There never was much reason to expect the G20 to come to the rescue of the eurozone. Certainly, there are no grounds in terms of equity why such an extraordinarily rich and economically successful region should be "rescued" by poorer nations. Furthermore, the eurozone has a small surplus on the current account of its balance of payments and a manageable public debt position, so it really has no need for outside capital. The problem is one of the distribution of funds within the eurozone, which admittedly has proven very difficult to solve.
The eurozone is often accused of lacking a strategic plan, but that is not true. It does have a plan, and a very clear one. The plan, which has been imposed by the creditor nations led by Germany, requires the debtor nations to take two major actions, both of which will be beneficial in the long term. First, they need to balance their budgets on the timetable agreed in recent summits. Second they need to introduce major reforms to their economic structure, notably involving labour market flexibility and privatisation. In exchange for these reforms, the creditor nations and the ECB are willing to provide short term liquidity injections to prevent sovereign bankruptcies. The question is not whether this plan exists, but whether it can work.
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It is normal to discuss the sovereign debt problem by focusing on the sustainability of public debt in the peripheral economies. But it can be more informative to view it as a balance of payments problem. Taken together, the four most troubled nations (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) have a combined current account deficit of $183 billion. Most of this deficit is accounted for by the public sector deficits of these countries, since their private sectors are now roughly in financial balance. Offsetting these deficits, Germany has a current account surplus of $182 billion, or about 5 per cent of its GDP.
Viewed in this light, it is clear that there needs to be a capital account transfer each year amounting to about 5 per cent of German GDP from the core to the periphery. Without that, the euro will break up. Until 2008, this transfer happened voluntarily, by private sector flows, mainly in the form of bank purchases of higher yielding sovereign bonds in the peripheries, and to a lesser extent via asset purchases (notably housing in Spain). Since 2008, these private flows have dried up, and in fact reversed, so the public sector has had to step in. It has done so in the form of direct sovereign loans, and more importantly by international transfers which have been heavily disguised within the balance sheet of the ECB. Although disguised, these transfers are very real.
The eurozone's proposed solution to this problem - budget contraction plus economic reform in the debtor nations, with no change in policy in the creditor nations - is very familiar to students of balance of payments crises in fixed exchange rate systems such as the Gold Standard or the Bretton Woods system in the past. It is not impossible for these solutions to work, but they are very contractionary for economic activity, and very frequently they fail. When they fail, they lead to devaluations by the debtor economies, normally because the required degree of contraction proves politically impossible to undertake. That is where Greece probably finds itself today. Others may be in the same position before too long.
The reason why the eurozone strategy is so difficult to implement is that both of its required actions are likely to make the European recession worse in the immediate future. This has already become clearly apparent in the negative feedback loops which have developed as budgetary policy has been tightened. None of the austere budgetary plans which have been announced during 2011 will achieve their fiscal targets in 2012 in the context of the recessions which will probably be encountered by many countries, and that includes France. There is no such thing as "expansionary austerity", certainly not in countries which cannot devalue or reduce their long term interest rates. These countries are now chasing their own tails.
Less widely appreciated is the fact that structural economic reform will also make the recession worse in the next couple of years. This reform is absolutely essential in countries like Italy, which are otherwise facing a future of indefinite stagnation, but IMF research shows that in previous similar examples, labour market reform has initially led to higher unemployment and lower GDP as workers are shaken out of unproductive employment. The IMF warns that these reform programmes work best when economies are beginning to recover from recessions, and when there is scope in government budgets to compensate the losers through tax cuts or other measures of support. Neither of these conditions apply today.
Is there any way of improving the chances of success for the eurozone's chosen strategy? Theoretically, yes. Germany, as the main creditor nation could choose to grow faster, and accept higher domestic inflation for a while, in order to ease the process of adjustment. In practice, Germany shows no sign of accepting this, but it is the best solution available, not only for the debtor economies, but also for Germany itself.
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