Relatório Stiglitz

se alguém ainda cá vier, espero que isto seja útil: o Relatório Stiglitz

Crescimento ou... desvalorização, inflação e calotes

Desculpem isto ir comprido, mas pareceu-me valer a pena.
Trata do crescimento económico como alternativa à desvalorização, inflação ou falta de pagamento das dívidas.
O contexto é o da expansão do acesso da população norte-americana aos serviços de saúde.
em todo o caso, aqui fica a ligação para a revista The Atlantic


Richard A. Posner
A Failure of Capitalism
Feb 8 2010, 7:00AM

Is Paul Krugman a Realist or a Dreamer? Toward Refocusing on Economic Growth

Paul Krugman advocates an additional stimulus program, along the lines of the $787 billion stimulus program enacted last February. He has not, to my knowledge, indicated how large a program he wants, but presumably it would be very large, perhaps equal in size to last year's program. He realizes that the nation cannot continue running up its debt without serious long-run consequences, but believes that now is not the time to reduce deficits by higher taxes or lower government spending; that we should wait for the economy to recover, and then address our debt through economizing measures, primarily in health care--he believes that the Obama health care plan would reduce the federal deficit.

He is not being realistic. There is almost certainly not going to be another stimulus program of any magnitude as long as the recovery, anemic though it seems to be, doesn't give way to a 1937-style second depression. And there aren't, in all likelihood, going to be any significant spending cuts; the perfection of interest-group politics will see to that. There is no way, it seems to me, that adding 30 or 40 or 50 million people to the health insurance roles (in the event that an ambitious health care program is enacted after all) can avoid an increase in the costs of health care borne by the government, because those people will demand more care once they have insurance. There won't be offsetting cuts in Medicare because the old people won't stand for any reduction in their treatment options. There aren't going to be big tax hikes, either, to pay off the debt; neither political party dares to raise taxes, beyond letting a small part of the Bush tax increases expire on schedule in 2011. Because spending won't fall or taxes rise, the public debt will rise, so the interest on it will rise, and its rise will be compounded by higher interest rates as the debt grows. Rising interest expense will combine with rising Medicare and Social Security costs to further compound the debt. It looks as if, mainly by virtue of the Bush deficits and the costs (in reduced tax collections and increased welfare expenses, bailouts, and stimulus), the public debt will reach $10 trillion in a couple of years.

I conclude that there probably is only one way out of our fiscal dilemma, apart from default, devaluation, or runaway inflation, and that is to increase the rate of economic growth to the point at which a growing public debt falls, or at least does not increase further, in percentage of GDP. But measures to increase economic growth must satisfy four criteria: that they not interfere with the economic recovery; that they not put the government in the futile position of trying to pick tomorrow's industry winners and investing in them ("industrial policy"); that they not cost too much, as that will contribute to the deficit, because the costs are likely to be incurred before the benefits are obtained; that they be politically feasible.

With these constraints in mind, I suggest the following candidates for stimulating the growth of the economy.

1. Remove all limits on the immigration of highly skilled workers, or persons of wealth. (This should be done gradually, so as not to increase unemployment while the unemployment rate remains very high.)

2. Decriminalize most drug offenses in order to reduce the prison population, perhaps by as much as a half, which will both economize on government expenditures and increase the number of workers. (Again and for the same reason, phase in gradually.)

3. Curtail medical malpractice liability, which increases medical costs gratuitously (because the courts are very poor at identifying actual malpractice) and, more important, engenders a great deal of very costly, and largely worthless, "defensive medicine."

4. Augment the admirable efforts being made by the Obama administration to improve public education.

5. Increase investment in the treatment of mental illness, which disables people during their productive years.

6. Simplify the federal tax code.

This list is merely suggestive, and could surely be improved. It is meant to suggest a more productive alternative to the current efforts at comprehensive health care reform, unpromising job subsidy and mortgage relief programs, and ambitious financial regulatory reform--all measures that are likely to slow the recovery by making the economic environment more uncertain and our fiscal problems more acute.

Seg. Social: Crescimento pode salvá-la?

Can Economic Growth Save Social Security?

Challenge, Sept, 2001 by Moshe Adler

Here is a fascinating issue. If, because of economic growth, median incomes rise rapidly in the future, won't social security benefits have to be raised as well? As the author explains, growth will create a wealth of new and better goods. Thus, unless the level of social security's real benefits grows at the same rate as the economy, retirees will have to choose between the samesize basket of the goods that growth will have rendered stale and a smaller basket of the new goods. The only way that growth can "save" the social security system is by making retirees poorer.

o resto aqui.

Stiglitz sobre o PIB e a crise

A pedido de várias famílias, aqui vai um vídeo: Joseph Stiglitz - Problems with GDP as an Economic Barometer


Depois, há mais um livro do Stiglitz, que sairá em abril: The Stiglitz Report: Reforming the International Monetary and Financial Systems in the Wake of the Global Crisis, em paperback.

a descrição na Amazon é esta: The fact that our global economy is broken may be widely accepted, but what precisely needs to be fixed has become the subject of enormous controversy. In 2008, the president of the United Nations General Assembly convened an international panel, chaired by Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and including twenty leading international experts on the international monetary system, to address this crucial issue.

The Stiglitz Report, released by the committee in late 2009, sees the recent financial crisis as the latest and most damaging of several concurrent crises—of food, water, energy, and sustainability—that are tightly interrelated. The analysis and recommendations in the report cover the gamut from short-term mitigation to deep structural changes, from crisis response to reform of the global, economic, and financial architecture.

The report establishes a bold agenda for policy change, that is sure to be the gold standard for understanding and contending with the international economy for many years to come. The Stiglitz Report is essential reading for anyone concerned about a secure and prosperous world.