The Unassuming Economist

A new article from The Economist cites my paper:

“[…] economic forecasters project GDP growth of about 2% in 2020.”

“How much confidence should one have in these predictions? For the past 20 years The Economist has kept a database of projections by banks and consultancies for annual GDP growth. It now contains 100,000 forecasts across 15 rich countries. In general, they fared well over brief time periods, but got worse the further analysts peered into the future—a trend unsurprising in direction but humbling in magnitude. If a recession lurks beyond 2019, economists are unlikely to foresee it this far in advance.”

“The biggest errors occurred ahead of GDP contractions. The average projection 22 months before the end of a downturn year missed by 3.7 points, four times more than in other years. In part, this is because growth figures are “skewed”: economies usually expand slowly and steadily, but sometimes contract sharply. As a result, forecasters seeking to predict the most likely outcome expect growth. However, they adjust too slowly even once bad news arrives, says Prakash Loungani of the IMF. That suggests they are prone to “anchoring”—over-weighting previous expectations—or to “herding” (keeping their predictions near the consensus).”

“If forecasters displayed such biases consistently, an aggregator could beat the crowd by granting more weight to those with good records. But top performers rarely repeat their feats. When it comes to GDP, the best guide is the adage that prediction is difficult—especially about the future.”

On cross-country:

• How consumer behaviour sways the housing market- and the economy – ING

On the US:

• What’s Up With Construction Costs? – BuildZoom
• The Goldilocks problem of housing supply: Too little, too much, or just right? – Brookings
• Gentrification and Fair Housing: Does Gentrification Further Integration? – Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy
• Where Have All The Renters Gone? – Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
• Risky Home Loans Are Making a Comeback. Are They Right for You? – New York Times
• California Needs a Housing Revolution – Bloomberg
• Here’s Housing’s Real Threat to the Economy – Bloomberg

On other countries:

• [Australia] Sydney’s house prices face a falling tide – Financial Times
• [Botswana] The housing market’s potential to boost Botswana’s economic growth – Bank of Botswana
• [Mexico] Mexico’s housing market is strengthening – Global Property Guide
• [Netherlands] Short-term rentals and the housing market: Quasi-experimental evidence from Airbnb in Los Angeles – VoxEU
• [Singapore] Can Singapore’s social housing keep up with changing times? – BBC

Photo by Aliis Sinisalu

The IMF’s latest report on Cambodia says:

“Real-estate sector risks. Capital continues to flow into the construction sector driven by regional investors and strong demand for residential and retail space. Significant data gaps, including on property prices, complicate the assessment of risks. There is anecdotal evidence that growing oversupply is dampening prices of high-end apartments, while, given the segmented nature of the market, property prices for retail and residential properties remain robust. As a result, affordability of residential housing is being eroded. Credit growth to the real estate sector, a key transmission channel linking credit and economic growth, has averaged around 35 percent since 2016, driven by few banks. Further heightening risks, real-estate developers are reportedly offering mortgages with looser lending conditions, an activity that remains unmonitored and unregulated.”

The IMF’s latest report on Kosovo says:

“With strong growth in property lending (beyond mortgages, this includes commercial and residential construction loans, consumer credit used for housing finance, suppliers’ credit) amid signs of a supply overhang in the capital, the authorities should closely monitor the market and develop a housing price index or create a centralized registry of property valuations to convey the price signal of the property market.”

From Conversable Economist:

“If carbon capture and storage was cheap and easy, it would be a technological fix for the issue of climate change. It’s not that simple, of course. But along with a range of other technologies and policies, carbon capture and storage can be part of the answer. In the Global Status of CCS 2018, the Global CCS Institute provides an overview of this technology (download requires free registration). The tone of the report is boosterish and upbeat about the technology–but it’s also full of facts and case studies and background about efforts currently underway.

Here are some main points:

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change develops scenarios for how the world economy limit carbon in the atmosphere in the next few decades, a major expansion of carbon capture and storage is baked into those forecasts. 

“In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its highly anticipated Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15), reinforcing the role carbon capture and storage technology must play in beating climate change. … Significantly for CCS, it made the point that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air. CCS was acknowledged in three of all four pathways IPCC authors used to reach 1.5°C and was singled out for its ability to: `play a major role in decarbonising the industry sector in the context of 1.5°C and 2°C pathways, especially in industries with higher process emissions, such as cement, iron and steel industries.'”

There are a number of reasonably large-scale CCS facilities in operation, but they have naturally tended to pick the approaches that are already cost-effective. The question is whether CCS will spread into a much broader array of uses. 

There are now 43 commercial large-scale global CCS facilities, 18 in operation, 5 in construction and 20 in various stages of development. … The first-of-a-kind commercial CCS facilities addressed in this report have already been in operation for years, mostly in industrial applications. They are “low hanging fruit”  in terms of deployment – natural gas processing, fertiliser, ethanol production where CO2 capture is an inherent process of productions. There is still a swathe of industrial applications crying out for CCS application. There is also a wave of new innovations such as hydrogen with CCS, direct air capture, CCS hubs and clusters that need to be deployed. …”

Continue reading here.