German Manufacturing Lessons

Germany recently recorded the largest monthly trade surplus by any country ever, of €20 billion this September. NYT has two stories that nicely illustrate the reasons behind Germany's success with retaining and growing manufacturing jobs in the country, even as the rest of the developed world struggles with the same challenge. 

The first is a story about Faber Castell, the world's largest maker of pencils, pens, crayons, markers, and other drawing and writing supplies. It writes,

Faber-Castell illustrates how midsize companies — which account for about 60 percent of the country’s jobs — are able to stay competitive in the global marketplace. It has focused on design and engineering, developed a knack for turning everyday products into luxury goods, and stuck to a conviction that it still makes sense to keep some production in Germany.... In contrast to many American companies, like Apple, that have outsourced nearly all production to Asia, Faber-Castell and many other German companies make a point of keeping a critical mass of manufacturing in Germany. They see it as central to preserving the link between design, engineering and the factory floor...

While the basic design of a pencil has not changed much in 400 years, Faber-Castell has managed to find ways to be unique. For example, in the late 1990s, it developed a triangular pencil with raised dots that make it easier to hold. That proved popular. Innovations include the use of water-based coatings to make pencils more environmentally friendly, as well as nontoxic to compulsive pencil chewers...

Even boxes of the highest-quality Faber-Castell colored pencils and artists’ markers can easily cost hundreds of dollars. It is this focus on the premium end of the market that has enabled German companies to survive in markets flooded by low-cost Asian alternatives. Mercedes and Audi cars are good examples of this, but German companies have also achieved similar success with more mundane products like Rösle kitchen implements, Steiff stuffed animals and Falke socks. 

The other story is about the famous German apprentice system which has kept the supply of skilled manpower flowing to meet the demand from manufacturing firms, besides easing labor market problems that have bedeviled other developed economies. About Germany's 1.8 million apprentices, it writes,

In Germany, apprentices divide their time between classroom training in a public vocational school and practical training at a company or small firm. Some 330 types of apprenticeships are accredited by the government in Berlin, including such jobs as hairdresser, roofer and automobile electronics specialist. About 60 percent of German high school students go through some kind of apprenticeship program, which leads to a formal certificate in the chosen skill and often a permanent job at the company where the young person trained.

And about South Carolina's experiment with trying to embrace the apprenticeship system to alleviate shortage of skilled workers,

Still, the close cooperation between employers and the state educational system is unusual, and despite initial skepticism on both sides, apprenticeship opportunities are rapidly expanding both for high-school age students and for older workers. Apprenticeship Carolina started in 2007 with 777 students at 90 companies. It now has 4,500 students at more than 600 companies in the state, with the typical apprentice in his or her late 20s. Mr. Neese’s goal is to have 2,000 companies by 2020... it links the state’s technical college system with private companies to help create specialized programs. 

Replication of the German business culture outside the country may remain a distant possibility, though the adoption of the apprentice model may be a more realistic project. In fact, for countries like India, with ambitious manufacturing sector goals, such apprentice systems may be the only practical way to assure the supply of medium-skilled manpower required by manufacturing firms. 

A "re-negotiations policy" for road projects?

I have blogged extensively on the moral hazard that have been unleashed with the widespread trend of re-negotiations that have gripped the infrastructure sector. Private infrastructure developers have internalized the norm that they can bid aggressively and irresponsibly, as many have done, with the assurance that they can always go back to re-negotiate the terms. India's pernicious culture of crony capitalism encourages the trend.

In this context, the Roads Ministry has proposed to break the gridlock with stalled National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) road projects by restructuring them. There are currently 48 road project developers who are renegotiating the restructuring of premium payments with the NHAI. However, instead of re-negotiating on a project-by-project basis, newspapers report that the Roads Ministry has effectively proposed a blanket policy (I am not aware of the details though) for restructuring premium payments owed by developers. It proposes that the premium payments of developers whose projects are stressed, mainly due to traffic shortfalls, be restructured in accordance with a general policy. The Mint reports on the crux of the Ministry's restructuring policy,

In principle, the roads ministry’s recommended restructuring involves back-ending the agreements with developers to reduce their payments to the government in the initial years of the contract—a move that could help them complete the projects. The ministry and its arm, NHAI, are worried that if projects are stuck on account of financing troubles, developers could start walking out of projects—resulting in a delay in building required infrastructure and losses on account of unpaid premiums. These projects will also have to be re-bid.

It immediately raises the question about why the same internal restructuring of its cash-flows cannot be done by the developers themselves. It needs to be borne in mind that most road developers have a portfolio of projects, with varying levels of profitability, which would facilitate the process of such re-balancing. In fact, the very objective of firms specializing in infrastructure and accumulating a portfolio of projects with a diverse risk-profile and cash-flow patterns, is to leverage their overall balance sheet and mitigate their individual project risks. GMR and the like have clearly internalized the norm that they will view each project as a stand-alone entity, and transfer commercial risks on to the government through the process of re-negotiations.

In simple terms, the Ministry is effectively proposing a re-negotiations policy for all road projects. It is a virtual fait accompli that developers will internalize this policy into their bids, thereby distorting the process of efficient price discovery in the forthcoming tenders. The tendering process would then become just a transit point in the process of arriving at the final contract conditions.

I have been thinking for sometime that, given the inevitability of re-negotiations with many infrastructure projects, it may be an efficient second-best approach, to transparently outline the principles that would define any process of re-negotiations. But we should be careful that it does not become codified into some policy, which would take away from the process of competitive bids that allot these projects. Re-negotiations should be done on a project-by-project basis, and not through a routine application of rules to qualify projects and renegotiate their terms.

Further, in order to discourage any moral hazard, the process has to be accompanied with prohibitive enough haircuts on equity holders. Promoters who bid irresponsibly or with other, less than transparent, considerations have to pay with their capital, and that too a prohibitive enough amount. It will be interesting to see what the Rangarajan Committee, entrusted with formulating a restructuring policy, comes out with. 

NGDP targeting and escaping the ZLB

Much of the innovations in monetary policy in the aftermath of the Great Recession have been driven by the compulsions of monetary accommodation when the interest rates are at the zero-lower bound (ZLB). It started with direct credit injection through unlimited liquidity auction windows, lowering collateral requirements and so on. Then, the quantitative easing policies sought to leverage the central bank's balance sheet by purchasing securities, private and government, undertaking maturity transformations in government securities etc, thereby "rebalance portfolios" to lower real interest rates. Finally, central banks are now, through forward guidance, seeking to shape market expectations through credibly committing to remain accommodative over a long-time horizon so as to restore normalcy in the economy.

The net result of all these policies is that we have had five years of ultra-cheap money and sustained recovery does not appear to be any closer. More worryingly, these policies have induced several distortions in the financial markets. Furthermore, any exit from the accommodation, before recovery has taken firm hold, threatens to destroy both the gains so far as well as trigger off a contagion across the emerging markets.

Amidst all this, the ZLB continues to bind, and looks set to do so for the foreseeable future. This, by itself is severely limiting on the effectiveness of monetary policy, and demands an exploration for new monetary policy frameworks. In this context, a new paper by economists at the US Federal Reserve Board argue that a revised monetary policy framework, like NGDP targeting, may be effective at overcoming the ZLB constraint. It has raised commentaries here and here in Free Exchange.

The paper explores various scenarios of monetary policy over the medium-term and finds that interest rates are not likely to rise beyond 4%, even by 2019. The likelihood of the US economy tipping to the next cycle of recession by then is very strong, thereby leaving the Fed with limited space to cut rates and adopt an accommodative stance with its monetary policy. In other words, the problem of ZLB is here to stay with us, ironically as a result of the global success with taming the high inflation trend. This raises the issue of how to design a monetary policy framework that can be responsive even when faced with the ZLB.

This has the potential to be very relevant for monetary policy debates in the coming years. Nominal interest rates remain low and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Further, deflationary pressures remain strong on both sides of the Atlantic. Even with economic recovery taking hold and interest rates rising, there is the strong likelihood that many developed economies will move into the next recessionary trough with far lower rates than would be enough to sustain the necessary monetary accommodation to recover from the recession. Inflation Targeting is likely to be a blunt instrument. An NGDP target is more likely to generate the thrust required to restore economic growth.  

Public services contracting woes in UK

Even as Britain grapples the legacy of its Thatcherite privatizations, the National Audit Office (NAO) has an excellent report that questions the way public services are contracted out in UK. The report was commissioned by the government in the aftermath of several scandals of mis-reporting, over-billing, and fraud.

Two of the largest outsourcing contractors, Serco and G4S have been found guilty of over-charging and fraud (by way of billing dead individuals) in their contracts for electronic tagging of offenders. Another, Atos entrusted with the responsibility of testing whether disability living allowance claimants are entitled to a government benefit, was found to have denied benefits to large numbers of people with terminal cancer and other serious illness.

The NAO report looks at the market for outsourcing public services, valued at £93.5bn last year, by examining four largest public contractors in UK. It raises concern at the concentration of public contracting in a few large firms and also at whether the money is being well-spent and desired outcomes are being delivered. 

In particular, the report examines three questions - whether public contracting market is sufficiently competitive; whether contractors profits reflect a fair return; and whether contractors are delivering services to the desired standards. It writes, 

First, it raises questions about the way public service markets operate. This includes the need for scrutiny over whether public service contracts are sufficiently competitive and whether the rise of a few major contractors is in the public interest. Secondly, it highlights the issue of whether contractors’ profits reflect a fair return. Understanding contractors’ profits is important to ensure that their interests are aligned properly with that of the taxpayer. But transparency over rewards that contractors make is at present limited.

Thirdly, the report asks how we know that contractors are delivering services to the high standards expected. In particular, government needs to ensure that large companies with sprawling structures are not paying ‘lip-service’ to control and that they have the right culture and control environment across their group. This requires transparency over contractors’ performance and the use of contractual entitlement to information, audit and inspection. This should be backed up by the threat of financial penalties and being barred from future competitions if things are found to be wrong.

The FT has this to say about the state of many outsourcing contracts,

Recent research by the Institute for Government think-tank has raised questions about the capacity of civil servants to ensure this money is well spent. “Gaming” of contracts is far too common, with departments too rarely checking whether providers are hitting the targets but missing the point... Competition is often non-existent...

Contracts, meanwhile, are too long and inflexible. Providers offer big discounts in return for guaranteed income over a longer period - and ministers and officials are often tempted by this deal, knowing they are unlikely to be there five years later. Policy, demand for services and technology all change frequently, however. Nine-year tagging contracts looked good value when they were signed in 2005 but not once the price of tagging technology plummeted. Taxpayers are still paying the price of 25-year public finance initiative deals to build and maintain hospitals and other essential infrastructure.  

An FT editorial hits the nail on its head in its assessment of what is wrong with public sector outsourcing in UK,

First, there is too little competition. Ministers must do more to allow smaller providers to grow. Second, Whitehall needs to be smarter about how it bargains over contracts, especially those where quality of service is as important as price. Ministers often sign up for deals merely on the grounds that they save money. They also need to be more savvy about monitoring subsequent performance. Third, more transparency is needed. Taxpayers need to see in much greater detail how these companies make profits and who their suppliers are... the pace of outsourcing has far outstripped Whitehall's ability to manage it properly. 

In fact, following the outbreak of the scandal, the government has put on hold a wave of contracts, worth an estimated  £500m a year, to outsource management of prisons and lowering of recidivism among prisoners. Outsourcing prisoner probation work had become almost a fad following some boutique experiments on lowering recidivism through social impact funding based business model.

There is nothing surprising about UK's experience with public contracting. In a matter of two decades, public services contracting has grown from virtually nothing to nearly £100 bn a year market. Public systems, especially those at the cutting edge, barely have the capacity to manage complex contracts. This problem gets amplified when they are dealing with large contractors with the capability to 'game' the contracts. 

This assumes great significance for countries like India where too public services contracting has grown rapidly without public systems being equipped with the capacity to manage these contracts. A classic example of an activity which runs the risk of losing credibility is independent third party quality control contracts entrusted to monitor the quality of engineering works. It is commonplace to today find many routine services contracts like that for cleaning and sanitation in public institutions like hospitals having degenerated into being indistinguishable from their previous publicly managed avatars.

Securitizing electricity revenues

The Times reports of the first ever securitization of solar electricity payments,

Standard&Poor’s has given its preliminary blessing to the first offering of this kind, rating a set of notes intended to raise $54.4 million for the fast-growing installation company SolarCity... it gave a rating of BBB+, a low investment-grade designation, to the notes. SolarCity plans to sell the bonds, which are secured by a bundle of residential and commercial power contracts, privately this month... Many of the power contracts are with individual residences and businesses, which have increasingly turned to leasing solar systems to avoid the upfront costs. Under those terms, SolarCity pays for installing and maintaining the system in return for monthly payments for the electricity generated. The deal will help finance the rapid expansion of SolarCity, which has become a leading installer of solar systems in the United States... It has signed up more than 82,000 customers so far...

Theoretically contracts backed by tariff payments by consumers should be attractive given that people will continue to use electricity and bill default rates are very low. However the lack of standardization of contracts and the lack of any performance history increases the risks associated. The prevailing market conditions have undoubtedly played a role in the issuance,

The bonds are expected to have a yield of around 4.8 percent, which, in a time of low interest rates, is a relatively high rate that compensates investors for buying such an untested security. The offering is also relatively small and will be sold only to select institutional investors.

As solar and other renewables sector expands, developers are already facing financing constraints. In the circumstances, they have to rely on such innovative approaches to mobilize the resources required to finance their investments. But such investments are not likely to be readily forthcoming in normal times. Further, there is the associated danger that the promoters, many with only a handful years of existence, may disappear leaving investors saddled with massive loans. Finally, there is the ever-present danger associated with securitization when it goes beyond its first stage into transactions that are far removed from the original contract.     

On secular stagnation and the quest to lower real interest rates

Larry Summers' speech at the IMF conference, where he hints at the possibility of a long-period of post-1991 Japan-style stagnant economic growth in US and Europe, has generated great interest.

Briefly, the economy is stuck at the zero lower bound, where the equilibrium real interest rate is negative. Conventional policies become ineffectual. More worryingly, this may not be an aberration, but the new normal. In fact, but for a series of equity and asset market bubbles, this should have started binding since atleast the early nineties. In this period, despite fairly loose monetary policy and a steep rise in household borrowings, there have been very few signatures of aggregate demand overheating. Inflation has remained consistently low. Summers conjectures that the short-term real interest rate consistent with full employment has fallen to negative territory, and therefore the economy needs the financial excess from bubbles to sustain full employment. He invokes Alvin Hansen to describe this as a "secular stagnation". He leaves us with a summary of the problem,

It is not over until it is over…We may well need, in the years ahead, to think about how we manage an economy in which the zero nominal interest rate is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity, holding our economies back, below their potential.

Paul Krugman attributes this stagnation to declining investment and widening output gap caused by a mix of lower population growth and slower pace of innovation. Miles Kimball points to the negative feedback from the declining share of population working. Whatever the case, Krugman advocates that in such circumstances prudence is folly and spending is virtuous and the way out is to either introduce negative rates for deposits or raise inflation, by whatever means, and keep it there.

The diagnosis of a secular stagnation comes out as being plausible. In fact economists like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have been arguing that the low hanging fruits from technological innovations having been plucked, we may now be in a period of technological stagnation. This when coupled with the declining population growth lends strong credence to a secular stagnation hypothesis. These are important long-term trends whose effects are certain to be profound.

Given the secular stagnation hypothesis, I am not sure whether the policy goal should be to attain the Great Moderation era "full employment" by seeking to lower the real interest rate. That would require continuing for an indefinite period the regime of quantitative easing and further monetary accommodation, as Krugman suggests, or deepening financial de-regulation, as Summers (may) be alluding to. Both are fraught with serious dangers of resource mis-allocation, incentive distortions, and structural problems (widening inequality and workers dropping out of the labor force).

There appears to be a distinct reluctance to accept the reality of a secular stagnation. Fundamentally, a sustainable pre-crisis trend recovery can happen only through the aggregate demand channel. But the aforementioned long-term structural trends are certain to keep aggregate demand muted. Therefore, instead of asking how to restore growth and employment back to pre-crisis levels, a more relevant exploration would be that of managing the economy given this new reality of a lower potential output. And that surely is not about seeking to lower real interest rates. 

QE in 12 graphs from MGI

The MGI have a excellent report on the effects of the quantitative easing programs across the world. Here is a graphical summary.

1. An extraordinarily long period of ultra-low interest rates was pursued so as to help recover from the Great Recession and enable financial institutions, businesses, and households to repair their debt-laden balance sheets.

2. The low interest rates were complemented with aggressive balance sheet expansion by all the major central banks in developed economies.

3. Apart from purchases of government securities, the US Fed and ECB intervened aggressively in credit markets, purchasing private assets like mortgage backed securities and commercial paper, and opened unlimited liquidity facilities to keep banks from being credit squeezed.

4. This extended period of monetary accommodation has had large-scale distributive consequences. Corporate borrowers and banks have been the biggest beneficiaries, whereas pension funds and households have been the losers. Non-financial firms in US, UK, and eurozone have saved an estimated $710 in 2007-12 on their debt service costs.

5. The bond markets have been the biggest beneficiaries.

6. Interestingly, its impact on equity markets, despite the recent surge, has been mixed.

8. The biggest beneficiaries though have been governments. By the end of 2012, governments have collectively benefited $1.4 trillion in reduced interest costs over the 2007 rate. To that extent, it has provided the fiscally constrained governments in these countries with the resources to finance their stimulus programs.

9. As the central banks start deleveraging, the biggest concern will be about its impact on the real economy, especially when economic activity remains weak and most countries are yet to recover fully their lost output and employment. The MGI report estimates that a 100 basis points increase in rates will increase household debt payments in US and UK by 7% and 19% respectively. In fact, households across US and Europe have lost a combined $630 bn as the lower interest on fixed income savings have more than outweighed the lower cost of borrowing.

10. Emerging economies too have not been spared. The Fed's balance sheet expansion has coincided with surge in capital inflows into emerging economies. In the Q2 2009 to Q4 2012, $700 bn of portfolio capital flowed into emerging market debt. In fact, in 2009-12 Mexico experienced seven times bond inflows as 2005-08, and Turkey five times.


11. So when the Fed unwinds its balance sheet, it is natural to expect a reversal in flows. And we have already had a sneak preview of that possibility, with its adverse economy-wide consequences.

12. The adverse external account of many emerging economies makes them vulnerable to the risks associated with the exit from the quantitative easing programs.

More discussion on the report in FT and Economist.