe “Been there, done that” during the not so Great Leap Forward and the catastrophic Cultural Revolution. For a lucky few in the new China, it’s now even time to shop at Bergdorf Goodman!
Okonjo-Iweala vs. Lying Prices
Nigeria’s finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is making a strong bid to be the next president of the World Bank. In looking at her record, it is striking that she has attacked one of the great economic plagues that hinder economic growth: lying prices. Those are the type of non-free-market prices that are prevalent in many emerging market countries. Subsidized fuel prices are a prime example.
For example, Indonesia’s fuel subsidy largess amounts to a whopping 2.5% of Indonesia’s GDP. Talk about price distortions and lying prices. Unfortunately, the Indonesian government’s attempt to inject more honesty into the market for fuel failed on April 1st.
Since last December, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala has taken on the Nigerian establishment, delivering a detailed plan to eliminate fuel subsidies and lying prices in Nigeria, and in January, Nigeria’s fuel subsidies were slashed. This medicine is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe it’s time for the World Bank to be directed by someone who embraces free market prices.
The Drug Debate at the Summit of the Americas
John Stuart Mill once said, “Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, and adoption.” It looks like the movement to end the failed war on drugs is about to enter the second stage, at least on a political level.
For the first time since Richard Nixon launched the international war on drugs more than 40 years ago, a U.S. president will face sharp criticism of this policy from his Latin American counterparts at a regional gathering this weekend. The setting is the Summit of the Americas, which will take in Cartagena, Colombia, on April 14-15.
As the Washington Post reported this week, some Latin American presidents, led by Guatemala’s Otto Pérez Molina, will bring to the table a discussion on alternatives to drug prohibition, including legalization. To be sure, there is no consensus among Latin American leaders on this issue. However, it will be the first time such a discussion will take place at this level.
The Obama administration has said that a regional debate on drug legalization is “legitimate,” but that U.S. support for prohibition won’t budge. However, there’s some evidence that Washington is pressuring some Central American countries to boycott the efforts of Guatemala to discuss this issue. At least that’s what Pérez Molina said after the presidents of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua skipped a Central American summit a couple of weeks ago where the Guatemalan leader expected to rally the region behind his proposal.
Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos, the host of the upcoming summit, is a critical figure in this debate. He was the first president to come out in favor of a debate on legalization, a policy he says he would support as long as everyone else agrees to it. That, of course, is a big caveat. Santos, while remaining critical of the war on drugs, has been more cautious than Pérez Molina in proposing and advocating legalization. However, as Santos himself has stated, Colombia has lots of moral authority to bring up this discussion.
The other important person to watch is Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff. High-ranking officials have said in the past that her government would explore alternatives such as decriminalization, but only after “deep” analysis. However, Rousseff hasn’t commented yet on Guatemala’s proposal. Because Brazil is the second-largest consumer of cocaine in the world, and is a diplomatic heavyweight in the region, its stand on this debate matters significantly.
Both the Rousseff and Santos administrations have pointed to the importance of having a “deep” and “objective” discussion about the merits of alternative drug policies. This means that the United States will no longer be able to dismiss the debate first-hand.
For decades the Cato Institute has been a leading voice for drug legalization. Our studies and conferences have provided facts and arguments on the futility of prohibition and the merits of alternatives such as decriminalization and legalization. We are gratified that the debate on ending the war on drugs is now reaching the highest levels of government, and plan to continue providing analysis for policymakers to make informed decisions.
Dignity in Retirement
In his 2005 open letter to Karl Rove, Ed Crane defended Cato’s proposal for private retirement accounts thus: “You want to get people excited about personal accounts? Tell them about the 1960 Supreme Court case, Flemming v. Nestor, which explicitly says Americans have no ownership rights to the money they pay into Social Security. It is, the Court ruled, a social program of Congress with absolutely no contractual obligations. What you get back at retirement indeed, when you can retire and receive benefits is entirely up to the 535 members of Congress. Where is the dignity in such a system?”
President Bush’s reform of the Social Security went nowhere, but Ed Crane’s warning is no exaggeration. Yesterday, Dimitris Christoulas, a 77-year-old retired pharmacist killed himself in front of the Greek Parliament. “A suicide note found in his coat pocket blamed politicians and the country’s acute financial crisis for driving him to take his life, police said. The government had ‘annihilated any hope for my survival and I could not get any justice. I cannot find any other form of struggle except a dignified end before I have to start scrounging for food from rubbish bins,’ the note said.”
According to The Telegraph, “One in five Greeks are unemployed, depression is on the rise and there is a growing feeling of despair across the country. The [Greek] government said last year that suicides had increased 40 per cent over the previous two years. The high-profile suicide [of Dimitris Christoulas] came a day after a 78-year-old Italian woman threw herself from the balcony of her third-floor apartment in protest against a cut in her monthly pension from 800 euros to 600 euros.”
Those Americans, who rely on Social Security for their retirement, should remember that what the government gives, it can take away. The Social Security system is on an unsustainable path to bankruptcy. The only question is whether Social Security is reformed before it brings about national bankruptcy as well. Every day that our masters in Washington, D.C. dither and refuse to act, the Greek option [i.e.: national bankruptcy] becomes more realistic. The only way to ensure dignified retirement for millions of America’s pensioners is by reforming social security and cutting the size of the government’s future financial obligations.
Revolt of the Irish Tax Slaves
I wrote last year about a backlash from long-suffering Greek taxpayers. These people – the ones pulling the wagon rather than riding in the wagon – are being raped and pillaged by a political class that is trying to protect the greedy interest groups that benefit from Greece’s bloated public sector.
We now have another group of taxpayers who are fighting back against greedy government. My ancestors in Ireland have decided that enough is enough and there is widespread civil disobedience against a new property tax.
Here are the key details from an AP report.
Ireland is facing a revolt over its new property tax. The government said less than half of the country’s 1.6 million households paid the charge by Saturday’s deadline to avoid penalties. And about 5,000 marched in protest against the annual conference of Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael party. Emotions ran raw as police backed by officers on horseback stopped demonstrators from entering the Dublin Convention Centre. …One man mistakenly identified as the government minister responsible for collecting the tax had to be rescued by police from an angry scrum. Kenny said his government had no choice, but to impose the new charge as part of the nation’s efforts to emerge from an international bailout. …The charge this year is a flat-fee €100 ($130) per dwelling, but is expected to rise dramatically next year once Ireland starts to vary the charge based on a property’s estimated value. Anti-tax campaigners have urged the public to ignore the tax demand, arguing that the government doesn’t have the power to collect it.
What makes this new tax so outrageous is that Irish taxpayers already have been victimized with higher income tax rates and a more onerous value-added tax. Yet they weren’t the ones to cause the nation’s fiscal crisis. Ireland is in trouble for two reasons, and both deal with the spending side of the fiscal equation.
1. The burden of government spending exploded last decade, more than doubling in less than 10 years. This wiped out all the gains from fiscal restraint in the 1980s and 1990s.
2. Irish politicians decided to give a bailout not only to depositors of the nation’s failed banks, but also to bondholders. This is a grotesque transfer of wealth from ordinary people to those with higher incomes.
It’s worth nothing that academic studies find that tax evasion is driven largely by high tax rates. This makes sense since there is more incentive to hide money when the government is being very greedy. But there is also evidence that tax evasion rises when people perceive that government is wasting money and being corrupt.
The serfs are fighting back
Heck, no wonder the Irish people are up in arms. They’re being asked to cough up more money to finance a bailout that was both corrupt and wasteful.
Let’s close by looking at American attitudes about tax evasion. Here’s part of a column from Forbes, which expresses surprise that Americans view tax evasion more favorably than behaviors such as shoplifting and littering.
A new survey suggests Americans consider cheating on their taxes more socially acceptable than shoplifting, drunk driving or even throwing trash out the window of a moving car. …only 66% of the participants said they “completely agree” that “everyone who cheats on their taxes should be held accountable” and only 72% completely agreed that “it’s every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes”–suggesting, as the Shelton study does, that perhaps disapproval of tax evasion is not as strong as, say, disapproval of stealing from private businesses.
I’m not sure, though, why anybody would be shocked by these results. We have a government in Washington that is pervasively corrupt, funneling money to scams like Solyndra.
These same people want higher tax rates, which will further encourage people to protect their income.
If we really want to promote better tax compliance, whether in the U.S., Ireland, or anywhere in the world, there are two simple answers. First, enact a simple and fair flat tax to keep rates low. Second, shrink government to its proper size, which will automatically reduce waste and limit opportunities for corruption.
But none of this is in the interests of the political class, so don’t hold your breath waiting for these reforms.
Where Are You on the Global Pay Scale?
Many of my well-to-do friends in Washington, D.C. have been sympathetic to the Occupy movement and the “We Are the 99 Percent” campaign. Indeed, everyone should be outraged when politically connected banks and businesses rob the U.S. taxpayer. But everyone should also recognize that most wealthy people in the United States have made their money by producing goods and services that make us all better off.
But, just to put things in a proper perspective, let us remember that many of those people who belong to the 99 percent in America are also very rich by global standards. Here is a very cool new feature from the BBC’s website that allows you to compare your income with that in the rest of the world. So if you are on an average individual income in Washington, D.C. ($42,078 per year or $3,507 per month before taxes), your income is 237% of the global average (adjusted for PPP, of course!).
Argentina Bans Book Imports due to ‘Human Health Concerns’
The Argentine government has severely restricted the importation of books due to “human health concerns” [in Spanish]. That’s right. According to the government, it can be dangerous to “page through” a book that has high lead quantities in its ink. “If you put you finger in your mouth after paging through a book, that can be dangerous,” said Juan Carlos Sacco, the vice-president of an industrialist organization that supports the measure.
The government claims that this is not a ban. However, since each buyer has to demonstrate at the airport’s customs office that the ink in the purchased book has lead quantities no higher than 0.006% in its chemical composition, the result is that all book imports into the country are stalled.
The measure has a lot to do with the increasing efforts of the Argentine government to stop the flight of dollars out of the country. Capital flight in 2011 reached $21.5 billion, and it accelerated after the reelection of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in October. Facing increasing fiscal pressures, and after seizing private pension funds and raiding the Central Bank’s reserves, many people expect the government to go after their bank savings.
The government has reacted with increasingly ridiculous measures. Sniffing dogs are being deployed at airports and border check points to detect the ink used to print U.S. bills, so Argentines cannot take out of the country more than $10,000 without declaring it to the government. The Fernandez administration is also requiring major importers such as automakers to match the price of their imports with that of goods they must now export. As a result, Porsche is exporting Malbec wine and Mitsubishi is now selling peanuts.
This is the economy that Paul Krugman defended as a “serious country.”
The government’s proliferation of capital and import controls is now clearly threatening freedom of speech. The restriction on foreign books is a measure consistent with the Fernandez administration recent push against independent newspapers and its growing authoritarian tendencies. As an Argentine friend told me last night, “I’m pretty confident that they’ll come after the Internet any time soon.”
The Egg on the EU’s Face
The European politicians love to talk about the “huge” benefits of membership in the European Union. It is certainly true that the “single” market between the EU member states has brought tangible benefits, but those have been declining in importance as technological change made access to services and capital cheaper and easier, and trade liberalization progressed world-wide. Moreover, as the Brussels-based EU bureaucracy expanded, economic liberalization gave way to regulation that helped to strangle European growth (see the graph below). Consider the latest absurdity to emerge from Brussels—a poultry regulation, which aimed to increase the comfort of the egg-laying chickens, but resulted in a drastic cut in egg production and a 100% increase in the price of eggs.
The EU bureaucracy may not appreciate the problem of unintended consequences, but ordinary Europeans are beginning to realize that the EU no longer is what it used to be—a byword for prosperity and stability. In the Czech Republic, for example, a record number of citizens do not trust the EU (63 percent) and the EU Parliament (70 percent). If the EU elite persist in killing jobs and growth, it may bring about the ultimate unintended consequence—the break up of the EU.
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