The European Economy Since 1945

by on November 8, 2006 at 6:30 am in Books, Economics, History | Permalink

An excellent book appeared on my doorstep yesterday, by Barry Eichengreen:

Thus Europe, which had relied on extensive growth in the 1950s and 1960s, had no choice but to switch to intensive growth from the 1970s on.  The problem was that institutions tailored to the needs of extensive growth were less suited to the challenges of intensive growth.  Bank-based financial systems had been singularly effective at mobilizing resources for investment by existing enterprises using known technologies, but they were less conducive to growth in a period of heightened technological uncertainty. Now the role of finance was to take bets on competing technologies, something for which financial markets were better adapted.  The generous employment protections and heavy welfare-state charges that had given labor the security to accept the installation of mass-production technologies now became an obstacle to growth as new firms seeking to explore the viability of unfamiliar technologies became the agents of job creation and productivity improvement.  Systems of worker co-determination, in which union representatives occupied seats on big firms’ supervisory boards, had been ideal for helping labor to verify that owners were investing the profits resulting from its wage restraint but now discouraged bosses from taking the tough measures needed to restructure in preparation for the adoption of radical new technologies.  State holding companies that had been engines of investment and technical progress were no longer efficient mechanisms for allocating resources in this new era of heightened technological uncertainty.  They were increasingly captured by special interests and used to bail out loss-making firms and prop up declining industries.

I have never read a better paragraph on what the European economies have done right and subsequently did wrong.  Note that Eichengreen is, broadly, a social democrat.  Eichengreen (who is more optimistic about Europe than I am) believes that Europe can turn things around, without chucking the basic model, but he doesn’t for a moment deny that Europe faces an economic crisis relative to the American model. 

I am still shocked by the response of the CrookedTimber commentators to my short essay on social democracy over there.  It is not just a question of how one reads the productivity and growth numbers, but also there is a commonly accepted narrative of what is wrong with the major European economies.  Eichengreen is the one doing service to the social democratic cause.

Mark Hannam November 8, 2006 at 9:05 am

Tyler

I wouldn’t worry too much about the commentators at CrookedTimber. Whether or not they represent the mainstream in academia, they certainly do not represent the mainstream in economic policy making.

I think there are some ground for optimism in Europe, but none for complacency.

Tyler Cowen November 8, 2006 at 9:49 am

If the numbers and analysis in Eichengreen don’t convince you, try *Europe at the Crossroads*, recently reviewed on MR. A few of the CT commentators point to other good sources.

Bruce G Charlton November 8, 2006 at 11:16 am

I agree with TC about the disappointing comments on Crooked Timber. But when I was a young chap I would have been saying the same things.

I argued bitterly against the economic reforms of the 1980s – which, contrary to my expectations, suceeded in turning-around decades of economic decline in the UK to make us currently the fourth economy in the world.

This was a truly amazing achievement, still unappreciated, which I and most of the UK intelligentsia argued was impossible. Has any other mature country done this kind of turn-around?

But I would guess that the Crooked T commentators are mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties, who havent been around long enough to have their wishful thinking and good intentions contradicted by experience, in the way that I did. It takes a long time.

One strong argument in support of TC is the UK. The UK is in-between Europe and the US in terms of its social model, and also in between Europe and the US in terms of economic indicators.

It is hard to be optimistic about France, Germany and Italy when reading the news; but it is probable that they will find ways to sort out their economic problems. Liberal democracy is a powerful problem-solving process.

Bruce G Charlton November 8, 2006 at 11:23 am

And another thing…

Perhaps the UK also contradicts TC’s thesis in one respect – I have read that the UK is the most secular/ least religious country in the world (lowest proportion of church members and goers). And specifically England (which is the most economically successful of the nations) has lower church membership than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

PK November 8, 2006 at 11:39 am

As to Crooked Timber: it’s so naïve to expect rational thinking from leftists. Leftism is not only a worldview; rather, it is a quasi-religious sect. Any attempt for a rational debate is doomed from the beginning.

Shaun M. November 8, 2006 at 1:52 pm

Bruce,

I believe Tyler’s comments about the lack of religiosity in Europe had more to do with the declining birthrates than current economic performance and what that low rate means for the future of the welfare state. And if I am correct in this assumption, then the U.K. is no different than the rest of Europe, with a 1.66 children per woman rate.

alexandre delaigue November 8, 2006 at 2:30 pm

Another trick making european productivity look higher than real is a high rate of government employment :

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sinn11/English

Steven Vickers November 8, 2006 at 3:05 pm

My sense is that Tyler is making the claim about which model will produce more growth, and quiggin is making the claim that there is not reliable evidence either way.

Actually, I believe the growth in the US is higher, and Prof. Quiggin was arguing that this was because the US was behind to begin with, and so was playing “catch-up.” It’s therefore entirely fair to rebut that by pointing out that since the US and EU levels are, at the very least, similar, one likely cannot attribute differences in growth to this factor. The difference, as I see it, is that Prof. Cowen was talking about growth, while the CTers wanted to change this relevant metric to levels, which isn’t the same thing.

Mark Hannam November 8, 2006 at 3:56 pm

I am confused as to why anyone would think that productivity per hour worked is a more important data point than total productivity. As Aesop pointed out (and he was European remember) the tortoise beats the hare.

Higher rates of employment combined with higher average hourly work weeks, means more production and thus more wealth. Over time, greater national wealth means the possibility of greater freedom and higher standards of living for all.

theCoach November 8, 2006 at 4:45 pm

Mark,
To further illusttrate, let me paste and copy from CT commenter soru:

once one starts to think about [exponential growth], it is hard to think about anything else

Obviously exponential growth, as a mathematical model, is a not-completely-wrong approximation of the way modern economies behave.

There is a question to be asked, however, as to how well it actually works when you get down to the level of modelling changes, predicting causal effects.

Specifically, the model would say if that in year 0, society A grew at 4% instead of 3%, that extra growth would translate into not just extra wealth the next year, but extra growth the following year (as 3% of 104 is bigger than 3% of 103), and so on down the years. The total wealth added by one year of 1% higher growth is, after a hundred years, much greater than 1% of the year 0 economy size.

There are a couple of questions to be asked about that mathematical effect:

1. is it true: do economies behave that way?

2. if so, is there a specific causal mechanism by which it works, for example extra R&D in year 0 lowering costs in later years, or infrastructure being built now beingused later?

3. if so, can it really be unconditionally true that a given real-world case of extra growth will lead to ongoing exponential gain? Surely those causal mechanisms only work if the extra money is actually spent that way?

4. What about globalisation? Even if the model works well for total global wealth, why would you expect it to work for political units? What is the mechanism that restricts the ongoing effects of US spending in year 0 to the US?

Posted by soru · October 30th, 2006 at 4:03 pm

Michael Blowhard November 8, 2006 at 5:05 pm

Tyler — You tried to have a good-faith, open discussion with a bunch of academic leftists? Are you out of your mind?

I’m very fond of CT’s Chris Bertram, but the rest of that crowd (commenters definitely included) … Whew. A bunch of thought-police devoted to spending 90% of their energy thought-policing each other. Which, as far as I can remember, was kind of what like being in college was like. Glad to have left it far, far behind…

David Wright November 8, 2006 at 5:10 pm

Coach: The problem with Quiggin’s argument isn’t that he forgot Poland. The problem with Quiggin’s argument is that he is desperately trying to find some statistic to support his a priori prejudice, and to think up reasons to ignore the broad array of statistics that point the other way. While it’s amusing to watch him flail about in the attempt, the friendlier response would be to correct his errors. So here goes:

1. While it’s certainly reasonable to look at GDP/hour worked, it’s not wrong to look at straight-up GDP/capita. Indeed, the latter is probably closer to what a normal person means by “standard of living”.

2. France isn’t an especially great example for Quiggin. The OECD figure for its output per hour worked is only 1% higher than the U.S.’s, a difference that really is at the level of statistical noise. As to why it is as high as it is: Social insurance reduces the incentive to work, so labor force participation in France is about 20% lower than in the U.S; the least productive people in France simply aren’t working.

3. If we let him cherry-pick countries, Norway (31% higher productivity, mostly due to oil) and Luxembourg (34% higher producivity, mostly due to banking) are much better examples for Quiggin. But if the point is to compare the European and American economic performance, it’s not really fair to let Quiggin cherry-pick regions, is it? Any geographical area will display a range of outcomes. If Quiggin gets Norway and Luxembourg, I want California and Manhattan.

4. As Tyler emphasizes, the real story is in not in current output, but in output growth. A growth differential, sustained long enough, will overcome any disparity in initial conditions. It is entirely reasonable to question whether the growth differentials between Europe and the U.S. will persist. Quiggin tries to imply that these differentials are a blip that have “only” been sustained for a decade. That simply isn’t true. The OECD tables show that U.S. growth rates have (with the exception of a handfull of recession years) exceed growth rates for the 30 years that the tables go back. (It is true that, in the last decade, in a phenomenon the macroeconomists call the “productivity miracle”, the differentials have widened.)

Patrick November 8, 2006 at 5:43 pm

To take a step back. Does this argument about Europe’s structural suitability for “extensive growth in the 1950s and 1960s” but not “intensive growth” also not explain what happened in Japan?

And what may well soon happen in other east asian countries, including China?

Cyrus November 8, 2006 at 6:13 pm

A central point of the CT post was, what happens over the long haul, if one economy grows at 2% and the other at 1%?

But observably, the economies that grow fastest are those that are coming from behind. Insofar as it is already known what works better, resources do not have to be wasted trying what does not work.

Of course, if it is known what works better with great certainty, than this knowledge is not confined to any one firm. Productivity can improve, but no supernormal profits will reward firms that adopt improvements, because everyone else knows what works, too.

The risk would appear to be, that firms that delay innovation until it can be done with certainty, risk having trouble attracting capital when they do decide to innovate, unless there exists a pool of capital seeking low risks and low returns they can tap into.

I submit that the savings of aging Europeans represents exactly such a pool of capital.

Michael Sullivan November 8, 2006 at 11:00 pm

y81: I wouldn’t prefer to take $10k on the dole for obvious reasons. And neither would most people, that’s a big reason that I find scare-mongering about the disincentive of the welfare state to be foolish. If it started to provide a living that rivaled a decent job, that would be one thing, but that’s not the way the dole works in the US, at least, and I’m not about to propose that we make it more lavish.

Do you follow the economic argument about marginal value per hour worked? That people tend to value their time at a certain amount of dollars, and that what they end up getting paid to work their last hour, tends to be not much higher than what they would *have* to be paid to work that last hour? That indicates that at the margin, pay per hour is everything, and total pay is irrelevant.

Of course, that isn’t the case overall, but I would argue that if you don’t consider pay per hour worked when looking at job preferences, (unless you are working in a dream career where you would go to work without pay as long as they gave you a roof and food to eat), you are setting yourself up to make ridiculously poor quality of life decisions. Time is money, as they say.

The correct attack on the $/hr stat is that is cooked by the high minimum wage and other factors that create high structural unemployment. We don’t know what the productivity of French workers would be if they had US-like min-wage, employment regs and labor participation rates, but it would certainly be lower than it is now.

AFAICT, the french system seems like a pretty good deal for those in the middle of the work-value scale, but a very crappy one for the bottom (who won’t starve but can’t work) and the top (who are nowhere near as wealthy as they would be in the US).

Barkley Rosser November 9, 2006 at 1:55 am

Offhand, the commentary both there and here has
been abysmally low, heavily marked by mindless
ideological ranting.

A quick observation is that a major problem
with Eichengreen’s supposedly glorious paragraph
is that it describes no European country. So,
Germany has a bank centered economy and labor
codetermination, but it does not have state
holding companies. The post WW II model driven
by the Ordo-Liberals who coined the term
sozialmarktwirtschaft (social market economy)
were very opposed to state ownership.

OTOH, France, Italy, and Austria and supposedly
US style UK had lots of state ownership, at least
until the Thatcher period hit. Italy had a lot
of domination by banks, but the rest of these
did not, and none had codetermination.

Eichengreen’s book may be good (generally he is
very competent), but this paragraph is incoherent
mush.

Jody November 9, 2006 at 5:58 am

Coach: I believe srp was referring to The Power of Productivity by Lewis which presents the McKinsey Global Institute study. A good read if somewhat repetitive in the latter half.

michael sullivan November 9, 2006 at 11:11 am

1. Regarding GDP/capita vs. GDP/hour: I want to emphasize that it’s not wrong to look at GDP/hour, but I do want to give two examples that illustrate why one should also look at GDP/capita.

You are, of course, correct here, and I failed to qualify my statements on that point properly. I don’t think it’s wrong to look at GDP/capita either. I do think that within the range of normal FT job outcomes, pay/hour is more important than total pay for standard of living, although perhaps in a way that is underappreciated (hence the linguistic disconnect). Any sane person who’s job is not a personal vocation would choose to work 35 hours than 40 for the same pay. Many will nonetheless choose a 60 hour job for not much more pay than some other 40 hour job, despite being well into middle class at the 40 hour job. I suspect that’s a potential problem with our brain models akin to risk-assessment difficulties and other well documented behavioral finance issues.

But you’re right (and it’s normally one of my bugaboos) that looking at just one figure can almost never tell the whole story economically.

You have me on euro-familiarity. I haven’t lived there, my french is barely usable, and none of my best friends are european :) It sounds like my vision of a good plan is pretty similar to yours (and Tylers). Perhaps I’ve reacted more to the cowboy comments that strew this thread (as well as CT’s and when this got mentioned on catallarchy) than I should. I’m definitely not putting you in that category, and we probably agree much more than we disagree.

I think there’s a baby in with the bathwater of SD, and it’s worth trying to distinguish. There’s a tendency in libertarian leaning circles to consider the whole package a bunch of hogwash based purely on theoretical arguments. I think the basic safety net principle is worth hanging onto, and that analyses which say it isn’t fail to account for enough choice variables to convince me. Arguments that “we already have that” are fine, but not when later coupled with attempts to get rid of what we do have. Not to accuse you or Tyler of this, but it’s a concern that I have.

“Getting rid of welfare” is one of the few libertarian positions that has significant popular support, and yet taken to extremes, it looks like the most suspect plank in the platform. So many other bits are *clearly* improvements to the status quo, and yet highly unpopular or popular in theory, but politically impossible in practice.

David Wright November 9, 2006 at 4:58 pm

Barlkey Rosser: The stagnation you cite is quite real, provided you choose the right metric (median pre-tax wages, exlcuding benefits) and the right time-frame (the last half-decade). But you forget that this is a comparative discussion, so you need to ask whether Europe has this problem, too.

I don’t know of any comprehensive European data on this, but I can tell you that the large European country with which I am most familiar (Germany) has this same problem in spades. The stagnation extends to the third quintile, and the top two quintiles aren’t getting ahead much faster.

Andreas (Student Oslo) November 28, 2006 at 1:50 pm

Seriously Mr Wright. You need to read up on Norway and its economic system, and quit making extremely simplistic claims about it only being the oil that make our economy one of the most efficient in the world, and us having the highest standard of living. For many reasons, most of them not one-dimensional economic ones, the average Norwegian worker is much more efficient then the average American worker and we save up our oil money for future generations. We don’t even spend it, we invest it abroad. The value of the Government Pension Fund (Oil fund) is at 325 000 000 000 dollars. Please.

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