Why electricity prices are high and going higher

It's never my policy to feel sorry for any politician, so let's just say I wouldn't like to be in Malcolm Turnbull's shoes when he meets the electricity retailers he's summoned to Canberra on Wednesday.

His hope is to persuade them to do more to help their customers find the best prices on offer, so that any savings customers make reduce, to some extent, the further big price rises that are on the way.

Trouble is, it's long been the practice of many big businesses – telcos, internet service providers, electricity retailers – to make it as hard as possible for their household customers to find the "plan" that meets their needs most economically, and also to take advantage of any trusting customer on a more expensive plan than they need.

So, whatever noises they make after their meeting with the Prime Minister, I can't see the likes of Energy Australia, Origin Energy and AGL – which between them have about 70 per cent of the retail market – volunteering to help their customers pay less.

Turnbull seemed to begin the year hoping to shift the blame for high electricity prices to Labor – which, federal and state, certainly has contributed to the problem – but it finally seems to have dawned on him that, if further big price rises are coming through right now, voters are likely to lay most of the blame on whoever happens to be prime minister at the time.

And, after all, it was Tony Abbott who sought election in 2013 on the claim that the big rise in power prices was caused almost solely by Ju-liar Gillard's price on carbon, and that abolishing the tax would fix things.

In truth, the story of why retail electricity prices have risen so far – doubling over the past decade, even after allowing for inflation – is long. But let me summarise.


About the first 30 per cent of the retail price is accounted for by the wholesale price – the cost of generating the power.

This component didn't contribute greatly to the price doubling of the past decade, but is now the chief source of the recent price rises of 15 to 20 per cent in some states, with more to come.

About the next 40 per cent of the retail price comes from network distribution costs – the cost of taking electricity from the power stations and transmitting it, first, through the high-voltage power lines and then through the poles and wires that distribute it to our homes.

It's this component that explains the great bulk of the doubling in the real retail price.

Because the distribution network is a natural monopoly, the prices the privatised or still government-owned distribution companies are allowed to charge are controlled by the Australian Energy Regulator, using a cost-plus formula.

Trouble is, with connivance by the NSW and Queensland governments, which retained government-owned distributors, the companies soon found ways to game the formula.

They claimed they needed to spend big on strengthening their networks to ensure that the spike in demand for power on just a few hot afternoons each year could be met without blackouts.

There were much cheaper ways to reduce the risk of blackouts – such as by rewarding some users for cutting back on those few days of peak demand – but these wouldn't have been as lucrative for the companies.

After years of big price rises to pay for this "gold-plating" of the network, the regulator finally woke up and tried to wind back some of the increase.

The NSW Coalition government, anxious to maximise the sale price of the poles-and-wires companies it was about to partially sell off, took the regulator to court and got the price roll back stopped in its state.

This brings us to the final 30 per cent or so of the retail price accounted for by the electricity retailers' margin.

Price control over these margins was lifted some years ago in the belief that competition between retailers would keep their margins in check, but it hasn't really worked.

This is partly because the companies try to avoid competing on price, and partly because not enough people use the government website, energymadeeasy.gov.auhttps://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au, to check every few years that their existing supplier isn't taking advantage of them.

But now the formerly stable wholesale generation part of the market has begun producing big price increases, with more to come.

This is partly because very old power stations are being closed and not sufficiently replaced by new generators, thanks to uncertainty about how the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is to be managed.

Having abolished Labor's carbon tax, the Coalition has so far failed to replace it with any other mechanism because of opposition from its climate-change deniers.

But also partly because miscalculations by one of the three gas companies permitted by the previous Labor government to build big gas export facilities in Queensland has pushed gas prices way above even the higher export-parity price.

Apart from crippling some industries, this has greatly reduced the ability to use gas-fired power stations to cover the "intermittency" of wind and solar power, pending the arrival of adequate storage technology.

Turnbull has threatened to use the feds' export powers to reserve sufficient gas for domestic use, but we're yet to see this have its effect. Much potential price pain lies ahead.

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Higher employment our payoff for avoiding recession

When Boris Johnson, Britain's Foreign Minister, visited Oz lately, he implied that our record 26-year run of uninterrupted economic growth was owed largely to the good fortune of our decade-long resources boom.

Johnson, no economist, can be forgiven for holding such a badly mistaken view – especially since many Australian non-economists are just as misguided.

They betray a basic misconception about the nature of macro-economic management and what it's meant to do.

It's clear that Johnson, like a lot of others, hasn't understood just why it is that 26 years of uninterrupted growth is something to shout about.

It's not that 26 years' worth of growth adds up to a mighty lot of growth. After all, most other countries could claim that, over the same 26-year period, they'd achieved 23 or 24 years' worth of growth.

No, what's worth jumping up and down about is that little word "uninterrupted". Everyone else's growth has been interrupted at least once or twice during the past 26 years by a severe recession or two, but ours hasn't.

That's the other, and better way to put it: we've gone for a record 26 years without a severe recession.

But now note that little word "severe". As former Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens often pointed out, we did have a mild recession in 2008-09, at the time of the global financial crisis, and earlier in 2000-01.

So, yet another way to put the Aussie boast is that we've gone for a period of 26 years in which the occasional increases in unemployment never saw the rate rise by more than 1.6 percentage points before it turned down again.

What you (and Boris) need to understand about macro-economic management is that its goal isn't to make the economy grow faster, it's to smooth the growth in demand as the economy moves through the ups and downs of the business cycle.

This is why macro management is also called "demand management" and "stabilisation policy". These days, the management is done primarily by the Reserve Bank, using its "monetary policy" (manipulation of interest rates), though both the present and previous governor have often publicly wished they were getting more help from "fiscal policy" (the budget).

When using interest rates to smooth the path of demand over time, your raise rates to discourage borrowing and spending when the economy's booming – so as to chop off the top of the cycle – and you cut rates to encourage borrowing and spending when the economy's busting – thereby filling in the trough of the cycle.

This is why the economic managers find it so annoying when the Borises of this world imagine that the decade long resources boom – the biggest we've had since the Gold Rush – must have made their job so much easier.

Just the opposite, stupid. Introducing a massive source of additional demand in the upswing of the resources boom made it that much harder to hold demand growth steady and avoid inflation taking off.

But then, when the boom turned to bust, with the fall in export commodity prices starting in mid-2011, and the fall in mining construction activity starting a year later, it became hard to stop demand slowing to a crawl.

We're still not fully back to normal.

This is why the macro managers' success in avoiding a severe recession for 26 years is a remarkable achievement, and one owed far more to their good management than to supposed good luck (whether from China or anywhere else).

But what exactly is the payoff from the achievement? Twenty-six years in which many fewer businesses went out backwards than otherwise would have.

Twenty-six years in which many fewer people became unemployed than otherwise, and those who did had to endure a far shorter spell of joblessness than otherwise.

The big payoff from avoiding severe recessions – or keeping them as far apart as possible – is to avoid a massive surge in long-term unemployment that can take more than a decade to go away – and even then does so in large part because people give up and claim disability benefits or become old enough to move onto the age pension.

Dr David Gruen, a deputy secretary in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, has demonstrated that, though the US economy had a higher proportion of its population in employment than we did, for decades before the global crisis, since then it's been the other way around.

"The key lesson I draw from this comparison is that the avoidance of deep recessions improves outcomes in the labour market enormously over extended periods of time," he concluded.

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All the things that aren't causing weak wage growth

There's just one problem to remember before we work ourselves into a complete tizz over the War on Wages, convincing ourselves globalisation and digital disruption mean we'll never get a steady job or a decent pay rise again.

It's this: so far we've heard a lot of suspiciously confident predictions about the way robots and digitisation are about to destroy millions of jobs, a lot of anecdotes about law-breaking employers, a lot of scary stories about "the gig economy" and "portfolio jobs", a lot of adults assuring impressionable school children they'll have 10, or is it 17, different jobs in their working lives, a lot of propagandising by the unions about the rise of "precarious employment" and a lot of speculation about how all this somehow explains why wages growth is the slowest it's been since the early 1990s.

Know what we haven't got a lot of? Hard evidence that any of all that has actually started happening to any significant extent.

This is not to say some version of all that won't happen at some time in the future. I can't say it won't since I don't know that the future holds, unlike all the self-proclaimed experts with their precise predictions.

(Next time you hear someone telling you exactly how many jobs robots will have destroyed by 2020, or how many jobs or occupations you'll have in the next 40 years, ask yourself this question: How – would – they – know?)

But if there's no evidence this frightening future has got going yet, there's no way it can explain why wage growth has been so weak for the past three or four years.

For once, let's take a close look at what we actually know has been happening.

It is true that, as we saw in this column two weeks ago, the structure of occupations in the workforce is changing. Research by Dr Alexandra Heath, of the Reserve Bank, shows the share of routine jobs has fallen by 14 percentage points, while the share of non-routine jobs has risen by 14 points.

Similarly, the share of manual jobs has fallen by 5 percentage points, while the share of cognitive jobs has risen to the same extent.

But this is a long-term trend. These figures are for the change over the 30 years to 2016, and there's no sign of the trend accelerating over recent years.

A lot of detailed – and reassuring – research on the official statistics has been done by one of our leading labour-market economists, Professor Jeff Borland, of the University of Melbourne, and reported on his website, Labour Market Snapshots.

For one thing, Borland's been searching for evidence that our jobs are being taken by robots – and failing to find it. He breaks the issue into two parts.

First, has computerisation reduced the total amount of work needing to be done by humans, as many people assume?

No. The total amount of work available per head of population has bounced around with the ups and downs of the business cycle but, overall, has shown no downward trend. The latest figures show, if anything, a bit more hours of work per person than there were in the mid-1960s.

Second, consistent with Heath's research, Borland finds evidence that the progressive introduction of computers, which began in the early 1990s, is probably changing the types of jobs being done by workers.

But he, too, finds that the pace of change in the composition of employment "is no quicker today than in the period before computers".

"So while computers may be having some impact on the Australian workplace, most claims about their impact are vastly overstated," Borland concludes.

Next, Borland shines his statistical spotlight on all the claims about work becoming more insecure or "precarious".

You don't have a proper, full-time permanent job. You get a bit of work here and a bit there. If you do have a job, it never lasts long.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has long published figures for job "tenure" – how long people have been with their current employer.

If all the talk of growing instability was a genuine trend – as opposed to the experience of a relatively small number of individuals – you ought to be able to see it in the job tenure figures.

But you can't. The reverse, in fact. Borland finds that, from the early 1980s to the present, the proportion of workers who've been in their job for 10 years or more has been steadily increasing. This is greatest for women, for whom it's gone from 12 per cent to 25 per cent.

At the same time, the proportion of all workers in their job for less than a year has been decreasing.

Next, how insecure do workers feel? When the bureau asks employees whether they expect to be with their present employer for the next 12 months, the proportion of men who don't has been steady at about 9 per cent between May 2001 and May this year.

Over the same period, the proportion for women has fallen steadily from 11 per cent to 9.5 per cent.

From all the talk, you'd expect the proportion of employees working for labour hire companies and temporary agencies to be rising strongly.

It ain't. Actually, between 2001 and 2015 it's fallen from a tiny 3.1 per cent to a tinier 2.2 per cent.

And though it's true the proportion of jobs that are part-time is continuing to rise, over the 10 years to 2016 it rose at the slowest rate for any decade since the mid-1960s.

Of course, none of this is to deny that wages growth in Australia has been surprisingly weak for several years, as it has been in other developed economies.

But in our guessing game about what might be causing that weakness, let's not get too fanciful.

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REBUILDING TRUST IN ORGANISATIONS

Talk to Relationships seminar, Sydney, Thursday, August 3, 2017

There’s little reason to doubt the assessment of the Edelman report and other sources that trust in organisations is diminishing in Australia, as it is many other developed economies. My job is to offer specific examples of that decline in trust and the problems it’s causing. Unfortunately, that’s all too easy.

What do we mean by trust in organisations? Edelman defines it very simply: trust to do what is right. What organisations are we thinking of? Most of those you could name. Edelman finds that, across many countries, trust is least in government – which I taken to refer mainly to elected politicians and less so to government departments and agencies. Trust in the news media is only a fraction greater. It’s quite a bit higher for business, though falling and still far from what it ought to be. Edelman’s country-wide assessment is that business is “on the brink” of distrust, but I fear that, here in Australia, it’s already over the brink. Not surprisingly, non-government organisations are the least distrusted in Edelman’s survey, but even these outfits aren’t as trusted as they were, and as they should be.

Why might so many of the different categories of organisation now be less trusted to “do what is right”? Because they’ve yielded to the ever-present temptation to put the interests of the organisation ahead of the interests of the citizens and customers and clients it professes to serve. Too often, the reputations of institutions have suffered mightily when finally it’s been revealed that those institutions put the preservation of their public reputations ahead of their duty by attempting to cover up, rather than acknowledge and correct, egregious instances of bad conduct.

But to get down to cases, let’s start with government. The public reputation of politicians has suffered from many categories of bad behaviour – the decades of election promises lightly made and just as lightly broken; the resort to spin doctoring and careful crafting of statements which, though true in some narrow, technical sense, are calculated to mislead; the way, during election campaigns, politicians on both side professor to be able to solve our problems and shower us with goodies, only to reveal a much harsher reality after the votes have been countered. These days politicians seem much more anxious than they used to be to tell us what’s wrong with their opponents’ policies than to explain the benefits of their own policies. But most voters are unimpressed by the claims and counterclaims, usually falling to the easy conclusion that both sides are lying. Politicians complain – no doubt correctly – that the public has “stopped listening” to the prime minister or the government. The public is turning away from the established parties (even including the Greens) with John Daley, of the Grattan Institute, calculating that 26 per cent of first preference votes in the Senate in last year’s election went to minor parties, up from 11 per cent in 2004.

Trust in government departments was diminished by the “robo debt debacle” in which vulnerable social welfare recipients were caused great distress by being sent demands for repayment generated by a deficient computer program, without adequate review of their accuracy. This seems to have occurred at the insistence of ministers, but Centrelink officials did their institution great reputational damage by their obfuscation and attempt to claim there was no great problem. Similarly, the Tax Office has significant problems with its both telephone system and its online system for many months, the severity of which it has been most reluctant to admit.

Much of the loss of trust in our institutions has occurred as a result of the enthusiasm and detail with which the news media have informed us of their various failings. But, with the notable exception of the ABC, this has done nothing to stop a decline of trust in the media itself. As a journo, I think I know exactly why this has occurred. It’s because, in our enthusiasm to bring our readers the most frightening news possible, we’ve been willing to convey to our readers sensational claims we don’t actually believe, but make no attempt to discredit for fear of spoiling a good story. Eventually, however, readers learn that the news we bring them isn’t necessarily to be believed. Our readers’ trust is lost.

No part of business has suffered greater loss of trust than our banks. Today the loss of reputation has been so great that there’s wide support for a royal commission into their conduct. But the damage began soon after the banks’ deregulation in the mid-1980s, when they began trying to win market share by offering new deposit and borrowing customers better deals than they were offering their existing customers, while failing to alert their customers to the better deals now on offer. When eventually customers realised their bank had been taking advantage of them, they were angry. Loss of trust is often the consequence of the failure to reciprocate loyalty.

In the years since the global financial crisis, however, the list of highly publicised instances of the banks’ negligent investment advice has multiplied. The most recent case is of a bank insurance arm finding excuses to reject legitimate claims under life insurance policies. The banks have often been reluctant to acknowledge these failures, or have portrayed them as a few rotten apples rather than systemic failure – often arising, I suspect, from misdirected performance indicators and monetary incentive schemes.

Turning to business in general, I imagine many of us have been shocked by media revelations of the extent of illegal underpayment of workers – sometimes by public companies claiming to have no control over the behaviour of franchisees. Another instance of lost trust is most people’s refusal to believe assurances from politicians and business lobby groups that workers would be the ultimate beneficiaries of a cut in the rate of company tax. And why are big businesses so desperate for a tax cut when so many of them already seem so successful at minimising how much tax they pay? Chief executives who demand restraint from their employees while subjecting their own remuneration to a quite different standard should not be surprised if they’re not trusted.

Finally, when we turn to the loss of trust in non-government organisations, it’s hard to ignore the damage various churches and other religious organisations – including the one I grew up in - have suffered from the shocking revelations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. As for the union movement – which has had its share of scandals in recent years – the loss of trust in employers has led to no surge in union membership.

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Here’s what you’ll have most regrets about

They say no one on their deathbed ever regrets not spending more time at the office. Which is not to say we don't have other regrets, nor that we have to wait until we're drawing our last breath to have them.

This column will tell you nothing about the state of the economy, or business or the financial markets, but that's its attraction.

Maybe there are other things you should be paying attention to, so as the cut the number of unticked items left on your lifetime To Do list.

I can't tell you what you most regret – or will come to regret – but I can give you some big hints, using a study by two professors of psychology, Mike Morrison, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Neal Roese, of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, which I learnt of through the PsyBlog website.

The profs commissioned a nationally representative survey of 370 American men and women. The most common regrets they found were romance, lost love, 18 per cent; family, 16 per cent; education, 13 per cent; career, 12 per cent; finance, 10 per cent; parenting, 9 per cent and health, 6 per cent.


That regrets about our relationships – 43 per cent by the time you combine romance, family and parenting – well-exceed working-life concerns – 35 per cent, when you combine education, career and finance – shouldn't surprise you.

If it does, keep reading. It's well established by psychologists that the quality of our relationships is hugely important to our wellbeing. Far more important than how many bucks you make.

"We found that the typical American regrets romance the most. Lost loves and unfulfilling relationships turned out to be the most common regrets," the authors say.

"People crave strong, stable social relationships and are unhappy when they lack them; regret embodies this principle."

The trouble isn't that most of us don't realise this in principle, I reckon, but that so many of us find it hard to remember day by day in the struggle to get ahead in life, or even just derive satisfaction from our work – which psychologists know is another key source of "subjective wellbeing" (AKA happiness).

It's telling that women were more likely than men to have romance regrets, whereas men were more likely to have work regrets.

Other research confirms that women tend to value social relationships more than men, which suggests Harry Chapin knew what he was doing when he directed Cat's In The Cradle at the less-fair sex:

"When you coming home, dad?/ I don't know when/ But we'll get together then/ You know we'll have a good time then."

Except that, for family-focused regrets, there were no significant differences according to sex, age, education or relationship status.

As we've seen, men were more likely to have work-related regrets about career and education.

People who lacked a romantic relationship had the most regrets about romance, just as those who lacked a higher education had the most regrets under the heading of education.

But here's a twist: those with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets.

Huh? The authors suggest that the higher your education, the more sensitive you are about how well you've been able fulfil your aspirations.

Of course, our regrets come in two kinds: things we did but now wish we hadn't (known in more godly days as acts of commission) and things we didn't do but now which we had (acts of omission).

Turns out regrets about our actions are about as common as regrets about inaction, but regrets about inaction last longer – true for people of all ages.

Roese reminds us that, although regret is painful, it's an essential component of the human experience.

It may be that part of its evolutionary purpose is to motivate us to fix whatever of our errors and omissions we can fix.

Previous research on regret has mainly used samples of college students. This study, however, used a random sample representative of all Americans.

This more representative sample allowed to authors to conclude that "one's life circumstances – such as accomplishments or shortcomings – inject considerable fuel into the fires of regret".

Students worry most about education and career, and little about family but, as we've seen, older people acquire very different priorities.

Here endeth the lesson. Now, back to work. It may not be more important, but it is more pressing.

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How to judge the 'stance' of monetary policy

Do you realise the Reserve Bank board hasn't changed Australia's official interest rate from 1.5 per cent for almost a year? But that hasn't stopped people in the financial markets from speculating furiously about whether rates are about to go down – or go up.

In the days leading to the board's meetings on the first Tuesday of the month, the market players start arguing and laying their bets.

It's clear the Reserve will have to start raising its official interest rate – also known as the short-term money market's overnight "cash rate" – to dampen the house price boom in Sydney and Melbourne, some people argue.

What's more, don't forget that rates around the world have started going back up. We'll have to follow suit.

Don't be silly, others say, the economy's growth is below par, unemployment is higher than it should be, wage growth is weaker than it's been in decades, and the inflation rate is actually below the bottom of the Reserve's 2 to 3 per cent target range.

In such circumstances, why on earth would the Reserve want to increase its official rate – also called its "policy" rate – which would push up the interest rates actually charged (or paid) by the banks, thus tending to discourage businesses and, more particularly, households from borrowing and spending and thus increasing economic activity?

But then, early last week, the Reserve issued the minutes of its previous board meeting, which revealed it had been discussing our economy's "neutral" interest rate, which the staff estimate had fallen by 1.5 percentage points to about 3.5 per cent, since the start of the global financial crisis in 2007.

Wow, said the rate-rise brigade, what bigger hint do you want? It's obvious the Reserve is softening us up for a return to a series of rate rises – maybe 2 percentage points' worth before it's finished.

Wrong. Next day the Reserve had to explain that the neutral interest rate was far more theoretical than that, and would have very little influence on its decisions about the policy rate in the foreseeable future.

And later that week the Reserve's deputy governor, Dr Guy Debelle, gave a long speech in which he explained what the neutral interest rate is, how it's determined and what notice the Reserve takes of it.

The Reserve uses its "monetary policy" – its ability to control the overnight cash rate, and thus influence the levels of all other short-term and variable interest rates in the financial system – to try to manage the strength of the economy's demand for the production of goods and services.

If it wants demand to grow faster, it lowers interest rates to encourage borrowing and spending. If it wants demand to slow down – usually because everything's roaring along and inflation pressure's building – it raises interest rates.

But how do we know whether, say, the present policy rate of 1.5 per cent, is really low and thus "expansionary", or not low enough to be very expansionary or, for that matter, whether it's so high relative the economy's weak state that it's actually "contractionary" (causing the economy to slow further)?

We know by comparing the actual policy rate with our best estimate of the "neutral" interest rate, which is neither expansionary nor contractionary. It thus provides a benchmark for assessing the "stance" of policy. If the actual official rate is below the neutral rate, the stance of policy is expansionary; if it's above, policy is contractionary.

Just how expansionary or contractionary you can determine with a little arithmetic. Right now, If the neutral rate is 3.5 per cent but the actual rate is 1.5 per cent, that sounds highly expansionary to me.

(Which ain't to say the stimulus is working; clearly, it's not having a huge effect – probably because households already have big debts, and don't want to borrow a lot more.)

Debelle explains that the neutral rate aligns the amount of the nation's saving with the amount of its investment, but does so at a level consistent with full employment and stable inflation.

That is, the neutral rate is where the Reserve's policy rate would be in the medium term if it was achieving the goals of monetary policy – that is, a rate of unemployment of about 5 per cent and an inflation rate within the 2 to 3 per cent target range.

So the level of a country's neutral interest rate will change with changes in the factors that influence saving and investment. Developments that increase saving will tend to lower the neutral rate, whereas those that increase investment will tend to raise it.

Debelle says you can group these factors into three main categories. First, the economy's "potential" growth rate – the fastest it can grow over the medium term without worsening inflation.

The faster a country's population and productivity are growing, the higher its neutral rate is likely to be because there should be strong demand for investment and less inclination to save.

Our potential growth rate is about 2.75 per cent a year, which is lower than it used to be, but higher than for other developed economies.

Second, the degree of "risk aversion" felt by a country's households and businesses. That is, how confident people are that the future is bright. This is what's taken a battering since the financial crisis. Greater aversion to risk makes people wary of investing and more inclined to save.

Finally, international factors. In our open economy, where financial capital can move freely across borders, global interest rates will also influence domestic interest rates.

If you think that means we've lost some of our freedom in the era of globalisation, note Debelle's reassurance: "We don't have the independence to set the neutral rate, which is significantly influenced by global forces. But we do have independence as to where we set our policy rate relative to the neutral rate."

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THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Aurora College Economics HSC Study Day, Sydney, Thursday, July 27, 2017

Globalisation is very much in the news. You won’t need me to tell you that the quite remarkable political developments around the world in recent times – Britain’s surprise decision to leave the European Union, Donald Trump’s unexpected election as US President and, here, the resurrection Pauline Hanson’s One Nation at last year’s federal election – represent to a significant extent a backlash against globalisation. This is a shock to many governments, which is causing them to reconsider their economic policies. Today I want to talk about these recent developments rather than just revise the syllabus. But let’s start by reminding ourselves what that much used and abused word “globalisation” means.

Definition

The OECD defines globalisation as “the economic integration of different countries through growing freedom of movement across national borders of goods, services, capital, ideas and people”.

That’s a good definition, but I like my own: globalisation is the process by which the natural and government-created barriers between national economies are being broken down.

A process

With this definition I’m trying to make a few points. The first is that globalisation is a process, not a set state of being. Because it’s a process, it can go forward – the world can become more globalised – or it can go backwards, as national governments, under pressure from their electorates, seek to stop or even reverse the process of economic integration. This is just what Donald Trump promised to do in last year’s US presidential election. Just how much he actually tries to reduce America’s economic links with the rest of the world – and how much success he’s likely to have – remains to be seen.

Among the advocates of globalisation there has tended to be an assumption that the process of every greater integration is inevitable and inexorable. That was always a mistaken notion, but this has become more obvious since Brexit and the election of Trump. First, the British have voted to reduce their degree of economic integration with the rest of Europe – a decision most outsiders see as involving a significant economic cost to the Brits’ economy. Second, the Trump Administration has withdrawn from the Trans Pacific Partnership, an agreement between the US and 11 other selected countries (including Australia) to reduce barriers to trade between them. Third, the Trump Administration has withdrawn from the Paris global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change

Climate change, but the way, is an unusual example of a global problem that can be fixed only by a global response – sufficient emissions reduction by sufficient large-emission countries. Individual countries, such as Australia, can contribute to the combined effort, but there is nothing smaller countries can do by their own efforts to reduce the effects of climate change on them. Only a concerted effort by many countries will make a difference to global warming. Economists recognise this as an example of market failure they call a “free-rider problem”. If everyone else pulls their weight then it won’t matter if I don’t bother helping because I’ll still benefit. The trouble with this thinking, of course, is that if too many people think the same way, the improvement doesn’t happen and everyone loses out.

Earlier globalisation

But to get back to the point that the process of globalisation is and always was reversible, people should know this because this isn’t the first time the process of globalisation has occurred. The decades leading up to World War I saw reduced barriers and greatly increased flows of goods, funds and people between the old world of Europe and the new world of America, Australia and other countries. But this integration was brought to a halt in 1914 by the onset of a world war. And the period of beggar-thy-neighbour increases in trade protection, to which countries resorted in response to the Great Depression of the early 1930s, greatly increased the barriers between national economies. Indeed, you can see that, in the years after World War II, the many rounds of multilateral tariff reductions brought about under the GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which has since turned into the World Trade Organisation – were intended to dismantle all the barriers to trade built up in the period between the wars.

The channels of globalisation

The four main economic channels through which the world’s economies have become more integrated are:

1. Trade in goods and services

2. Finance and investment

3. Labour

4. Information, news and ideas.

Trade is probably the channel that gets most attention from the public. Donald Trump’s populist campaigning against globalisation has focus on the belief that America’s greater openness to trade – particularly with developing countries – has caused it to lose many jobs, particularly in manufacturing, as cheaper imports caused many domestic producers to lose sales, or as factories have been moved offshore to countries where wages are lower, without America receiving anything much in return. These sentiments would be shared by many voters for One Nation.

Surprisingly, financial globalisation didn’t get as much blame as it could have for the global financial crisis and the Great Recession it precipitated. Although the crisis began in America, caused by unwise lending for homes that many borrowers couldn’t afford, compounded by the proliferation of highly contrived derivatives, it quickly spread to most other countries. This spread of trouble from America to the rest of the world was caused by two main factors: first, the world’s financial markets are highly integrated, which meant that many European banks had bought securities and derivative contracts that were revealed as toxic and threatened to bring those banks down. Second, the globalisation of the internet and the news media meant news of wobbling banks was transmitted almost instantaneously to the living rooms of homes in countries across the world. This continued for several weeks, causing a world-wide shock to businesses and consumer confidence. This, indeed, was the main channel through which the crisis reached Australia.

But it’s easier for Australians to remember that the global crisis of 2008 was preceded by the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, indicating that our highly integrated global financial markets are prone to crises – crises which invariably spill over from the “financial economy” of borrowing and lending, saving and investing, to the “real economy” of producing and consuming goods and services. The push by the G20 to strengthening the capital and liquidity requirement imposed on the world’s banks, though the Basel agreements, is intended to make financial markets more stable.

Most countries have not liberalised the flow of labour into their economy in the way they have the other factors of production. Although increasing numbers of people are fleeing their country to escape war, famine and persecution, many choose the country they’d like to arrive at on economic grounds. Many voters object to the inflow of immigrants, whether they be boat people arriving in Australia, Mexicans crossing the border to the US, or Poles taking advantage of the European Union’s single market to look for jobs in Britain. Immigration seems to have been a major motive for some Brits voting in favour of Brexit.

Income distribution and the gains from trade

One of economists’ core beliefs is that there are mutual gains from trade. Provided the exchange of goods is voluntary, each side participates only because it sees some advantage for itself. This is undoubtedly true, but in the era of renewed globalisation we’ve been reminded that, though the gains may be mutual, they are not necessarily equal. Some countries do better than others.

Similarly, the benefits to a country from its trade aren’t necessarily equally distributed between the people within a country. When, for example, a country imports more of its manufactured goods because they are cheaper than its locally made goods, all the consumers who buy those goods are better off (including all the working people), but many workers in the domestic manufacturing industry may lose their jobs.

Another factor that has been working in the same direction is digitisation and other technological change which, in its effect on employers’ demand for labour, seems to be “skill-biased” – that is, it tends to increase the value of highly skilled labour, while reducing the value of less-skilled labour. It seems likely that, between them, trade and technological trade have worked to shift the distribution of income in America, Britain and, to a lesser extent, Australia, in favour of high-income families and against many middle and lower-income families.

The unwelcome surprise many politicians and economists have received from the high protest votes for Brexit, Trump and One Nation is causing them to wonder if too little has been done to assist the workers and regions adversely affected to retrain and relocate, and too little to ensure the winners from structural change bear most of the cost of this assistance.

The factors promoting globalisation

I want to make a last point arising from my definition that “globalisation is the process by which the natural and government-created barriers between national economies are being broken down”. It’s that some of the barriers between national economies are government-created – such as restrictions on the free flow of goods and services, money and people – but the biggest barriers have been natural: the physical distance between countries which, historically, has increased the time and cost involved in moving goods, travelling and communicating between them. Historically, most services weren’t able to be traded across national borders.

This means the process of globalisation is being driven by two, quite separate factors: decisions by governments to lower the barriers between economies they themselves have erected – deregulation – and technological advance that is lowering the natural barriers between economies by lowering the cost of freight, travel and communication. Improvements in diesel engines and this size of tankers, the invention of shipping containers and the jumbo jet, are examples. Then there are advances in telecommunications which have hugely reduced the cost of telephone calls, and the development of computers and the internet, which allows instantaneous global communication at negligible cost. These advances have turned the provision of many digitisable services from non-traded to traded.

It suits many people who are part of the backlash against globalisation to blame the loss of jobs wholly on the actions of government and, in particular, on the signing of trade agreements. This way, they can tell themselves that getting the government to abrogate its trade agreement will return the world to the way it was. What they fail to realise is that many of the jobs lost from particular industries were lost not because of trade but through automation and computerisation. But governments can do little to halt technological change. Even if new protective barriers were raised – greatly increasing the prices of the protected goods – the rebuilt factories would be much more highly automated and employ far fewer workers than they used to.

So governments can, by reverting to protectionism, attempt to reverse the tide of globalism. But, since so much of the tide is driven by advances in digital technology, it’s likely many barriers between economies will to continue to shrink.

Shares of the World Economy, 2016

GWP Exports Population

China          18   11     19

United States   16   11         4

Euro area (19 countries)   12   26         5

India     7     2       18

Japan     4     4         2

Advanced economies (39) 42   64       15

Developing economies (153) 58   36       85

            100 100     100

Source: IMF; GWP based on purchasing power parity

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