Results for “Denmark GDP”
22 found

Model these Sweden Denmark lower inflation rates

Sweden’s annual inflation rate rose to 2.5 percent in September of 2021 from 2.1 percent in August but below market expectations of 2.7 percent. It was the highest since November of 2011, mainly due to prices of housing & utilities (5.1 percent vs 3.8 percent in August), namely electricity and transport (6.2 percent vs 6.4 percent), of which fuels. Additional upward pressure came from education (2.5 percent vs 2 percent); restaurants & hotels (2.4 percent vs 2.6 percent); miscellaneous goods & services (2 percent vs 1.4 percent) and food & non-alcoholic beverages (0.9 percent vs 0.3 percent). Consumer prices, measured with a fixed interest rate, rose 2.8 percent year-on-year in September, the fastest pace since October of 2008, below market expectations of 3 percent but above the central bank’s target of 2 percent. On a monthly basis, both the CPI and the CPIF rose 0.5 percent.

Here is the link, they are an open economy facing lots of supply shocks, right?  So what is up?

And Denmark:

Denmark’s annual inflation increased to 2.2% in September of 2021 from 1.8% in the previous month. It was the highest inflation rate since November 2012, due to a rise in both prices of electricity (15.2%), pointing to the highest annual increase since December 2008 and gas (52.8%), which is the highest annual increase since July 1980.

I thank Vero for the pointer.  In an email to me she asks:

“If supply issues are the only cause of our inflation woes, then why is it that countries that spent less than 5% of GDP on the pandemic are experiencing average inflation of 2.15%? While countries that spent over 15% of GDP are experiencing average inflation of 3.94%? I don’t know the answer but I think it is worth asking this question.”

Anyone?

Bank assets as a percentage of gdp

Via Megan McArdle (from a good post on why it's hard to leave the euro), we are offered this list:

Bank assets as a percentage of GDP

Luxembourg 2,461
Ireland 872
Switzerland 723
Denmark 477
Iceland 458
Netherlands 432
United Kingdom 389
Belgium 380
Sweden 340
France 338
Austria 299
Spain 251
Germany 246
Finland 205
Australia 205
Portugal 188
Canada 157
Italy 151
Greece 141

(For comparison, total banking assets in the U.S. are equal to approximately 82 percent of GDP.)

File under "Too Big To Save."  Do be a little careful, however, since countries such as Ireland have financial institutions based there, for tax reasons, without the Irish government feeling responsible for them. 

Air Pollution Reduces Health and Wealth

Great piece by David Wallace-Wells on air pollution.

Here is just a partial list of the things, short of death rates, we know are affected by air pollution. GDP, with a 10 per cent increase in pollution reducing output by almost a full percentage point, according to an OECD report last year. Cognitive performance, with a study showing that cutting Chinese pollution to the standards required in the US would improve the average student’s ranking in verbal tests by 26 per cent and in maths by 13 per cent. In Los Angeles, after $700 air purifiers were installed in schools, student performance improved almost as much as it would if class sizes were reduced by a third. Heart disease is more common in polluted air, as are many types of cancer, and acute and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, and strokes. The incidence of Alzheimer’s can triple: in Choked, Beth Gardiner cites a study which found early markers of Alzheimer’s in 40 per cent of autopsies conducted on those in high-pollution areas and in none of those outside them. Rates of other sorts of dementia increase too, as does Parkinson’s. Air pollution has also been linked to mental illness of all kinds – with a recent paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry showing that even small increases in local pollution raise the need for treatment by a third and for hospitalisation by a fifth – and to worse memory, attention and vocabulary, as well as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Pollution has been shown to damage the development of neurons in the brain, and proximity to a coal plant can deform a baby’s DNA in the womb. It even accelerates the degeneration of the eyesight.

A high pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to result in reduced earnings and labour force participation at the age of thirty. The relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight is so strong that the introduction of the automatic toll system E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems in areas close to toll plazas (by 10.8 per cent and 11.8 per cent respectively), by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars have to queue. Extremely premature births, another study found, were 80 per cent more likely when mothers lived in areas of heavy traffic. Women breathing exhaust fumes during pregnancy gave birth to children with higher rates of paediatric leukaemia, kidney cancer, eye tumours and malignancies in the ovaries and testes. Infant death rates increased in line with pollution levels, as did heart malformations. And those breathing dirtier air in childhood exhibited significantly higher rates of self-harm in adulthood, with an increase of just five micrograms of small particulates a day associated, in 1.4 million people in Denmark, with a 42 per cent rise in violence towards oneself. Depression in teenagers quadruples; suicide becomes more common too.

Stock market returns are lower on days with higher air pollution, a study found this year. Surgical outcomes are worse. Crime goes up with increased particulate concentrations, especially violent crime: a 10 per cent reduction in pollution, researchers at Colorado State University found, could reduce the cost of crime in the US by $1.4 billion a year. When there’s more smog in the air, chess players make more mistakes, and bigger ones. Politicians speak more simplistically, and baseball umpires make more bad calls.

As MR readers will know Tyler and I have been saying air pollution is an underrated problem for some time. Here’s my video on the topic:

Optimism about Mexico a story of compounding returns

Current per capital income measures at about 19k PPP.  Apply 2.2% growth for 30-35 years and Mexico then approaches the living standard of today’s UK or South Korea!  Since 1994, Mexico’s average growth rate has been 2.09%, including Covid times, so that is hardly outlandish as an assumption.

Here is my latest Bloomberg column on that topic.  Here is one excerpt:

In the meantime, there are reasons to be bullish on Mexico right now. One is that economic globalization has been somewhat halted, and in some areas even reversed. To the extent Americans do not trust Chinese supply chains, the Mexican economy will pick up some of the slack. Mexico is also the natural lower-wage supplier to North American industry. (Its main problem in this regard is that its wages are no longer so low, but that too reflects its progress.)

And if tourism in Asia and Europe remains difficult or inconvenient, Americans will visit Mexico more and grow accustomed to holidaying in locales other than Cancun. Some of those habits are likely to stick.

I do also cover the ifs, and, or buts.  And:

Mexico, like much of Latin America, also has a burgeoning startup scene, especially in ecommerce and fintech. Mexico City might end up as the technology capital of [Spanish-speaking] Latin America. That would help with one of Mexico’s chronic economic problems, namely that small firms decide to stay small to escape regulations and taxes. Successful tech startups, in contrast, can scale more easily and face fewer regulations on average than manufacturing firms.

Recommended.

Friday assorted links

1. Did the dual-career model peak in the mid-1990s?

2. Long summit on vaccines, long video, many top names represented.

3. List of possible coronavirus benefits?

4. Notes on the dynamics of subsequent epidemic waves.

5. Tokyo deaths do not seem to be up.  What is the best model for this?

6. What is school in Denmark looking like these days?

7. David Beckworth on the ngdp gap.

8. Budget allocation cuts going to higher ed appear to be brutal.  Again, the “free college” idea is a complete non-starter.

9. “Importantly, we detected SARS-CoV-2−reactive CD4+ T cells in ~40-60% of unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.

10. NYT covers Navy reports of UFOs, and no they’re not just a few simple, repeated optical illusions like maybe you saw in that YouTube video, for instance radar evidence too.

Has the time come and passed for negative interest rates?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Step back and consider the cultural context. Germany is still scarred by the memories of two world wars, fascism, communism, deflation and hyperinflation: in general, huge instability. Since the end of World War II, however, personal savings and the banking system have been an oasis of predictability and a driver of growth. Many Germans treasure their frugality, perhaps excessively or irrationally, and it has become an important part of the narrative Germans tell themselves about the economic order they have built.

Now enter the ECB, in essence telling Germans (and others) that savings are a bad thing, to be taxed and penalized. The very word “negative,” as in “negative interest rate,” makes the policy hard to sell politically. The German word “Strafzinsen” refers to a penalty rate, but the root “Straf” also refers to punishment, and it was used effectively by Franz Kafka in his famous torture-laden short story “In the Penal Colony” (the German title is “In der Strafkolonie”). One German newspaper referred to the “final expropriation” of the German saver, noting that the ECB’s decision to deviate from its inflation target carries “grave consequences.”

More generally, a significant segment of the German population is upset or outraged by the policy. There is even a claim that the revenue from the negative interest payments will be used to finance other EU countries.

Most economists and central bankers view negative interest rates as an acceptable tool of macroeconomic management. Maybe so. But in an era when trust, including trust among nations, is much lower than previously thought, it probably isn’t a good idea to place a punishing new tax on the German national virtue of saving. Central bankers must also be sensitive to public relations.

I find it striking how many people are responding to this column by insisting that Merkel should do more fiscal stimulus.  She should (though I don’t find “stimulus” to be the most instructive word here), as I suggest in the piece, because the Germans have been letting their infrastructure run down for a good while now — internet speeds anybody?  But at the end of the day, I don’t think that spending will eliminate the basic macroeconomic problem facing the EU, nor is most of that spending likely to land on the doorstep of the countries which most need it (though Huawei may benefit a good deal).  There is also this:

So if a policy of negative interest rates is just a Band-Aid, it is one that should be ripped off. And if monetary policy is insufficiently expansionary, that is going to require an increase in the ECB’s inflation target, or a move to nominal GDP targeting, not a jerry-rigged tax on deposits.

There is also an argument that Germans are saving too much. But by some measures, they have a level of national wealth relatively low for their per capita income, in part because Germans are less likely to own their own homes. According to the OECD, Germany’s near neighbors Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland all save more in percentage terms than Germany does.

German savers: underrated.

Bryan Caplan on Spain

He spent a bunch of weeks there, there are many good observations, here is one of them:

17. Big question: Why is Spain so much richer now than almost any country in Spanish America?  Before you answer with great confidence, ponder this: According to Angus Maddison’s data on per-capita GDP in 1950, Spain was poorer than Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and roughly equal to Colombia, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama.  This is 11 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and Spain of course stayed out of World War II.

And this:

The worst grocery store I saw in Spain offered higher quality, more variety, and lower prices than the best grocery store I saw in Denmark, Sweden, or Norway.

Do read the whole thing.

Is Democracy Doomed?

Democracies are much richer than non-democracies and their wealth has made them the envy of the world. The close correlation between democracy, high GDP per capita, and economic, military, and cultural power has made modernity appear to be a package deal. When people look at rich, powerful countries they typically see a democracy and they think, “I want that.”

At the same time, however, the academic literature on the causal effect of democracy on growth has shown at best weak results. Here is the all-star team of Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo, and Robinson (ungated) in the JPE summarizing:

With the spectacular economic growth under nondemocracy in China, the eclipse of the Arab Spring, and the recent rise of populist politics in Europe and the United States, the view that democratic institutions are at best irrelevant and at worst a hindrance for economic growth has become increasingly popular in both academia and policy discourse. For example, the prominent New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (2009) argues that “one-party non democracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. ”Robert Barro (1997, 1) states this view even more boldly: “More political rights do not have an effect on growth.”

Although some recent contributions estimate a positive effect of democracy on growth, the pessimistic view of the economic implications of democracy is still widely shared. From their review of the academic literature until the mid-2000s, Gerring et al. (2005, 323) conclude that “the net effect of democracy on growth performance cross-nationally over the last five decades is negative or null.”

Acemoglu et al. continue, “In this paper, we challenge this view.” Indeed, using a multitude of sophisticated econometric strategies, Acemoglu et al. conclude “Democracy Does Cause Growth.” In their sample of 175 countries from 1960 to 2010, Acemoglu et al. find that democracies have a GDP per-capita about four times higher than nondemocracies ($2074 v. $8149). (This is uncorrected for time or other factors.) But how much of this difference is explained by democracy? Hardly any. Acemoglu et al. write:

Our estimates imply that a country that transitions from nondemocracy to democracy achieves about 20 percent higher GDP per capita in the next 25 years than a country that remains a nondemocracy.

In other words, if the average nondemocracy in their sample had transitioned to a democracy its GDP per capita would have increased from $2074 to $2489 in 25 years (i.e. this is the causal effect of democracy, ignoring other factors changing over time). Twenty percent is better than nothing and better than dictatorship but it’s weak tea. GDP per capita in the United States is about 20% higher than in Sweden, Denmark or Germany and 40% higher than in France but I don’t see a big demand in those countries to adopt US practices. Indeed, quite the opposite! If we want countries to adopt democracy, twenty percent higher GDP in 25 years is not a big carrot.

As someone who favors democracy as a limit on government abuse, I find this worrying. One optimistic response is that the nondemocracies that adopt the policies necessary to make a nation rich, such as support for property rights, open markets and the free exchange of ideas, may not be such bad places. These beasts, however, appear to be rare. But if they are truly rare there must be more to the democracy-GDP per capita correlation than Acemoglu et al. estimate. So what are they missing? I am uncertain.

If democracies don’t substantially increase growth, why are they rich? Acemoglu et al. don’t spend time on this question but the answer appears to be reverse causality (from wealth to democracy) and the fact that today’s rich democracies adopted capitalism early. But don’t expect the wealth to democracy link to be everywhere and always true, it’s culturally and historically bound. And catch-up is eliminating the benefits of the head start.

If much of the allure of democracy has been higher GDP per capita then the allure has been a mistake of confusing correlation for causation. A fortunate mistake but a mistake. The literature on democracy and growth implies that there is no reason to reject an alternative history in which the world’s leading industrial economy was a nondemocracy. Nor why we could not see some very rich nondemocracies in the future–nondemocracies that would be as on par with the United States as say Sweden, Denmark and Germany are today. If that happens, the case for democracy will look very much weaker than it does now as the correlation between democracy and wealth will be broken and the causal effect more evident even to those without sophisticated econometrics.

Hat tip: Garett Jones for discussion.

Poland fact of the day

When it comes to contingent government pension liabilities as a percentage of gdp, Poland appears to be above 350%.

France, Denmark, and Germany are next in line, with figures well over 300%.  For purposes of comparison, the United States is considered to have a serious pension problem but the corresponding number is only slightly above 100%.

Here is the John Authers and Robin Wiggelsworth FT story.  Australia seems to be doing best.

One reason for this high Polish sum is that the Polish government has semi-nationalized a lot of the private sector pension liabilities.  In 2014, this procedure (FT) did not receive much discussion:

As part of an overhaul of the country’s pension system, Warsaw will next week transfer from privately-managed funds to the state 150bn zlotys (€36bn) of Polish government bonds and government-backed securities, which will then be cancelled.

I believe this idea will reenter the broader policy debate sooner or later.

Friday assorted links

1. Which celebrities are loved equally by Republicans and Democrats?

2. Male economists stand out once again (pdf).

3. Miles Kimball to move to University of Colorado at Boulder.

4. “Michelangelo’s David will explode.” (NYT)  And “The most popular target for photographers was the David’s genitals.”

5. The gap between gdp growth and credit growth is widening in most Chinese provinces.

6. Martins Sandbu on Denmark and America; note the cited figures were means not medians.

What if there are no more economic miracles?

Here is my Bloomberg column on the passing of the economic miracle, here is one excerpt:

Most of the world’s wealthiest and best-governed countries got there without super-rapid bursts of growth. Denmark, which has a per capita income of about $52,000 and is frequently ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world, never experienced what anyone would call an economic miracle. If you Google that phrase, the main entry will be a research piece detailing how, in the 1990s, the country lowered its unemployment rate without having to dismantle its welfare state.

Denmark’s overall economic record is gloriously boring. From 1890 to 1916, per capita growth averaged about 1.9 percent per year, and if in 1916 you had forecast that this pace would continue for another 100 years, you would have been off by only about $200. Denmark had positive growth about 84 percent of the time and no deep recessions, according to a recent study by Lant Pritchett and Lawrence Summers.

And this:

…the experience of Denmark and other “no drama” growth stories provides some clues to the future of developing economies. The East Asian growth model, for all its wonders, belongs to history. Slow and steady may be the only option left. For whatever reasons, few countries have been able to scale up their educational successes as rapidly as the East Asian tigers. Trade growth, which exceeded overall output growth in the late 20th century, now seems stagnant. Many export industries are automated and hence don’t create as many middle-class jobs as they used to.

In other words, today’s world may resemble the 19th century more than the last few decades.

Do read the whole thing.

Is there a market liberal case for Brexit?

Jacob Levy has a very good post on this topic, here is one bit from it:

There’s a level of popular belief that the EU enforces illiberal and market-unfriendly policies on Britain. On the fiscal side, here’s a comparison of British public spending as a share of GDP just before entry into the EU, and just before the Brexit vote:

1971: 42.0
1972: 40.8

2014: 41.8
2015: 40.8

(source)

Even when you add in the <1% of GDP that is paid to Brussels, this is just not a picture of a system that has forced Britain to become a big-spending social democracy. (Neither, of course, is it a picture of a system that has forced Britain into neoliberal austerity, a charge one hears from the left.)

Here is another:

According to the 2015 Economic Freedom of the World report’s overall measure for regulatory burden, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Ireland, and Romania are all less regulated than the UK. The most recent Heritage index of “business freedom” ranks Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Sweden ahead of the UK; for labor freedom, Denmark, Austria, and Ireland. In all these cases, these relatively-liberal EU countries compare favorably with other developed countries in or out of the EU.

Do read the whole thing, here are comments from Ilya Somin.

To where should you vote with your feet?

Mark Brown asks me:

If voting with your feet was your preferred method, what would be the best country to immigrate to from the United States for: A) Progressives B) Social Conservatives C) Libertarians

As a follow up, a common expression in the US among adults as I was growing up was “its a free country”. That expressed both disdain of the expressed course of action and a willingness to let the fool do what he wanted. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are literary representatives of that, what should I call it, frontier freedom? Are there countries that even if the official line is restrictive, the feeling of liberty might be much greater? Am I nuts to feel that in many ways the US is less free than it was a couple of generations ago?

For Progressives I’ll pick Denmark.  They have high taxes and ultimately they are not too friendly toward immigration, instead preferring to keep their social policy comprehensive and expensive.  Sweden may not quite manage the same, although they are still a fairly high pick on this list.  Another direction to look would be Australia, where government spending is most likely to actually be redistributive.

For Social Conservatives, I say Singapore.  They are tough on drugs and the citizens are expected to work and required to save.  Parents are treated with respect, at least relative to the West, and when it comes to births at the very least they are trying hard with subsidies and ads on buses.  An underrated pick here would be France, by the way.

For Libertarians, I say the United States.  For all of the statist intervention in this country, it remains the place where markets are capable of exercising the most power for the better.  And it is no accident that such a huge chunk of the world’s libertarians are also Americans, or at least heavily American-influenced.  Singapore is in the running for this designation, with its government at eighteen percent of gdp, but so many things there are planned so comprehensively and the attitude of the country is more technocratic than free market per se.  Hong Kong is no longer such a free economy, having come under increasing Chinese influence not to mention law-enforced cartelization, and that is on top of their government-supplied housing stock and single payer health care system.

As for the last part of this question, the relatively peaceful parts of Mexico, in my view, very often feel freer than the United States.  But I am never sure how much that is worth.

Which countries will have the next financial crisis?

Here, from Peter Levring, is a discussion of high private household debt in Sweden and Norway and Denmark, along with some remarks by Paul Krugman.  Here is an excerpt from Levring:

In Denmark, consumers owe their creditors 321 percent of disposable incomes, a world record that the Paris-based OECD said in November demands a policy response. In Sweden, debt by that measure is close to 180 percent, a level the government and central bank say can’t be allowed to rise. Norway’s central bank has struggled to find a policy mix that addresses its 200 percent private debt burden.

Here is a sustained argument, from Jesse Colombo, that Singapore is due for a crash:

This chart from Nomura shows that Singapore’s loan growth has far outpaced its nominal GDP growth in recent years, making for the worst credit-GDP growth gap in Asia…

The optimistic stance of course is to focus on Singapore’s net asset position, quality governance, and its new and enhanced role in an “Average is Over” world.  The same can be said for the Nordics as well.

Those inclined to pick on Malaysia can read the argument here, or try the Philippines.

China seems more like 2015 at this point, if that.  And the Russian bailout bought some time for Ukraine.

Or, from Alen Mattich, Canada may be the next victim:

Canadian house prices are very clearly bubbly. By one estimate Canada’s house price to rent ratio–an important metric–is the furthest from historic trends than any country in the world right now. Various estimates have Canadian house prices at between a third and two-thirds over-valued.

I am myself inclined to think Thailand and Turkey are most vulnerable over say the next year, maybe Greece too, in part because of the accompanying political dysfunctions in each case.  And is India’s recovery already over?  Indonesia still has troubles ahead.

One key question is the relative worry weights you assign to private debt vs. bad institutions.

What about the rest of the world?  The eurozone is seeing ongoing credit contraction and perhaps deflation too.  Japan just announced a surprisingly large and apparently persistent current account deficit.  And the United States?  Things look pretty good, but in fact by the standards of historical timing we are soon due for another recession.

I’ll put my money on Turkey.

What’s wrong with Britain?

Scott Sumner has the microphone:

I was curious to see just how tight British fiscal policy actually is, so I checked the “Economic and Financial indicators” section at the back of a recent issue of The Economist.They list indicators for 44 countries, including virtually all of the important economies in the world.  Here are the three biggest budget deficits of 2011:

1.  Egypt  10% of GDP

2.  Greece:  9.5% of GDP

3.  Britain:   8.8% of GDP

Egypt was thrown into turmoil by a revolution in early 2011.  Greece is, well, we all know about Greece.  And then there’s Great Britain, third biggest deficit in the world.

I suppose some Keynesians work backward, if there is a demand problem it must, ipso facto, be due to lack of fiscal stimulus.  If the deficit is third largest in the world, it should have been second largest, or first largest.

A slightly more respectable argument is that the current deficit is slightly smaller than in 2010 (when it was 10.1% of GDP.)  But that shouldn’t cause a recession.  Think about the Keynesian model you studied in school.   If you are three years into a recession, and you slightly reduce the deficit to still astronomical levels, is that supposed to cause another recession?  That’s not the model I studied.  Deficits were supposed to provide a temporary boost to get you out of a recession.  At worst, you’d expect a slowdown in growth.

To get a sense of just how expansionary UK fiscal policy really is, compare it to France (5.8% of GDP), Germany (1.0% of GDP), or Italy (4.0% of GDP).  Lots of people blame ECB policies for the recession, but Britain is not in the eurozone.  Outside the eurozone you have Denmark (3.9% of GDP), Sweden (zero), Switzerland (1% surplus).

Obviously there must be some problem in Britain that isn’t affecting some of its more prosperous northern European neighbors.

Most blogosphere writings on this topic do not demonstrate nearly enough sophistication, fact, or detail.  The rest of Scott’s post discusses ngdp for Britain.  I have a piece in the Sunday Times (of London) this weekend on these topics and TGS, though no link because the whole system is gated.  If you have a pdf, I would be appreciative if you could send it to me, for my private use only.

  • 1
  • 2