El día de ayer, el FMI da a concer el reporte sobre México que se realiza de manera programada. Existen varios temas y puntos que valen la pena comentar, pero lo haré en otra ocasión. En general el reporte es positivo reconociendo los avances del páis en materia macroeconómica y sus respuestas a la crisis actual. Al mismo tiempo alerta sobre los riesgos que existen, en particular el financiero y cambiario en virtud de las condiciones de los mercados en este momento.
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Sin embargo me llama la atención un aspecto sobre sus recomendaciones de política fiscal que reproduzco a continuación
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40. Finally, the staff and the authorities discussed the possibility of eventually refining the fiscal policy framework. The balanced budget rule has a number of advantages and is supportive of fiscal discipline, but some features may be procyclical in nature or do not always assure the operation of automatic stabilizers. Consideration could be given to a rule that would allow greater, and more systematic, smoothing of expenditure in response to cyclical fluctuations (across budget years) in output and the tax base. This would help smooth the business cycle in a credibility-consistent manner
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49. Assuring the fiscal space for new public investment and key social expenditures is another key challenge. Fiscal space is projected to come under pressure over the mediumterm, as oil revenue falls, and pension costs rise. This highlights the importance of achieving the authorities’ goals for tax administration gains and restraint of current expenditure. Other policies to raise revenue or cut untargeted subsidies may become necessary. The constraints to managing the economic downturn within the current balanced budget rule suggest the possibility of eventually moving to a cyclically-adjusted fiscal balance target. In addition, the likely increase in contingent fiscal liabilities because of the crisis, underscores the need to continue enhancing the analysis of fiscal risks, including at the aggregate public sector level
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En concreto, el análisis del FMI señala el inconveniente de manejar la política fiscal con la regla actual de saldo público balanceado debido a su carácter pro cíclico y recomiendo considerar la utilización de otra regla como la ajustada al ciclo para darle mayor carácter de estabilizador automático o contracíclico.
Este punto lo he venido señalando desde hace ya varios años, tanto en mis columnas, como en conferencias y en mi investigación académica, como lo acabo de volver a comentar en un post
Multipliers and the Role of Government a raíz de un comentario de Mark Thoma en su Blog.
Multipliers and the Role of Government a raíz de un comentario de Mark Thoma en su Blog.
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En un artículo académico que publiqué en Applied Economics en el 2007 Structural Budget Balance: a preliminary estimation for Mexico, Applied Economics (ver liga en la columna derecha de este Blog), señalaba
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The structural balance, in particular, has several key characteristics that make it very attractive for Latin American economies in general and the Mexican in particular. It helps the government detect if a change in fiscal policy is needed in order to achieve the medium and longer term objectives: on one hand maintain fiscal sustainability and, on the other, stabilizing the economy. At the same time this indicator could help maintain the trust of international organizations, capital markets and both domestic and foreign investors. ..… A second great virtue of this indicator…..is that it can be used to establish a rule limiting the structural budget to GDP ratio, and therefore, work as an automatic stabilizer of the economy. To comply with this rule, during recessions the government must have a more expansionary fiscal policy that stimulates aggregate demand and, during expansions, a more restrictive one that contracts aggregate demand….”
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probablemnte ahora que lo dice el FMI lo consideren una opcipón viable.... creo que vale la penad discutirlo seriamente.... en el fondo lo que debe destacarse es la necesidad de generar un esquema de estabilizadores automáticos en nuestra economía que son muy limitados ahora.
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Saludos....En referencia al post de Alejandro de si Economia es una ciencia. El editorial de Barron's de esta semana............A Matter of Taste..........................
By THOMAS G. DONLAN..........................
Economics isn't the hard science many think it is..........................
THE SWEDISH CENTRAL BANK AWARDS the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences without regard to former prizes and prize-winners. Its style is like the Nobel Prize in Literature -- strictly a matter of taste, which changes from year to year. The result is a random scattering of recognition among disagreeable economists. Handing a prize to Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner, neither credited nor discredited the prize awarded to Milton Friedman in 1976.
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There is a simple reason for the scatter-shot approach: Economics is not a science. It is, at best, a continuing philosophical debate, although it sometimes seems like an intellectual substitute for football between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Chicago teams.
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Winners frequently are recognized for research and mathematical analysis that other economists value, not for the expression of opinions that later made them famous in the public eye.
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Milton Friedman, for example, won the 1976 economics prize largely for his work on consumption functions, which are mathematical descriptions of the ebbs and flows of individuals' propensities to save and consume.
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This work is still used by economists who have no use for the other side of his prize citation -- his monetary history of the United States and the monetarist theories he propounded. Still less do some of them appreciate Friedman's televised defenses of economic liberty and individual freedom.
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Similarly, Paul Krugman won in 2008 while enjoying notoriety as a political columnist, but his prize-winning work, published nearly 30 years earlier, concerned analysis of trade between countries that have similarly efficient production of similar goods.
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Choosing Up Sides
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With such models as Friedman and Krugman, we should not be surprised at the ease with which contending politicians can line up economists, even Nobel-winning economists, to support their political judgments with their reputations.
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President Barack Obama has been presenting the views of a coterie of economists as the view of the great mass of economists. To help him, the Center for American Progress gathered a couple of hundred economists, including nine Nobel Prize-winners, to support the version of the stimulus bill that was passed by the House of Representatives. The statement, published as advertising in major newspapers, said the bill would put the U.S. economy "back onto a sustainable long-term-growth path" through its reliance on infrastructure investments.
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The Cato Institute published a riposte, featuring three Nobel laureates among 90 contrary economists -- some against details of the plan, others who think there should be no plan at all. A third group, not enumerated because they did not publish a manifesto, holds that the $789 billion stimulus bill is entirely inadequate, by a factor of two or three.
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Making a Mess
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When Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974, he embarrassed many economists by noting their failures. Speaking in the midst of a great inflation that caused a greater loss of stock-market wealth in the U.S. than the Great Depression, he noted that the inflation was "brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue." He added, "We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: As a profession, we have made a mess of things."
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Hayek pronounced the failure of economics to be rooted in a "scientistic" attitude that employed the habits and methods of physical science where they were not appropriate. He faulted particularly, "the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level."
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Hayek conceded that there was quantitative evidence for the assertions and beliefs adduced by John Maynard Keynes and his followers, but he warned that the evidence was not good enough: "In the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process...will hardly ever be fully known or measurable."
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Economists, Hayek continued, "happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant. The correlation between aggregate demand and total employment, for instance, may only be approximate -- but as it is the only one on which we have quantitative data, it is accepted as the only causal connection that counts. On this standard, there may thus well exist better 'scientific' evidence for a false theory, which will be accepted because it is more 'scientific,' than for a valid explanation, which is rejected because there is no sufficient quantitative evidence for it."
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Hayek, of course, was on the side that had less quantitative evidence.
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A Bold Experiment
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In this political climate, too many economists are treating the Keynesian multiplier as if it were Newtonian physics. Every dollar of government spending, we hear, will generate $1.57 of gross domestic product. We are reminded of the long-buried claim that cuts in the marginal rate of income taxation would pay for themselves, but Keynesian economists have no such sense of fallibility. Indeed, some estimate that every dollar of tax cuts in the stimulus bill will generate 50 cents of GDP.
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Resolving this is not a matter for econometrics. Running an opinion through a computer does not make it any less an opinion. Resolving it is a matter for representative democracy. We are on the brink of an experiment: The Keynesians won the election; they should try their theory -- and be held responsible for the results.
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It's the latter condition that is hard to enforce, of course. Keynesians are still trying to convince us that their policies defeated the Great Depression -- either in the 1930s as the New Deal or in the 1940s as the deficit-driven spending to win World War II. The evidence in favor does not do much to explain the postwar prosperity: If government spending drove the economy, what drove it when the spending was withdrawn?
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An explanation, with or without quantitative evidence, could win the Nobel Prize...........................
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB123456978348686215.html
Considero importante el análisis creado y sobre todo las recomendaciones del FMI y las del Dr. Villagomez, ya que es claro que nuestra política fiscal necesita nuevas estrategias que le permitan estabilizarse y por lo tanto reflejar, en un sentido optimista, mayores y mejores resultados benéficos para la sociedad en general. Mi pregunta sería ¿Cuales serían las causas por las cuales no se han considerado estas recomendaciones?
Carmen, es dificil saberlo y habría que preguntarles.... seguramente es una mezcla de argumentos políticos y técnicos
Concuerdo en que no puede ser completamente válido aplicar una reforma fiscal que fue estudiada antes de la crisis. Tal y como hemos visto a lo largo del curso, si los intereses, los precios o cualquier otra variable sufre una drástica modificación, todo el modelo sufrirá esos cambios. Por lo tanto, considero que debe ser necesario ir actuando conforme se estén dando los movimientos y no aplicar una reforma que en estos momentos puede perjudicar aún más la cuestión económica del país.
Saludos,
Sofía León M.
Una restructuración o refinación a la política fiscal podría ser muy interesante como lo mencionan; concuerdo con el Dr. Villagomez en que un balance estructural dará mayor certidumbre tanto al interior como al exterior a fin de reactivar la economía. En la actualidad, y sólo para poner de ejemplo, nos enfrentamos a una crisis, entonces sería necesaria una política fiscal expansiva que aumente la producción y aumente el consumo de las personas físicas, así como la inversión extranjera de las empresas, aunque esto significaría un endeudamiento del Estado; aunque se activaría la economía en el corto plazo, se deben tomar en cuenta muchos factores técnicos que se vendrían como un efecto dominó, tal sería el caso de cómo conseguir dicho financiamiento, una manera sería la venta de títulos de deuda pública, mismos que se verían depreciados al ser tan demandados, siendo así probablemente se invierta más en el Estado que en el sector privado; y otra serie de factores técnicos que en definitiva no tengo pleno conocimiento. Por otra parte, pienso que la política fiscal da mucha responsabilidad al Estado y debe considerarse mucho al sector privado; probablemente llegan a acuerdos o no lo sé, pero me gustaría saber en que consistiría el indicador que se menciona para que logre funcionar como un estabilizador en la economía mexicana? o mejor dicho, cuál sería la recomendación que propone para que México haga frente a la actual crisis?
Me parece que las ideas que usted transcribe del Fondo Monetario Internacional y con las que usted afirma coincidir desde antes de este reporte, constituyen una opción sumamente interesante que hay que atender, pues en el cabal cumplimiento del papel del Estado como coordinador de la actividad económica, nuestras autoridades están obligadas a afrontar la crisis que actualmente se experimenta en todo el mundo. Por ello desde hace tiempo se ha reiterado en emplear instrumentos como la política monetaria y la cambiaria para ejercer el rol que el artículo 26 se la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos impone al Estado mexicano, sin embargo la constante del ejercicio monetario y cambiario no han podido revertir los efectos de la crisis y por el contrario se han visto disminuir nuestras reservas internacionales, por ello no creo ocioso el implementar incluso las 3 herramientas al mismo tiempo, siempre procurando que la política fiscal expansionista esté correctamente sectorizada, coordinada y orientada a maximizar los beneficios y por lo menos amortiguar el impacto inflacionario que pueda tener. La operación de esas sugerencias no debe ser una tarea sencilla para nuestras autoridades, pero como acuñara el empresario Alejandro Martí respecto a otra crisis en la que estamos sumergidos: ¡Si no pueden, renuncien !
Definitivamente las recomendaciones hechas tanto por el FMI así como por el Dr. Villagomez deberán de ser no sólo consideradas a mayor profundidad por las autoridades fiscales del país sino también deberán de buscar la manera de ponerlas en práctica. Finalmente este tipo de reportes son hechos por expertos que pueden ver el "big picture' más allá de intereses políticos que muchas veces pueden llegar a nublar el juicio de nuestras entidades fiscales. Sin embargo mi pregunta es, en dado caso de que estas recomendaciones sean seguidas por el gobierno, a partir de que momento se podrían ver reflejadas de manera general? Y que tan común es que los países sigan al pie las recomendaciones hechas por instituciones financieras internacionales como el FMI?
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