EconPol Europe

Europäische Volkswirte, insbesondere des Netzwerks EconPol Europe, zur Euro-Währungskrise

Von Dr. Christian Marettek (FIDES-Leiter, 28.11.2018)

Überblick

EconPol Europe – The European Network for Economic and Fiscal Policy Research versteht sich als Zusammenschluss von politikorientierten Forschungsinstituten, um ihre wissenschaftliche Expertise in die weitere Gestaltung der Europäischen Union einzubringen.

Wie viele der Forschungsarbeiten weisen tatsächlich eine hinreichend Praxisrelevanz im Interesse der zu bewältigenden Euro-Währungskrise auf?

Selbstverständlich können wir hierzu als viel kleineres Forschungsinstitut kein Urteil abgeben.

Wir möchten allerdings im Folgenden dem interessierten Bürger einen ersten Eindruck zu den veröffentlichten Forschungsthemen und -ergebnissen wiedergeben.

Dazu stellen wir im Folgenden die Inhalte eines Teils der aktuellen Diskussionsbeiträge aus 2017 vor.

 

Zu den Ursachen der Euro-Krise 2009/2010: ergänzende Hinweise von Volkswirten

Simon Wren-Lewis 2016, The Eurozone’s Flaws Are Not Intrinsic

Der Oxforder Professor (kein Mitglied von EconPol Europe) Simon Wren-Lewis 2016, The Eurozone’s Flaws Are Not Intrinsic wendet sich schon mit den einleitenden Sätzen gegen zwei herkömmliche politische Folgerungen aus der Euro-Krise:

„The first … is that the whole project was doomed from the start and should be abandoned. The second is that the only way forward is further political integration. Both appear politically impractical if democracy is preserved, but both are also unnecessary.“

Zur Begründung wird auf die besondere Ausgestaltung der Euro-Währungsunion und die Stellungnahme eines internationalen Kreises von Nationalökonomen verwiesen: Der VoxEU article entitled “Rebooting the Eurozone: Step 1 – Agreeing a Crisis narrative”, betont, dass die Krise von 2010 weniger als eine durch Regierungshandeln ausgelöste Schulden-Krise (Griechenland) anzusehen ist, als „the problem was private sector excess, leading to a banking crisis which the government was forced to socialise. Governments in both Ireland and Spain were running financial surpluses in the years leading up to the Great Recession, and their debt-to-GDP ratios were low. This suggests that if we can do something to mitigate the extent of periods of private sector excess, we will be able to make any subsequent fiscal crises more manageable.“r Artikel betont die Wichtigkeit der EZB-Entscheidung aus September 2012, notfalls mit den Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) die Krise in den Griff zu bekommen. Als Outright Monetary Transactions (OMTs) (im Deutschen auch: geldpolitische Outright-Geschäfte, wörtlich: vorbehaltlose geldpolitische Geschäfte) bezeichnet man ein von der Europäischen Zentralbank (EZB) angekündigtes Instrument, unter dem das Eurosystem in vorab unbeschränktem Ausmaß Ankäufe kurzfristiger Anleihen von Staaten im Euro-Währungsgebiet durchführen kann. Wikipedia: Bislang (Stand: Oktober 2017) wurde noch von keinem Staat ein OMT-Programm in Anspruch genommen, das heißt, es sind auch noch keine Staatsanleihenkäufe als OMTs erfolgt. Es wird jedoch allgemein davon ausgegangen, dass bereits die bloße Ankündigung in der Vergangenheit eine beruhigende bzw. zinssenkende Wirkung auf die Finanzmärkte ausgeübt hat.

Wren-Lewis geht davon aus, dass durch eine frühere Bekanntgabe der OMT-Programme als Notfalllösung sich die Schuldenkrise 2010 nicht über das (hausgemachte) Griechenland-Problem hinaus entwickelt hätte und eine Rezession vermieden worden wäre.

„My proposal would prohibit any intergovernmental lending of the EFSF/ESM type. If the 2010 crisis outside Greece was a result of private sector excess and the failure of the ECB to act as a lender of last resort, the policy response led by Germany, which treated it as a general problem of government profiligacy, was a mistake – one which had disastrous consequences, as it helped lead to a second eurozone recession.“

Hintergrund: OMTs sind von dem anderen viel kritisierten Programm der EZB, dem am 22. Januar 2015 beschlossenen erweiterten Programm zum Ankauf von Vermögenswerten (Expanded Asset-Purchase Program, EAPP), zu unterscheiden. Auch wenn dieses ebenfalls – unter anderem – den Ankauf europäischer Staatsanleihen vorsieht, ist es von einem möglichen OMT-Programm unabhängig und unterscheidet sich auch in seinen Modalitäten.

Roberto Tamborini 2017, Why are macroeconomic imbalances so important for the European Monetary Union?

Roberto Tamborino von der Universität Trient untersucht in Why are macroeconomic imbalances so important for the European Monetary Union?  die Ursachen der Euro-Währungskrise. Die Krise der Europäischen Währungsunion (EWU) beruhte nach herrschender Auffassung überwiegend auf „makroökonomischen Ungleichgewichten„, die zwischen den Euro-Ländern bereits vor dem weltweiten Finanzkollaps von 2007/08 und der anschließenden Rezession existierten. „Makroökonomische Ungleichgewichte“ in der Brüsseler Sprache bedeutet einen vielschichtigen Mangel an realer Konvergenz zwischen den Volkswirtschaften der Mitgliedsländer der Euro-Zone.

Hintergründe gemäß Tamborini:

• Solange die Länder auf unterschiedlichen Wegen des Wachstums des BIP, der Produktivität und der Einkommen stehen, große und nicht nachhaltige Leistungsbilanzungleichgewichte entstehen werden.
• Die darauf folgenden Kapitalbewegungen würden plötzlich aufhören und dadurch Bank- und Finanzkrisen auszulösen.
• Die nationale Finanzpolitik würde unter Druck gesetzt, schwächelnde Bankensysteme zu retten, während Länder auf einem niedrigen Wachstumspfad auch eine härtere Annäherung an das 60% Schuldenziel sehen werden, mit höheren Zinssätzen und stärkeren Konsolidierungsanstrengungen.
• Die Kommission widmet sich ausschließlich wachstums- und konvergenzpolitischen Maßnahmen, und die Überwachung makroökonomischer Ungleichgewichte spielt bei den neuen Instrumenten des europäischen Regierens eine herausragende Rolle.

Roberto Tamborini sagt:

„Die Formalisierung des Konvergenzprozesses ist ein wichtiges Ziel in der Roadmap zur Vollendung der Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion. Ein höheres Wachstum in Europa stellt natürlich ein wertvolles Ziel dar. Aber sind konvergente, tendenziell einheitliche Wachstumsraten in einer Währungsunion wirklich eine Sine-qua-non-Bedingung?“

Tamborini vergleicht dazu die makroökonomischen Ungleichgewichte zwischen den Euro-Staaten (Staatenbund) mit denen zwischen verschiedenen US-Staaten (die eine feste Föderation bilden) und kommt in der Analyse zu folgenden Ergebnissen:

• Ungleichgewichte existieren auch innerhalb der Föderation der US-Staaten. Diese werden aber nicht als primäres Problem angesehen, weil sich die US-Regierung mit ihrem Handeln primär am Wohlstand der Einwohner orientiert (nicht so stark an makroökonomischen Ungleichgewichten zwischen einzelnen US-Staaten). „So here is a first clue to solve the puzzle:body in a federation thinks of it as a collection of open economies in a fixed exchange rate regime.“
• Die Euro-Zone ist wegen der Ungleichgewichte seit ihrer Gründung nicht als „Optimal Currency Area“ anzusehen – aber die Hauptprobleme entstehen seiner Meinung nach eigentlich deshalb, weil sie keine „Optimal Federal Area“ ist.

„Everyone was aware of this original sin from the very beginning, and with great regret the bet that the creation of the monetary union would have paved the way to the other federal institutions has so far been lost.

Consequently, EMU members remain entrapped in a tangle of rules whose rationale is not to govern a genuine monetary union but the European Monetary System 2.0, a Dr. Frankenstein’s creature with a single monetary authority, irrevocably fixed exchange rates, and no common stabilization and rebalancing mechanisms.“

Damit betont Tamborini die Gründungsfehler der EMU aus Sicht der Volkswirtschaftslehre mit besonders drastischen Worten.

 

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Anne-Laure Delatte (CEPII Paris), Clemens Fuest (ifo München), Daniel Gros (CEPS Brüssel), Friedrich Heinemann (ZEW Mannheim), Martin Kocher (IHS Wien), Roberto Tamborini (Universität Trient) 2017, The Future of Eurozone Fiscal Governance

Die Autoren fokussieren sich auf den Vergleich zwischen dem ‘Maastricht-Modell’ und dem ‘US-Modell’.

Das Maastricht-Modell verlangt, dass die letzte Verantwortung für Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitik auf der nationalstaatlichen Ebene verbleibt.

Nach dem US-Modell würden viel stärkere europäische Institutionen entwickelt werden.

In beiden Fällen werden zusätzlich benötigt: Politische Koordination, eine europäischen Banken-Union und eine Insolvenz-Ordnung für souveräne Staaten.

„We discuss the challenges and trade-offs involved and argue that certain elements of the two approaches which combine increased risk sharing with increased market discipline and risk reduction could be combined to achieve a more resilient and economically successful Eurozone.“

Die entsprechende Reform würde beinhalten (vgl. die Vorschläge der EU-Kommission):

• Completion of European Banking Union (Recapitalise banks with high NPLs, ESM as a fiscal backstop)
• Increasing the credibility of the No-Bailout-Clause by reducing the costs of sovereign insolvencies (equity underpinning of government bond holdings, greater diversification, tightening of capital requirements for banks)
• Creating a Eurozone fiscal capacity that supports public investment and unemployment insurance in the event of strong asymmetric shocks
• Separating fiscal surveillance from the European semester and giving independent fiscal boards (or the ESM) the task of making countries comply with fiscal rules
• Reforming the European Semester to integrate independent expertise at the national level to achieve recommendations that are more adjusted to specific circumstances of the individual member states.

 

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Luciano Andreozzi and Roberto Tamborini 2017, We need more Europe in the Monetary Union. Which Europe? Hints from policy games.

Die Verfasser gehen von der offenbar mehrheitlich übereinstimmenden Meinung aus, dass ein Mehr an Integration zur Lösung der Euro-Währungskrise unausweichlich ist – wie es auch von Jean-Claude Junker als EU-Kommissionspräsident gerade im laufenden Jahr 2017 entschlossen gefordert und im oben zitierten Reflexionspapier der EU-Kommission dargestellt wurde. Nur welches Europa soll geschaffen werden?

Hierzu lassen sich mindestens drei unterschiedliche Denkrichtungen unterscheiden:

• „The first moves from the premise that the EMU regulatory framework has proved to be too weak, unable to constrain rational and elected policymakers properly (Eyraud et al. 2017; see also Schuknecht et al. 2011). The typical symptoms are seen in the persistence of the deficit bias in fiscal policy, public debt growth, transmission of public finance distress. Therefore, reforms should deepen and strengthen the original rule-based conception of the EMU embedded in the Treaties. Further fiscal sovereignty devolution is preferably
  towards, „technocratic“, non-political agencies as guardians of the rules (e.g. the European Fiscal Board and national fiscal boards: Asatryan et al. 2017, Beetsma and Debrun 2016).
• The second line is instead critical of the fiscal rules apparatus since its was designed to control for the negative externalities of fiscal profligacy but not for those of fiscal austerity, which accounts for the deeper and longer recession in the EMU than elsewhere (e.g. De Grauwe 2013, Manasse 2015; in the vast debate on austerity see the contributions collected by Corsetti (ed.) 2012). A related allegation is that the rules failed as substitute for explicit policy coordination.
• A third view is that the EMU as a supranational institution lacks „incentive compatibility“ with the legitimate role of democratic governments as representatives of social preferences over policies and their outcomes (the notion of incentive compatibility is also introduced by Eyraud et al. 2017; see also Wickens 2016). A role emphasised by the stress of the Treaties on the exclusive national responsibility, and naturally intertwined with the longlasting question of the democratic deficit of Europe (Bastasin 2015a, Fabbrini 2015).

The second and third view converge towards the idea that tightening the existing regulatory system has already been experimented (the so-called Two Pack, Six Pack, Fiscal Compact, etc.) with poor results on crisis management and further deterioration of the „input“ and „output“ legitimacy of the EMU policymaking process (Scharpf 2015, Schmidt 2015). Reforms should instead address the democracy and legitimacy issues, creating supranational governance mechanisms that prevent interdependence wars by taking national (different) social preferences seriously.
Two critical obstacles on the way of reforms cannot be ignored. The first is the idea of national sovereignty, identity and interests deeply rooted in
European citizens. As a matter of fact almost all national governments of different political colours have repeatedly proved unable, or unwilling, to
devolve more sovereign powers. The second is that further integration is mostly needed when citizens‘ pro-Europe sentiments are at historical low and
anti-Europe social and political movements for the first time pose serious threats to the whole European construction.4 Therefore, direction and extent
of reforms (if any) will eventually be a political decision reflecting some balance of interests and power across governments. Outcomes are highly
uncertain and hardly predictable.“

Das Ziel der Studie ist Hinweise zu gewinnen, wie das supranationale Governance ausgestaltet werden könnte, damit demokratische Regierungen sich im Interesse ihrer Bürger verhalten. Hierzu entwickeln die Autoren ein spieltheoretisches Modell. Wenn unabhängige Staaten, deren Wirtschaft stark verflochten ist, verschiedene Vorteile aus internationalen Vereinigungen suchen, müssen sie bestimmte Einschränkungen hinsichtlich Interessen, kulturelle Prägungen und nationale Identität hinnehmen. (Vgl. Alesina et al. 1995, 2005, 2017, Alesina and Spolaore 1997, Spolaore 2015).

Dementsprechend wird ein Politikspiel als Modell vorgeführt, bei dem zunächst den Fall der Nicht-Kooperation, dann verschiedene supranationale Strukturen simuliert werden:

• „two interdependent countries with reciprocal negative externalities where each sovereign government seeks to optimise its own welfare function reflecting social preferences over policy options and their outcomes.
• We first establish the welfare losses associated with noncooperative (Nash) policy choices.
• Then we examine what kind of supranational policy regimes (SRs) may be subscribed to by both governments according to the Pareto criterion.“ (ebenda S. 3).

 

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Daniel Gros 2017, Is Germany’s Current Account Surplus Bad for the World Economy?

Daniel Gros, Direktor des Brüsseler CEPS antwortet in seinem Beitrag Is Germany’s Current Account Surplus Bad for the World Economy? vom 27.07.2017 unmittelbar auf den Leitartikel des britischen Zeitschrift Economist vom 08.07.2017 “Why the German current-account surplus is bad for the world economy”. Der Economist-Artikel ging von der Annahme aus, dass der Rest der Welt davon profitieren würde, wenn Deutschlands Ausgaben steigen würden, was jedoch gemäß Gros nur zutreffen würde, wenn die Dynamik der Welt-Volkswirtschaft hinreichend durch Nachfrage bestimmt würde.

„But this is less and less the case since the global output gap has already fallen below 0.5% (of potential output) and is projected to disappear within a year or two. Under these conditions, the German current account surplus, which amounts to 0.33% of global output, cannot do a lot of damage to the global economy.“

Ergänzend wird festgestellt, dass Niederlande, Dänemark, Schweden, Schweiz und Norwegen zusammen ebenfalls auf einen Überschuss von $230 Mrd. kommen und dass das deutsche Defizit zudem fehlerhaft berechnet sei.

 

 

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Emmanuel Farhi and Jean Tirole 2017, Deadly Embrace: Sovereign and Financial Balance Sheets Doom Loops

Emmanuel Farhi (Harvard University) and Jean Tirole (Toulouse School Economics, TSE) haben mit dieser Arbeit vom 16.08.2017 eine umfangreichere (86 Seiten), vom ERC geförderte Studie vorgelegt, die als charakteristisch für typisch volkswirtschaftliche, mathematische Modelle der Gegenwart gelten kann.

Die Studie liefert eine modellgestützte Theorie für die Rückkopplungen und gegenseitigen Verstärkungen, wie sie im Falle der Staatsschuldenkrise von Griechenland aufgetreten sind. Dabei handelt es sich um Rückkopplungen und gegenseitigen Verstärkungen zwischen Inländischen Sicherheitsleistungen des Bankensystems einerseits (domestic bailouts of the banking system) und der Staatsschuldenkrise bzw. dem Schuldenerlass (sovereign debt forgiveness) durch internationale Kreditgeber andererseits.

 

Anne-Laure Delatte 2018, Fixing the euro needs to go beyond economics (EconPol Europe Opinion 14, November 2018)

Lesenswert ist die jüngste Studie nach meiner Einschätzung:

„The euro area is stuck in a situation of conflicts of interests between creditor and debtor countries. The political economy of such a situation requires coordinating creditor and debtor countries to distribute the burden of adjustment. Creditor countries require debtors to repay their debt with domestic resources, pushing for spending cuts and tax increases. In turn, debtors are better off if they can delay adjustment and rely on the official euro area safety net if needed. 

Benassy et al. (2018) have designed a plan to eliminate precisely this conflict of interests. Their reform proposals aim at creating a consensus between countries calling for more market discipline (the creditor countries) and those calling for risk sharing (the debtor countries). They argue that a compromise can make both creditor and debtor countries better off.  Countries can reach a new steady state without getting through significant changes in the current political governance because their plan, they argue, produces gains for both sides. In a similar vein, before them, scholars have designed alternative economic plans to reduce debt overhang and neutralise contagion in case of a crisis (Pâris and Wyplosz 2014, Corsetti et al. 2015, Brunnermeier et al. 2016, Corsetti et al. 2016).  

In the end, the Meseberg declaration in June 2018 included a few of their objectives but faced strong opposition by the group of creditor countries forming the ‘Northern alliance’.  In sum, none of these plans has managed to create a consensus around a common political agenda. In turn, the reform agenda has remained frozen since the Banking Union discussions in 2015. National governments with divergent interests stand against one another and the debt of several countries is drifting away. The contention between debtor and creditor countries grows: the wider the divergence, the further the compromise about who should bear the burden of adjustment.  As a result, redenomination risks kick back when political tensions rise (Gros 2018). 

These pervasive conflicts of interests hamper fixing the crisis and keep the euro vulnerable to a shock. The euro is stuck in an inefficient equilibrium where both creditor and debtor countries are worse off. 

There are two reasons why these smart economic plans have not generated a consensus. First, the management of the euro crisis since 2010 has relied on inter-state bargaining. Second, even if the deals produce ‘gains on both sides’, these might consist only in a reduction of net losses compared to the current situation, which makes the status quo a safer solution from a political standpoint.  

The euro crisis has been managed by governments within the Euro Summits between euro area heads of states, and within the Eurogroup meetings between the finance ministers of the euro area (the latter met 206 times between 2010 and 2017, i.e. every two weeks on average). While the European Commission has reinforced its role as a provider of economic expertise, it has not managed to politically bring forward their proposals of issuing common bonds, a form of risk-sharing and of a common unemployment regime, a form of transfers. The only supranational institution which played a key role in keeping the single currency together is the ECB Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes”.  It was only possible because of the relative isolation of the ECB from the political process (although a political controversy was not totally avoided, a fact that defied the principle of its independence). 

Inter-state bargaining has brought European integration forward so farso why would it be an issue now?   Indeed, Morascvick (1998), who examined five history-making episodes in the evolution of the EU, argues that a liberal inter-governmentalism has driven European integration in a “series of pragmatic inter-state compromise on different national preferences” (p. 479). National preferences were indeed different with respect to customs union, with Germany and Britain seeking industrial liberalisation and being reluctant with regards to agricultural liberalisation, while France held the reverse position. In the end, agreements had distributional consequences reflecting the compromises made by national governments, but the total net outcome was positive and pareto-efficient at the inter-state level, Morasvick argues. 

In contrast, national preferences today are not only different but in conflict. This implies that setting the adjustment burden between creditors and debtors involves both losses and gains for both sides, with high uncertainty on the net outcome. For example, the G7+7 argue for a regulation that penalises concentrated sovereign exposures in bank balance sheets as a quid pro quo for a euro area deposit insurance. This measure carries liquidity risks for the sovereigns under financial market pressure (the debtor countries) as peripheral banks have substituted for the markets by increasing their exposure during periods of tension (Lanotte and Tommasino 2018). Conversely, a euro area deposit insurance is viewed as involving potential losses for creditor countries. In sum, while a compromise could make both creditor and debtor countries significantly better off, both view the final net outcome as risky.Hence, even if the status quo is detrimental for both sides, it is politically preferable to a new deal carrying so much uncertainty.  

As a result, while inter-state bargaining can be efficient in a negotiation on trade tariffs implying a positive net outcome on both sides, this decision-making process is arguably unable to produce a compromise in a debt overhang negotiation. The current situation requires a referee with a capacity to pursue the common interest across national borders. 

Reforming the political governance of the EU, rather than just its economic governance

The euro crisis is one of a series of crises seriously threatening the European project and feeding the rise of nationalist euro-sceptic political parties. Similarly, the management of the migration flows since 2015 has been plagued by serious coordination failures as Europe is deeply divided on how to share the migration burden. The fact that the countries located on external borders of the EU are both exposed to the largest migration flows and are also the largest debtor countries (Italy, Spain and Greece) adds complexity.  It is misleading to deal with the euro and the migration crises as two isolated issues. Unable to act in concert, the current governance has pushed crisis management down to the national level and impeded the provision of transnational compromises. 

We need coordinated, representative decision-making to make Europe functional again. 

But national governments are very reluctant to transfer sovereignty to non-national parliamentarians.  In order to go beyond this either-or logic of integration or sovereignty, we need to co-opt the members of elected national parliaments within a new, second, parliamentary chamber at the European level. This new parliament, composed of national MPs, could arguably do better at creating transnational compromise on policies in three ways: 

• First, by transferring responsibility: A European Assembly would fix the inefficient asymmetry between the EU-wide interaction of heads of government and the domestic parliamentary check when they are back home. It would also create a direct interaction between national MPs who would have the double responsibility of representing their constituents in national arenas and in the Europe-wide body.
• Second, by creating affectio societatis: The Assembly would bring national MPs together and contribute to form habits of co-governance.
• Lastly, by fostering information and accountability: The chamber’s regular meetings and public debate on European and domestic issues would be brought at the same level of attention. It would arguably increase transparency compared to emergency summitry prone to deal making behind closed doors.

In sum, enhancing accountability would restore legitimacy and breaking the opposition between national and supranational political agenda would help create a greater capacity for interest-generalisation across national borders.

This new legislative body would arguably have the legitimacy to vote new common European taxes to finance common public goods. Citizens expect Europe to break the stalemate, to deliver macroeconomic stability and inclusive growth, to implement efficient measures against global warming, and to enforce a coordinated migration policy and a human hosting of refugees. To reduce the potential creditor-debtor conflict of interest, a cap on transfers could be introduced in order to avoid permanent transfers between creditor and debtor countries (a maximum of 0.1% of GDP, for example). Giving the EU a capacity to deliver common public would contribute to address the anti-elite and restore the citizens confidence. 

Not all member countries may presently be willing to go along with reforms to the political governance. It may therefore be sensible to come up with legal solutions allowing the Assembly to start with a subset of countries willing to go forward and not wait for a new Treaty to be signed. These solutions exist (Henette et al. 2017). 

In sum, reforming the economic governance is not enough; we need to reform the political governance. The plan as sketched above has limits worth discussing. The 2019 European elections will offer a platform for a debate. It is time to debate alternatives.“  

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