We're on the right policy track

Graeme Wheeler, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, gave a fine speech today at a central banking conference in Wellington. It's a fairly easy read, too, for the non-specialist, so best thing is have a go yourself. But if life's too short, here are the two big points I'd take from it.

First, next time you hear politicians say, "why don't we have a bit more inflation and a bit more growth, instead of the Reserve Bank holding us back all the time", tell them they're talking bollocks.

As Wheeler points out (p4), "In the 20 years before the [1989 Reserve Bank] Act, annual real GDP growth averaged 2.2 percent while annual inflation was volatile around an average of 11.4 percent. Since 1990, annual inflation and real GDP growth have averaged 2.3 and 2.6 percent respectively and there has been a marked decline in inflation variability".

In other words, you can have it all - the same (or even marginally better) GDP growth, and lower and less erratic inflation. It's not a trade-off over the longer haul.

Here's the graph he put up to illustrate it. You can see, more or less, that the GDP growth rate picture is much the same before and after, and you can very clearly see that inflation is much, much lower and much, much less volatile.

The other big point is about transparency and independence. Internationally, central banks have been getting much more communicative about what they are up to and why (though, as I noted here, the European Central Bank has been a slow learner), and have been given more independence from government. We score highly on this: as he said, "A recent international survey ranked New Zealand second among 120 central banks for transparency".

Again, you'll hear politicians trying to take back control of monetary policy, sometimes cloaking their eagerness to get their clammy electoral hands back on the interest rate lever in the language of "democratic control".

Ignore them: what the evidence shows - as I found when I looked up that "recent international survey" that the Governor mentioned - is that more transparency and independence result in lower and less erratic inflation. The authors say (p236) that "Disentangling the impact of the two dimensions of central bank arrangements is difficult—not surprisingly, given that they respond to similar determinants", but either separately or together the picture is consistent: higher levels of transparency and independence lead to lower inflation and less volatile inflation.

Bottom line - and this is my take, not Wheeler's words - there's good reason to be very sceptical about relaxing or overriding our current inflation targetting regime, and equally good reason to steer clear of letting the pollies back in charge of it.

Why Zero Profit Equilibria Can Subsist

In the long run equilibrium, firms in competitive markets make zero profit. This may seem odd, considering all the effort and time that has to be put into running a company. So why should these firms stay in business?

The answer to this question lies in the definition of the term profit. What most people think of when they hear profit is a number on the balance sheet of a firm. We call this the accounting profit. However, for many economic issues, considering accounting profits may not be sufficient. In those cases, we need to look at a different type of profit as well; the so-called economic profit.

Accounting profit

As mentioned above, accounting profit is the surplus we can find on a balance sheet. It can be calculated as the difference between total revenue and costs. However, the important aspect here is that accounting profit only includes explicit costs. That is, it only accounts for costs that result in an outflow of money (or an increase in dept) for the firm.

For example, think of an ice cream seller who wants to open a new business. Let's assume he faces costs of $100'000 for equipment and ingredients. At the end of the year, he has sold ice cream for a total of $150'000. Thus he makes an accounting profit of $50'000 ($150'000 - $100'000).

This approach is rather business-oriented. It includes everything that is relevant to set up a balance sheet. However, since we are looking at the issue from an economic perspective, we need to include some additional aspects. Therefore, we shall look at economic profits.

Economic profit

Economic profit is defined as total revenue minus total costs. That means in addition to the explicit costs it also includes implicit costs, such as opportunity costs. In other words, economic profit also accounts for the time, money and effort an owner puts into his company.

Regarding the zero profit condition, this suggests that in the long run equilibrium, owners need to be compensated for their opportunity costs. Hence the company must actually generate a positive accounting profit in the amount of the opportunity costs incurred. Therefore it will generate at least the amount of profit that is needed to maintain the factors of production (labor, capital, etc.). This profit is referred to as the normal profit.

To illustrate that idea, let's go back to our ice cream seller. If he had decided not to set up his business, he could have for instance deposited the $100'000 (i.e. the explicit costs) in a bank account to earn $5'000 in interest. In addition to that he could have worked for another ice cream producer to earn $45'000 a year. As a result, his opportunity costs add up to $50'000. If we include those costs in the calculation of the accounting profit above we get the economic profit for this case, which will amount to zero ($150'000 - $100'000 - $50'000).

This shows that even if economic profits are zero, producers still earn positive accounting profits. They have no reason to go out of business, because they receive compensation for their opportunity costs, so there is no alternative that would generate higher profits for them.

In a nutshell

In the long run equilibrium, firms in competitive markets make zero profits. This may seem odd at a first glance. However it makes sense because the statement refers to economic profit. It is important to note that unlike accounting profit (i.e. revenue minus explicit costs), economic profit (i.e. revenue minus explicit and implicit costs) includes opportunity costs. As a result according to the zero profit condition, competitive firms in the long run equilibrium are compensated for their opportunity costs. That means there is no superior alternative for them so they have no incentive to go out of business. On the contrary, they may still generate substantial accounting profits.

Why the shortages?

Yesterday I posted about recent trends in immigration, and made a case for taking in more talented and skilled people, especially from Europe: business conditions there aren't great, they're much better here, and there's a window of opportunity to hoover up some talent.

Along the way I got thinking a bit more about MBIE's lists of local skill shortages, which they use to prioritise people overseas who come looking for New Zealand work visas. There are two of them, the 'Long Term Skill Shortages List', which MBIE says "identifies occupations where there is a sustained and on-going shortage of highly skilled workers both globally and throughout New Zealand", and an 'Immediate Skill Shortage List', which "includes occupations where skilled workers are immediately required in New Zealand and indicates that there are no New Zealand citizens or residents available to take up the position".

On the 'Immediate' list, there's a whole bunch of medical shortages - virtually every speciality you can think of (cardiologists, haematologists,paediatricians, you name it, it's there), the technicians to support them, plus dentists, dental technicians and dental therapists.

On the 'Long Term' list, there's a equally wide range of shortages - anaesthetists, clinical psychologists, GPs, intensive care specialists, nurses of all kinds, obstetricians, physiotherapists, just to pick out a selection, plus we're short vets as well.

Why is this?

I can rule out one explanation: it's not because people aren't interested in taking up these professions. I can't speak for all of them, but I do know about some of them, and I'd be confident that the medical and vet schools aren't short of people trying to get in.

There could be benign explanations.

Maybe we just don't have the resources to turn out all the skills we need, and that could be because we're not a rich enough country or because, like a lot of governments post GFC, ours has had to prioritise pretty hard in recent years, and not everything desirable can be financed.

And then there's the possibility that we've been at home to Mister Cockup. Maybe we've made a complete hames of matching labour market supply and demand, and I'm open to that as a theory, too, especially as you don't get normal labour market incentives working in these essentially centrally planned disciplines.

And then there's a darker hypothesis: that some or all of these professions are artificially restricting local supply. Do the gatekeepers to these careers face an inherent conflict of interest when advising on the level of student intake?

It doesn't help that the possibilities I've listed aren't mutually exclusive. We might have a mixture of cyclical or secular shortage of the readies, ineffective planning, and anti-competitively narrow entry gates. So I don't have any smoking gun answers.

But we can't leave these markets the way they are. They're just not working properly.

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.

The ref shouldn't reach for his pocket

You've got a valuable piece of intellectual or physical property. What, from a competition law perspective, can you do with it?

That might seem a daftly broad (or broadly daft) question to ask, but it keeps coming up, and it rather bothers me, since if there isn't a clear answer, you'd imagine that there could be a potentially costly chilling effect on the (often sizeable and specialised) investment involved.

What got me thinking about it, again, is the current fuss in the UK over the television rights to live coverage of Premier League soccer games. Ofcom, the relevant regulator, has agreed to take a look: here's its news release, which doesn't give a great deal of context, so here are a piece in the FT and a piece in the Daily Telegraph which give some background (hopefully neither is paywalled for the casual browser - I can't easily tell, as I've got a sub to both of them). Or here's the Guardian's coverage.

The gist is that the rights to the Premier League coverage have been vigorously contested at auction by Sky and BT, sending the price up, and in turn (allegedly) leading to high prices for end consumers watching the games on the box. Virgin, who have lost out on the rights, have complained. Ofcom has said it'll have a look, while pointing out that agreeing to have a look doesn't mean it's accepted that there is indeed a competition issue.

I don't think there is. For the life of me I can't see a competition problem here.

I don't see any issue with the clubs getting together to sell the rights to all the games. Alternatives would have large, inefficient transaction costs and wouldn't be attractive to broadcasters or end consumers. And in any event I'd say a football league would fly through any 'joint venture' provisions in competition law.

And I don't see any issue with an auction of the rights to the highest bidder. Competition for the market is fine by me, especially (as seems to be the case here) the auction opportunities come along reasonably often and are open to anyone with enough zeroes in their bank account. Indeed, I would say that Virgin's gripe is entirely because there has been robust competition for the prize.

And I'm not enamoured of the logic behind the European Commission's approach, which (I gather) at one point required the rights to go to at least two parties. Should J K Rowling have had to offer the Harry Potter books to two different publishers?

I can see instances where there may be an essential piece of infrastructure (spectrum, for example), where (unless you're a rapacious sell-the-airwaves-for-the-most-I-can-get government, and if you don't believe they exist, then you didn't notice how the Aussies privatised Sydney Airport) you wouldn't want to award a monopoly because of the adverse consequences of downstream market power.

But football?

I'm not saying that it's always going to be in football's own best interest to maximise their short-term profit: a longer-term view of the end game might see a better outcome from a wider consumer base rather than a narrower one, for example. It may not even be in a broadcaster's best long-term interests to hoover up all the rights on offer: not if you don't want to make yourself the target of populist regulation. And sometimes non-economic factors will need to get a look in, too (in spectrum allocation, for example, you might want to think of concentration of media ownership from a democratic point of view).

But normally, if someone's decided, eyes wide open, that they want to auction a right for the best short-term price, and someone's decided, also eyes open, to put the cash down and buy it, I can't see from a competition perspective why anyone should stand in the way.

And while we're in the general territory of football and what people can do with what they own, can the owner of a football stadium provide the chips and beer itself? Or must it allow third parties access to the chips and beer 'markets' at its stadium? Will it be okay (Premier League style) to award the concessions for beer and chips to the highest bidder, or must it spread the market around? And if you think this a fanciful example of competition law overreach, it's actually cropped up in New Zealand: can an airport award one onsite 'duty free' franchise to the highest bidder?

There'll be exceptions, but for me, there won't often be good reason to interfere with a competitive auction where willing buyer meets willing seller.

Perfect Competition vs. Imperfect Competition

Firm behavior in competitive markets is probably one of the most fundamental subjects in economics. That is mainly due to the fact that most markets we encounter in reality are competitive, at least to a certain degree.

Competition is characterized by a multitude of firms offering the same (or a similar) good or service or a close substitute. In general it can be said that the more similar the goods or services are, the more competitive the markets will be. However, the competitiveness of a market is still highly dependent on firm behavior. For example, companies engaging in collusive behavior may result in a significant impediment to competition. For now, we will assume that firms do not engage in such activities.

As mentioned above, competitive markets may experience different degrees of competition. To explain the principle of competitiveness, it is useful to distinguish between two different market structures: perfect competition and imperfect competition.

Perfect competition

As the name suggests, perfect competition is considered the purest form of competition. For a market to be perfectly competitive, the following criteria need to be met:

• The goods that are sold need to be homogeneous. In other words, they need to be exactly the same and can thus be substituted at no cost.
• There must be no preferences between different sellers. For the customers it should not matter from which seller they buy their products.
• No actor should have the ability to affect the market price. That means, both buyers and sellers do not have any market power and can thus be considered price takers.

Looking at these criteria, it becomes apparent, that they will hardly ever be met in reality. Even so, an example that comes fairly close to perfect competition is the market for rice. There are thousands of buyers and sellers and the products are mostly identical. But it will never be perfectly competitive, as there will always be minor differences in products, preferences between sellers and so on.

However, at this point it is important to note that the idea behind perfect competition as a theoretical construct is to help explain various market mechanisms and economic behavior. So even though we may not find perfectly competitive markets in reality, the concept is still extremely relevant.

Imperfect competition

In contrast to perfect competition, imperfect competition is a fairly common market structure in practice. It is defined by the following characteristics:

• The goods that are sold are differentiated. That means, even though they mostly satisfy the same needs, there are minor differences that allow customers to distinguish the products from one another. 
• Due to the differentiated goods, customers develop preferences for some sellers. Thus, they are willing to spend more money on goods from specific sellers.
• As a result, the sellers may exert a certain degree of market power and charge a price premium. Hence, they can directly influence the market price to a limited degree and are no longer pure price takers.

An example of imperfect competition is the market for cereals. Just think about the cereal aisle at your local supermarket, you will find dozens of different cereals (Cap'n Crunch, Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, etc.). Out of those brand you probably have a favorite, like most people. However, if you think about it, those cereals are actually not that different. Ultimately, they all serve the exact same need; providing you with a tasty breakfast.

In a nutshell

Competitive markets are characterized by a multitude of firms offering the same (or a similar) good or service or close substitutes. They can either be perfectly competitive or imperfectly competitive. In perfectly competitive markets the goods are homogeneous, consumers have no preferences, and neither buyers nor sellers can influence the market price. Imperfectly competitive markets on the other hand are distinguished by differentiated products, consumer preferences, and as a result a certain degree of market power for sellers.

Decile funding - pros and cons

There's been quite a bit of reaction in the social media to the news that 'Poorly targeted' school decile funding may be dropped. It's not easy to make much of a case for anything in 140 character bursts, so I thought I'd take a bit more space to wonder if the case against decile funding isn't being oversold.

Here's some data, from the same article, which shows the percentage of students in different decile schools who are well below the national standard for maths (I gather you'd get the same picture if you looked at other subjects). What would you conclude from this chart?

You'd have to say that there is some at least rough and ready correlation between decile level and school performance. Performance worsens as you move down from decile 10 to decile 1 (other analyses have found the same pattern). You'd be inclined to keep a school's decile status in play as an explanatory factor, rather than junking it.

Since this is the picture after schools have had decile-related resourcing, you'd have to suspect that the relationship would have been even more pronounced pre-resourcing. You could, I suppose, make the argument that decile funding has been completely ineffective, and the relationship in the chart is the same pre and post decile-related funding, but that seems to me to be a big stretch to the rather unlikely counterfactual that funding levels make no difference at all to educational outcomes. There's an even more unlikely possibility, that decile funding was counterproductive, and that the decile/performance relationship would have been less pronounced without greater funding to lower decile schools, but I can't see how that would work, certainly not at any systemic national level. So you'd be inclined to believe decile funding has had some positive impact.

But self-evidently, the decile-related funding has not completely equalled out school performance. One part of the answer is that the link between a school's socio-economic profile as summarised by its decile classification and a school's performance isn't 100%, and it's unlikely that it ever could have been. So you'd be sympathetic to arguments that would tweak or supplement the decile funding system, though not to wholesale junking of the approach.

Another part of the answer, though, is likely variation in teaching quality at different schools. In the chart, there's a clear pattern of poorly performing outliers at every decile level. It's unlikely that all of that pattern is down to slippage in the relationship between decile level and educational outcomes, though some of it will be. For example, that outlier decile 2 school, the worst in the chart, could well be facing tougher challenges than most of the decile 1 schools, either because it got mismeasured in the decile process or because the things that matter outside the decile criteria weigh especially heavily on it (equally there could be schools that have been coasting, and their performance reflected an easier catchment challenge in reality than the decile ranking suggested). But some of it, as in most endeavours in life, is likely to be down to variations in the quality of the provider.

Either way, you'd be inclined to hone in on those outliers from two perspectives. One is that, if there is indeed something missing from the decile approach, and there seems to be, then these outlier schools are the most likely place to find it. And the other is that if they're just bad schools, you'd want to sort them out.