Category Archives: Articles

Series on tax: Part 2b – let’s experiment with explanations

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In the second part of my series on taxation I wrote about distortion and burden.  But I’m not sure whether my description about wedges and how people respond to prices was necessarily clear enough for a non-economist audience.  So I’m going to experiment with some other ways of articulating what I mean – ways that are equivalent, but for different people may be clearer.

Note:  I apologise in advance if this is a bit scattered – if you have questions or comments note them down in the comments, you’ll be doing me a favour :)

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Series on tax: Part 1 – why?

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Huzzah, I am writing about tax on Rates Blog.  In Part 1 I ask “why do we tax“.

I get onto other issues later – in fact, this will be a five article series.  Here all I do is combine the idea of “government spending” and “paying for government spending”, and give a little wink to ideas such as equity and tax incidence.  They will play a more central role in the next article, when I discuss tax systems that seem ideal … but that we don’t use for often good reasons.

Let’s be careful judging savers

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Although my article might not give that impression at first glance – that is actually where I am in agreement with Bob Jones here.  However, I’m also saying that the RBNZ governor isn’t wrong about bringing up the “savings issue”, and it is fair for us to discuss where marketand government failures are … including in the way housing is treated by the tax system:

The point is that the complaints of economists are not the product of us assuming stupidity, or telling people they are immoral. They are the concerns of a group who believes that there may be some policy relevant issues – for example the peculiar ways that the New Zealand tax system treats housing as an asset – which are hurting New Zealanders.

Far from showing the Reserve Bank governor is out of touch, as Jones suggests, his willingness to discuss this issue illustrates that he realises how important it is for future generations of New Zealanders.

I also get concerned, as does Bob Jones, that the push towards “save more” is really a moral push to tell people what to do with their income.  However, when economists are talking about savings issuse they are saying that our persistent large current account deficits, with a range of other factors that seem unusual in New Zealand, provides a situation that we should analyse.  Analysing it has led economists to note a number of issues where there is a trade-off – a trade-off policy makers and the public feel the wrong choice has been made about.

Given this, people want to change policy settings.  I’m not jumping into this debate in of itself – but I would note that there is nothing wrong with asking the question, and merely saying “I’ve done pretty sweet on property in the past” doesn’t invalidate that.

If we have a bank tax, make it a deposit levy

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I argue the deposit levy point (as a form of insurance) here.

The only point I have to add is that some may say “why charge poor old depositors”.  I’d note here that we need to think about the “incidence of tax” – if it is true that depositors have no market power, then the entire burden of the tax will fall on banks and borrowers.

This is all part of a broader debate on deposit guarantees (here, here) – if we rule them out, we rule out the justification for a levy as well.  I’d add there is a big issue I haven’t touched – what is our ability to limit deposit insurance given concerns about “bank stability”, and what do we do when banks are just too big (think Ireland and Iceland).  My real desire is to see transparent, and credible, ex-ante policy … and to be honest about the trade-offs we are facing and accepting.

Either way, my focused has switched back to methodology issues as I’ve realised I need to intensify work on my NZAE paper this year (posts here and here) … in case they actually decide to accept the abstract I’ve just submitted.  As a result, when I next get a chance to sit down there are two posts I want to write about assumptions, and then I might start blogging some of the background material I’ve already written about for the paper.

However, knowing me I’ll just start ranting about whatever I see in the paper instead ;)

Practical experimentation at Microsoft

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The Microsoft Bing team responsible for conducting controlled experiments have a paper out that canvasses some practical problems they’ve come across in the thousands of experiments that they’ve run. It’s an interesting read, even if the subject matter isn’t particularly fascinating for those outside the search business. A lot of the things they find sound really obvious in the general sense but would be tricky to pick up in practice.

The main points are:

  • Very few ‘good ideas’ are actually good ideas because we dont’ really understand the behaviour of people outside our social group, even if they’re our customers. About 10% of ideas that make it to experimentation actually turn out to be beneficial to the business.
  • The criteria used to judge success are not always obvious and there can be a trade-off between short-run and long-run success. For example, degrading the quality of internet search results increases market share because users have to spend more time on your page. In the long run that wouldn’t hold up but it could take many weeks to see the drop-off in the results.
  • Understanding your instruments is crucial to interpreting results. Some results are an artifact of the survey method and that can often be really hard to pick up. This is often the case for economists when we don’t read the details of survey methods. The best applied economists actually take advantage of the design details of particular surveys to conduct natural experiments.
  • Don’t extrapolate from trends in the immediate aftermath of shocks. When you watch data in real-time after a shock you’re often just seeing a trend towards the long-run mean that will shortly stabilise.

HT: Andrew Gelman

Pulling out the comparative advantage card

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Since everyone is talking about the drop in manufacturing output and employment and trying to figure out “how to fix it” I thought I’d pull out the old comparative advantage card to show why it may not be a problem.   In case you are wondering what it is, Wikipedia is always rock and roll.

New Zealand is a sparsely populated country that is far away from most large international markets. With fuel prices going up, increasing vertical integration (when different aspects of the production process are joined together in the same firm) and the rise of just-in-time inventory management, more and more manufacturers are positioning themselves “close” to market.

This trend, combined with the benefits of agglomeration in production and the improving use of technology overseas, has made manufacturing in countries like New Zealand less and less competitive.

This is tough for people who have invested time and skills in specific forms of manufacturing, but in so far as these changes are the result of changes in technology and the habits of global consumers, we cannot stand in the way of them.

…

And this is the flipside – although New Zealand is comparatively bad at manufacturing things that require large scale (such as say cars) it is comparatively good at other things (producing milk).

Other countries having become more productive in the export manufacturing space it actually a good thing for New Zealand as a whole – as it has driven down the price of what we buy from overseas relative to the price of what we sell.

This can be seen in our terms of trade (the ratio of export prices to import prices), which has risen 10% since manufacturing activity peaked.

No doubt my article may overstate the case – I would prefer not to make a policy based conclusion until there is some data heavy analysis of the issue.  However, given that changing technology and production patterns around the world will be a major driver of what is going on I felt that the argument actually needed to get some air.  I have noticed that it is popular to focus on esoteric issues when looking at what is going on – among both economists and non-economists.  However, doing so often leads us to lose sight of some of the most important issues!

As people who have done training in economics we have covered this issue a number of times on the blog (eg *,*,*,*,*) – the key point is that we need to understand “why” something is going on before we can truly define whether it is good or bad, change in itself is not bad.  Some people may not like the “descriptive” vs “prescriptive” split economics pushes, but it is the most transparent and honest, and dare I say it scientific, way of doing things.