Posts Tagged: Bank of England


11
Sep 08

Notes to Self: Blanchard on the Future of Macroeconomics

Circulation in macroeconomics

Olivier Blanchard of MIT is one of the top macroeconomists in the world. When he write articles like this, it’s worth your time reading what he thinks.

Or, you could read what I think he thinks. Which may save time.

My summary. Macroeconomics is the study of fluctuations. Since the 1970′s there have been three approaches to macro. First, the new-classicals. These guys build models of the macroeconomy where the aggregate properties of the economy come from the decisions made at the household and firm level. All markets are in equilibrium, and the only thing which creates cycles is changes in technology. This approach is associated with Ed Prescott, Robert Lucas, and Thomas Sargent. Second, the new-Keynesians. These guys emphasised the role of market imperfections like asymmetric information in generating cycles. Top chaps in the NK school would be Greg Mankiw and Joseph Stiglitz. Third, the growth theorists. These guys mainly ignored the problem of fluctuations. People like Daron Acemoglu and Charles I. Jones come to mind. 

Blanchard argues that modern macroeconomics has had a sort of convergence from these three schools, where the theory of the new-classicals is augmented with imperfections. The problem with this approach is complexity. Now we need large dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models to make predictions about the economy in the short run, which makes understanding the message behind these models difficult. 

Blanchard sees a more `open source’ future for macroeconomics, where we hack together macro models based on the problem they are built to solve, and estimate them numerically, without worrying about the general equilibrium and social welfare properties of these models.

I’m a bit skeptical about the issue of pluralism in economics (see here), but I think Blanchard’s vision of a broader macroeconomic church, if it came about, would be nice to see if it ever happened. 


28
Aug 08

Looking at Ireland’s National Income, 2002-2007

The Spire of Dublin symbolises the modernisati...

August saw the release of the National Income and Product Accounts for 2007. A few choice graphs for y’all this morning. First, we’ve got the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) graph from 2002-2007, valued at different prices.

GDP is really the sum of the price, P, of final goods and services, i, in a given period, times the quantity of those goods and services, Q_{i}, so if there are n goods in the economy,

\text{GDP} = \sum_{i=1}^{n} P_{i} Q_{i}.

GDP is based on prices, which change all time, so the number is chain weighted to take account of those price changes. That’s why you see two bars in the figures below from page xvi of the CSO’s NIE report. 

 

Ireland\'s GDP, 2002-2007Two things should strike you reading the graph from left to right. First, just look at how rich we are. Think about how this statistic translates into tangible differences in people’s living standards. It’s a remarkable thing, when you consider, say, our European neighbours. Here’s a graph of GDP per capita (dividing total output by the number of people in the economy to take account of different population sizes) for the OECD countries.

GDP per capita

What do you see? You see a very rich Irish nation, compared to its peers. We know this, but it’s important to be reminded. 

Next up, we’ve got personal expenditure. Again, notice the increases over time, since the end of the Celtic Tiger period around 2002. 

What is the bottom line? The national income accounts show a robust and wealthy economy, which has some overvalued assets, and is undergoing a revaluation of those assets by 2007. The wealth created in the previous years, however, doesn’t go away—it’s all still there, on our backs, on our roads, over our heads, in our bank accounts. We’ve just decided the economy’s heading for another recession. 

Number to watch: personal expenditure 2007 as compared to 2008. This will tell you what households are spending, how much, and what on. It’ll make for some interesting reading.