The Unassuming Economist

Recent headlines suggest the ‘Made in the USA’ label is back in business. “Manufacturing employment has grown faster in the US than in any other leading developed economy since the start of the recovery,” says the FT. Indicators of the manufacturing sector also point to an optimistic outlook, according to January’s Business Outlook Survey of Philadelphia Fed.

The manufacturing outlook seems good in the rest of the world too with the exception of Europe. World industrial production will grow 5% next year, compared to 4.5% in 2011, according to Dan Meckstroth (Chief Economist of Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation—MAPI).

But, beneath the surface things seem less hopeful, particularly in the advanced economies. For more than a decade, there has been a “hollowing out” of jobs in these economies — a striking loss of middle-income and manufacturing jobs – as summarized in a research piece I coauthored. The chart below shows a striking decline in middle-income jobs in advanced economies between 1993 and 2006.

This trend has continued over the past few years. “During the recession and recovery … highly skilled workers have done best, low-skill workers have done poorly, and those in middle-skill employment have done very, very poorly,” according to a recent article in The Economist. “Even as the job market has improved over the past year … employment among workers without a high-school degree rose by 126,000. Employment for workers with a college degree rose by just over 1m jobs. For those with just a high-school diploma, however, employment fell by 551,000.”

Advanced economies are also losing market share in manufacturing to emerging economies.

And in both advanced and emerging economies, manufacturing share’s of GDP is declining.

My research notes that the decline in manufacturing jobs accelerated during the 2000s and was accompanied by a huge increase in advanced economies’ imports from low-income countries. Other authors estimate that at least one-third of the aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment during 1990–2007 can be attributed to increased imports from emerging markets. The chart below shows the sharp decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs and the increase in the profits of multinational firms during the 2000s. Meckstroth also points out that non financial corporate profits are nearly back to their peak, in particular, income for foreign affiliates which are extremely profitable.

The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) made a controversial call in September last year: it said a U.S. recession in 2012 was a ‘done deal’. Yesterday, Ethan Harris of BofA/Merrill Lynch was more hedged: he said there was a 40% chance of a U.S. recession but a 50% chance that U.S. growth would be 1.9%. Harris was pretty sure the eurozone was headed for a recession in 2012.

Harris, the co-head of Global Economics Research at BofA/Merrill Lynch, was speaking yesterday to the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C.

Europe: a recession, but how big? Europe is almost certainly going to go into a recession, according to Harris, and this will have an impact on the U.S. economy through banking, trade and confidence channels. For the Eurozone’s 2012 GDP growth, Harris forecast -0.6% with a 50% probability and -2.5% with a probability of 40%.

U.S. Triple Dip: in 2012, look for another soft patch. Harris said the U.S. is facing three shocks in the year ahead.

•  First, the U.S. will get a downgrade. Neither party has a credible deficit reduction plan. Also, the deficit commission has no chance of success. 

• Second, there will be an automatic tightening of U.S. fiscal policy. The total of programs expiring in 2012 adds up to US$225 billion (1.4% of GDP). 

• And third is the post election pothole. He said that the post-election fiscal shocks adds to US$430 billion (2.9% of GDP), this include debt deal part I and II and the expiration of Bush tax cuts. 

Putting all the three shocks together, he forecasts US real GDP growth of 1.9% for 2012 and 1.4% for 2013 (vs. Consensus projections of 2.1% and 2.5%, respectively). On a quarterly basis, he projects a downward path for GDP growth of 1.8% in Q1 and Q2, 1.3% in Q3 and 1% in Q4; this is in sharp contrast to Consensus, which projects an upward path.

Harris also said the housing recession in the U.S. continues, there is way too much inventory. It will take 18 months to clear the home inventory at the current sales pace. He thus projects a recovery in the housing market around the third quarter of 2013. He expects U.S. inflation to fade in the summer. He forecasts core PCE 1.5% for 2012 and 1.3% for 2013 vs. consensus projections of 1.8% for both years.

Meanwhile, ECRI seems to be sticking with its recession call for the U.S. – see the latest on their position here.

Via Bloomberg Businessweek. Charles Kenny writes “You would think that, armed with so much learning, their powerful models, and reams of data, economists would have anticipated that the recovery in the U.S. and Europe would stall, that growth in such places as China, India, and Brazil would accelerate, and that poverty rates would plummet in Africa. You’d be wrong.

A few years ago, Prakash Loungani of the IMF looked at the accuracy of short-term economic growth forecasts by industry experts across a range of countries. Sixty recessions occurred in the countries he studied during the period covered by the forecasts. A grand total of two of those 60 were predicted by forecasters a year before they happened—which means the other 58 took economists by surprise. Two-thirds of all recessions remained unpredicted by April of the year in which they occurred. “The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished,” Loungani concluded.

So don’t put too much credence in predictions either of a double-dip recession or of an economic recovery in the U.S. over the next 18 months. We just don’t know. Pretty much the only safe bet is that something will happen.

Loungani’s study was relatively limited in scope: It looked at economists’ attempts to predict economic shifts a year or two out in a set of largely advanced countries. Imagine the much larger challenge of predicting longer-term growth outcomes in a wider range of countries—not just rich ones, but also the Nigerias and Vietnams of the world. In fact, there’s no need to imagine: We are awful at it.”

Kenny is a fellow at Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation.

The Economic Times (India) summarizes my recent work on Information Rigidity in Growth Forecasts: Some Cross-Country Evidence (joint with Herman Stekler and Natalia Tamirisa).

From today’s New York Times — “The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished,” wrote IMF economist Prakash Loungani in one of many papers demonstrating the near-universal truth that economists’ predictions are least accurate when they are most needed. Read the rest of the New York Times excerpt of this new book on the dismal record of economic forecasting by Dan Gardner.