Never mind the deficit

I've just spent the morning, with the rest of the usual journo and economist suspects, in Treasury's lock-up for the Half Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update. Though sometimes I wonder why I bother: Bill English's press handout essentially said that the numbers on the fiscal outcome aren't worth the paper they're written on ("Previous forecasting rounds show the outlook can change significantly between the Half Year Update and the final accounts being published").

No doubt most of the media coverage will be along "Government misses its fiscal surplus target" lines: the government had planned a fiscal surplus of  $297 million for the year to next March, and it now looks like a fiscal deficit of $572 million. And even the forecast surplus for the year to March '16 ($565 million) is partly the result of a bit of jiggery-pokery with the contingency allowance the government has for possible future spending.

But I don't give much of a hoot about that, and neither should you, for several reasons. For one, the fiscal surplus or deficit is the difference between two very large numbers (government revenue and spending), each around the $72 billion mark, and very small changes in the very big numbers can make fiscal surpluses and deficits appear and disappear, just like that (as Tommy Cooper used to say). For another, there's an entirely plausible, and benign, reason for the forecast surplus becoming a forecast deficit: inflation has turned out to be lower than expected, which means the tax take in dollar terms is lower than expected. It's not, for example, the result of letting government spending rip (spending is actually gently drifting down as a share of the economy). And for yet another, while a deficit of $572 million sounds like something substantial, it's actually only 0.2% of GDP. However you look at the "missed the target" angle, it's no biggie from an economic perspective.

There were more substantial things to focus on. I was especially interested in what Treasury's forecasts for GDP growth would look like, given that last week the Reserve Bank had upped its expectations for the economy. It's encouraging.

It's possible, too, that there's more than the usual business cycle going on here: both the Reserve Bank, and now the Treasury, have begun to wonder whether the long-term growth rate of the economy ("potential output") hasn't picked up a bit (it's one of the alternative scenarios that Treasury looked at in the Update). Some of it is down to big increases in business investment, some of it down to high levels of net immigration (we're expected to gain 52,400 people in the year to March, and keep gaining people in future years, though not at the current clip). As Treasury noted, many of these people are of working age, and "the skills, ideas and international connections of the migrants are assumed to further increase productivity growth". Xenophobes, please note.

Two other things caught my eye.

With the caveat that whatever the reliability of fiscal forecasts, exchange rate forecasts must be an order of magnitude more flakey again, Treasury is currently picking that the overall value of the Kiwi dollar isn't going anywhere over the next three years. Most of us have been operating on the assumption that the Kiwi dollar is "too high" and will drop in the none too distant future: maybe it isn't going to happen.

And the other thing is the outlook for what we earn on our exports compared to what we pay for our imports (the "terms of trade"). The working assumption is that yes, we're suffering on the dairy front at the moment, but other commodities will keep us going, dairy will recover in the end, plus we're paying a lot less for the oil we import. Maybe that's how it will indeed play out, fingers crossed, but it's a reminder that we're still vulnerable - arguably too vulnerable - to the vagaries of the commodity markets.

Let's take in more talent from overseas - and quickly

The latest net migration figures got a fair amount of media airtime, and even though a fair slab of it was on the invidious "aren't we doing better than Australia" track, the numbers were still pretty impressive - we had the biggest ever annual level of net immigration in the October '14 year (+47,700), beating the previous records set in the August '14 year (+43,500) and the May '03 year (+42,500). Net immigration is running at over four times its annual average over the past 20 years (+11,700). If you're interested in the details, the big pdf release from Stats is here and the actual data here.

It's interesting to see how sensitive these migration flows are to economic conditions at both ends of the migration journey: a lot of the media commentary, for example, picked up on the big impact on trans-Tasman flows of the strong New Zealand business cycle, compared with the currently sub-par Aussie one. But the same mechanism also works on migrant flows from other places, and it's left me wondering whether we're missing a good opportunity to attract European talent in particular.

We know, for example, that employment conditions in France are pretty grim, particularly for younger people, mostly down to the weak French economy, but aggravated by an inflexible labour market. So it's not surprising to see that the number of French people coming here on work visas has been rising strongly, from 1,187 in the October '12 year to 2,642 in the October '14 year. Unemployment isn't anywhere near as bad in Germany, but again the local slow economy is encouraging more Germans to look for jobs here, and the numbers coming on work visas have risen from 1,703 to 2,723 over the past two years.

But these opportunities to get talented people to come here from overseas don't last forever: the flows are very sensitive to relative changes in the business cycle at both origin and destination. Ireland's the classic example: business conditions were dire in Ireland until this year, when there has been a reasonably robust recovery. And the link to the net work migration flows from Ireland has been immediate: we had 1,298 Irish people coming here on work visas in the October '12 year, and 1,378 in the October '13 year, but it's already started to ebb, with a drop to 1,032 in the October '14 year.

I'd say we have a short but highly promising opportunity to get more skilled people to come here from the recessionary Eurozone. Jobs fairs in Australia are all well and good: but what about also doing a one-off liberal offer of work visas around Europe?

And by liberal, I mean one that doesn't pay too much mind to MBIE's 'Long Term Skill Shortage List', the thing that prioritises the kinds of skills we're normally looking for, partly because the list looks to me rather odd in places - I can believe we're short of engineers of all kinds, a fair array of medical specialists, and anything to do with ICT, but social workers? chefs? education lecturers? statisticians? external auditors? quantity surveyors? - and partly because we can't actually achieve that degree of precision in knowing what we'll need or in linking credentials to innovation or entrepreneurship. For all we know the next big app could be written by a self-taught enthusiast who left school with no qualification.

So I'd be inclined to hoover up as many of Europe's skilled and talented people as we can, while we can, and I'd relax the current immigration criteria to do it. Paper Marseilles and Düsseldorf with easy to complete work visa forms, and see what happens.

It can only be good for us. And if you're not too sure that immigration is good for a country, then read this opinion piece from the Brookings Institution, "Even Piecemeal Immigration Reform Could Boost the U.S. Economy", which says

High-skilled immigrants are good for America, and we should encourage more of them to come here given recent trends in entrepreneurship, where more firms are dying than being created every year. But high-skilled immigrants could help turn that trend around — they are twice as likely to start businesses as native-born Americans. This is especially true in high-tech sectors, where immigrants are not only more likely to start firms, but also to patent new technological discoveries

A bit of piecemeal immigration liberalisation would work for us, too.