Dithering in the dark

Quantifying the effect of political uncertainty on the global economy

EUROPE teeters at the edge of an economic abyss, its fate in the hands of political leaders at odds over how to solve the continent’s twin debt and bank crises. America may be pushed over a “fiscal cliff” at the end of the year by political dysfunction. And even China, although unlikely to take a deep dive, is hostage to the will and ability of its government to stimulate growth. More than at any point in recent history, the global economy’s fate is tied to the capriciousness of policymakers. How much does such uncertainty cost?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that it costs a lot. Customers of Cisco Systems, the world’s biggest maker of internet gear, are taking longer to make decisions, according to John Chambers, the company’s boss. Their orders tend to be smaller than before, and to require more in-house approvals. They say they are planning to buy more stuff later this year, reported Mr Chambers recently, but “then in the very next breath they say it depends on what happens on a global and macro scale.”
In Europe firms must reckon not only with recession but also with the risk that their investments may be redenominated in a different currency or locked in by capital controls. Robert Bergqvist of SEB, a Swedish bank, says that several Swedish corporate customers have put investment projects on hold because they don’t know how the euro crisis will unfold.

If America falls over the “fiscal cliff”, it would suffer a fiscal squeeze of 5% of GDP, easily enough to push the economy into recession. Last summer, as America’s government came perilously close to exhausting its legal authority to borrow, Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress could not resolve their fiscal differences. Instead, they kicked the can down the road, agreeing on huge automatic spending cuts that would start on January 2nd, just as all of George Bush’s tax cuts are due to expire, along with a separate temporary payroll tax cut.

No deal to avoid this double whammy is likely before the November 6th election. So any firm that sells to the federal government is left in limbo. Mike Lawrie, head of Computer Sciences Corporation, a big technology-services firm, recently told investors: “I just don’t know what’s going to happen…None of us [knows].” The debt-ceiling showdown makes last summer’s weak economy weaker, said James Tisch, the boss of Loews Corporation, a conglomerate, last month. And “this fiscal cliff is the summer of ’11 but on steroids.”

Economists have long suspected that uncertainty could hurt growth. John Maynard Keynes said investment was based on expectations that are “subject to sudden and violent changes”. In a 1980 paper Ben Bernanke, now chairman of the Federal Reserve, formalised this effect: since most investment is irreversible, uncertainty “increases the value of waiting for new information [and thus] retards the current rate of investment.” In the 1990s Avinash Dixit and Robert Pindyck went further, making an analogy between an investment opportunity and a stock option, the value of which rises with the volatility of the stock price but disappears once the option is exercised. If an investment is irreversible, uncertainty raises the value of hoarding cash and waiting to see what happens.

Gauging the fog

Quantifying uncertainty is a more recent sport. To measure it, Nick Bloom and Scott Baker of Stanford University and Steve Davis of the University of Chicago constructed an index. It counts how often uncertainty related to policy is mentioned in newspapers, the number of temporary provisions in the tax code and the degree to which forecasts of inflation and federal spending differ from each other. That index hit its highest in 25 years during last summer’s debt-ceiling battle and remains high (by contrast, the Vix index of stock market volatility, a conventional gauge of uncertainty, remains below its peak of 2009; see chart). A simpler index for Europe that tracks news reports of uncertainty has similarly spiked.

Mr Bloom and his co-authors fed their index into a model of growth that seeks to filter out purely economic factors by controlling for interest rates and stock prices. They conclude that the rise in uncertainty between 2006 and 2011 reduced real GDP by 3.2% and cost 2.3m jobs.

Such estimates should be taken with a grain of salt. They demonstrate that policy uncertainty and weaker economic growth are related, not that the first causes the second. Many radical policy actions, from the TARP bail-out programme to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing and the Dodd-Frank law on financial reform, were responses to unprecedented economic trauma: collapsing house prices, failing financial institutions and the deepest recession since the second world war. That trauma did most of the damage to growth, not any uncertainty about the policy response. Had policymakers stood still, the result would have been less policy uncertainty but a far more damaging crisis.

Clearly some policies, such as Mr Obama’s health-care reform, generate uncertainty independent of economic developments. But at least Obamacare comes with benefits as well as risks; that cannot be said for the current political brinkmanship. As the fiscal cliff draws nearer, argues Ethan Harris, Bank of America’s economist for North America, the incentive to defer hiring and investment will grow, putting pressure on the economy. “The process is as important as the outcome,” he says, “and the process is a disaster.”