The five things you need to know about TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated between the EU and the US. I think it's a good idea. Here's what you should know about it: 1. Abolishing tariffs is only a small part of TTIP.

Tariffs are generally low between the EU and US, but for some sectors they are very high. The EU currently imposes a 10% duty on car imports from the US, and the US imposes tariffs as high as 40% on some clothes from the EU, like shoes. Getting rid of those high sectoral tariffs will allow for greater economic specialisation, and the EU and US economies are so large that even reducing small tariffs overall would boost wealth levels a bit.

2. The biggest costs to trade are from so-called ‘non-tariff barriers’, and getting rid of these could have a big effect.

Most of TTIP is designed to harmonise regulation where there is redundant double-regulation (or ‘regulatory incoherence’) of firms operating in both the EU and the US. For instance, cars may be just as safe in the US and the EU (or not – nobody's sure yet), but have to adhere to completely different safety requirements to achieve that. Harmonising car safety regulations could make it cheaper to build cars without reducing car safety at all. Because of different rules about egg washing that don't seem to make a difference to actual safety, US eggs couldn't legally be sold in the UK and vice versa. Some regulations are simply designed to make it more expensive for foreign firms to sell goods, to protect native firms. Harmonising some of these rules should reduce costs substantially.

Different regulatory regimes might allow for more experimentation, but the feedback mechanisms involved in regulation are so fuzzy that this kind of ‘discovery process’ rarely actually takes place.

3. The economic gains from TTIP could be pretty substantial.

The CEPR estimates that a successful TTIP that removed a lot of these ‘non-tariff barriers’ as well as all existing tariffs would cause an increase to EU GDP by €120bn (0.5% of GDP) and US GDP by €95bn (0.4% of GDP) in total. That’s modest, but would translate into an extra £400 annually for British households. 90% of those GDP gains would come from non-tariff measure cuts.

4. The only regulations that TTIP will prevent in the future are ones that discriminate against foreign firms.

This will include rules that mean that US and EU governments will have to consider foreign firms for public procurement in certain areas (but not publicly-funded healthcare, social services, education or water services). In general the EU is extremely restrictive about the impact TTIP can have on public services. EU governments can organise public services so that only one monopoly provider supplies it (eg, the NHS), and they can regulate whatever they deem to be ‘public services’ at any level of government. The only exception is where an EU government has already opened up a sector to foreign firms (ie, to avoid firms that have already invested from losing their money). This is a pity, I think – I’d like to see EU states sign up to an agreement that stopped them from discriminating against foreign firms in all areas. But TTIP is not that agreement.

5. The Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in TTIP – the so-called ‘secret courts’ – are nothing new.

Pretty much every free trade agreement signed around the world includes an ISDS provision, which allows firms to challenge states that renege on their part of the deal. Since 1975 the UK has signed 90 ISDS treaties, and 3,400 exist around the world. In that time the UK investors have brought 43 claims against other states. Only two have ever been brought against the UK and both were unsuccessful. What’s more, ISDSes cannot compel a state to change its laws, only to pay compensation to firms if it has broken its treaty obligations. It might seem pointless to have this – the UK and the US both have strong rules of law. But TTIP also includes countries like Greece, Hungary and Romania which have much less reliable judicial systems.

Trade restrictions and dehumanisation

Tariffs are simply taxes but one can see why subsidies are, in the eyes of some, somewhat justifiable (though they still remain morally reproachable). However, a closer examination of both reveals the problematic, degrading moral assumptions that their imposition necessarily presupposes (along with all protectionist policy). Protectionist policies are, more often than not, designed to protect domestic industry. The argument is usually phrased along the lines of “protecting our farmers’ jobs”, “our workers’ jobs”, “our manufacturing industry”. It all boils down to protecting the jobs of domestic citizens; this is essentially nationalism in benevolent garb.

‘Protecting’ farmers, for example, from the competition of comparatively cheaper foreign imports imposes costs upon domestic consumers (whose range of choice is restricted and who are forced to pay higher prices). However, protecting domestic farmers over foreign farmers via tariffs, subsidies and other trade restrictions presupposes a key value judgment by elevating domestic farmers’ jobs’ intrinsic worth over foreign farmers’ jobs’ intrinsic worth. There is no real economic reason for this since this is one topic that all economists agree on (except, perhaps, for some agricultural economists based in rural and/or semi-rural communities); that is, that there should be free trade between countries – rather, this is a question of politics.

Systemically, it is an issue of agricultural land usage rights; after all, if farmers could diversify the use of their land, then they would no longer need subsidies (since their income stream would no longer be limited solely to farming) – hence, they are also tools of perpetuating political dependence. There is also the issue of food security but this is reflective of the prevailing war-ready/war-preparing psyche and artificially reduces the costs of going to war in the first place (an obvious cause for concern in the long-run). In this case, the criteria for elevating the political worth of a person boils down to voting rights, nationality, culture, ethnicity etc. rather than the simple fact of the personhood they are naturally endowed with.

Those who lobby government to redistribute wealth argue that it is unfair that people can be so privileged or downtrodden merely through birth. However, tariffs and subsidies are essentially income redistributions in at least three ways; firstly, from taxpayers (taxes fund subsidies), secondly, from consumers (tariffs make products more expensive and reduce a range of choice) and thirdly, from foreign producers (by making it infeasible for them to export and thereby make a living). Through capitalising on the shaky, divisive social construct of nationality and citizenship, protectionists have successfully increased tax revenue and subtly assaulted the intrinsic worth of human life. Is this redistribution of income really worth moral retrogression?

Oxfam, capitalism, and poverty

After Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century told us about rising inequality, it's perhaps unsurprising that a new report from Oxfam tells us the global 1% will soon own half of all the world's wealth. But things are not quite as they seem. Oxfam's figures look at net wealth, implying that Societe Generale rogue investment banker Jerome Kerviel is the world's poorest person, and Michael Jackson was afflicted by the direst poverty before he died.

Ivy League graduates about to start a job as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs are judged far poorer than rural Indian farmers with the tiniest amount of capital.

Seven point five per cent of the poorest tenth of the world live in the USA, the figures say, almost as many as live in India.

And the claim that 85 own as much as 3.5bn is even more misleading, since the bottom 2bn don't have nothing, but negative wealth—something like $500bn of it.

What's more the global 1% probably contains more Times readers than CEOs or oil sheikhs—you need own a house worth around £530,000 to enter it.

All these facts skew Oxfam’s figures to make them astonishingly misleading.

Better figures tell a completely different and far more optimistic story.

Global poverty has actually fallen enormously with the rise of global capitalism. The fraction of the world's population living on less than $2 a day (measured in constant dollars) has crashed from 69.6 per cent in 1981 to 43 per cent today.

Even if you take out India and China, where the most spectacular improvements have been made, and look only at Sub-Saharan Africa, the worst-off region, there have been improvements. From 1981-2006 8.6 percentage points fewer were living on under $1 a day and 4.9 percentage points fewer were living on under $2 a day.

In virtually every respect global poverty is falling and poor people are living longer, better lives. That is less sexy than Oxfam’s claims, but at least it is true.

If only Britain had joined the Euro?

Will Hutton tells us, in last Thursday's Guardian, that widespread consensus on the UK's staying out of the EU is wrong-headed—joining would have kept our exchange rate low, which in turn would have meant no financial boom and an economy based (more) around producing manufactures. To add to this, our entry would have meant a more activist European Central Bank, which would have been willing to intervene when necessary. There is more wrong with his article than I could possibly tackle in one post, so I will focus on the key elements I've summarised above. None of what I say implies it necessarily would have been bad to have been in the Euro over the past ten years—such an alternative history is almost impossible to conclusively support—just that the arguments Hutton uses are extremely weak.

Pretty much all of his argument is bizarre, utopian and uneconomic. Devaluations work not because they make a country's products cheaper to foreigners, adding to net exports and driving GDP growth. Devaluations work because they boost inflation, which gets around nominal wage stickiness, allowing markets (particularly labour markets) to clear and giving relative prices the space to adjust. They make no difference to the price of a country's goods to foreigners, and in practice often boost imports as much as or more than exports, due to improved conditions. This is even true if we devalue by decree, as Hutton's desired artificially low €-£ exchange rate would be—it's just that the inflation could take slightly longer to come as firms and households bid up prices.

What's more, this is a Good Thing. We don't want to spend energy, time, labour and capital hours, as well as space, producing valuable things only to sell them in exchange for artificially few foreign goods. If countries are happy to send us desirable stuff in exchange for less of our stuff then that's great, and in any case it sows the seeds of its own balance, as consistent deficits (ceteris paribus) will drive down the exchange rate. This may eventually force the UK to run surpluses, but this would not be a Good Thing. Running surpluses means lower social welfare because we are consuming less leisure or goods or services than we would otherwise be able to enjoy. And we may never even have to run one if we keep creating loads of property or financial wealth to pay for our imports.

But let's imagine that Hutton could have subverted economic rules as basic as gravity and magically have kept the exchange rate at his desired low rate without any of the obvious expected balancing effects from wages and prices. And let's imagine that we want to send more goods abroad to get less in return. Would this have supported the manufacturing industries he wants? It's difficult to see how. If the City was providing the best financial services options for the world at £1 = €1.25 then it's not obvious that a cheaper pound, and cheaper financial services, would make them less attractive. The UK's economy contains a relatively large contribution from financial services because the UK is relatively good at financial services—as well as hi-tech manufacturing, advertising, and many service sector areas. These are the UK's comparative and in some cases absolute advantages.

And would the UK be better under the ECB (albeit with some British influence) rather than its own Bank of England? It's hard to see why Hutton thinks this. The BoE let inflation rise to hit 5.2% on the CPI measure, and has consistently allowed inflation to stay above target—the ECB has inflation below its 2% target, despite the obscene jobs crises in Spain, Greece and other crisis-hit countries. It is basically refusing to do any monetary stimulus. There is essentially no debate in Europe over whether the ECB should actually meet its inflation target, or indeed consider other economic variables, or go yet more radical and drop inflation targeting altogether. Would the UK's input really outweigh the massive consensus there, especially when the UK is divided on the issue itself? Again, I am sceptical. Strangely, Hutton seems to think that pointing to the UK's own situation and reminding us we're not living in "a land of milk and honey" is sufficient to gloss over the fact that most of the Eurozone is doing so much worse!

This laughable logical leap is nothing compared to his claim that both sides of the political divide are "united only in their belief, against all the evidence including Britain's export performance, that floating exchange rates are a universal panacea." As might be expected, he doesn't give the tiniest shred of evidence that the consensus view holds that floating exchange rates are not only the best exchange rate policy, but a panacea for all types of economic ills. But really, that's not the point. Even if everyone did—ridiculously—think that floating exchange rates were actually a panacea for economic problems, that wouldn't go any way to implying that they weren't better than fixed exchange rates.

Will Hutton's argument is completely invalid, though perhaps he gets some points for making such an outlandish and unpopular case. If it would have been good for the UK to enter the Euro 10 years ago, then it is not because it would have allowed us to permanently rig all markets to send off more of our stuff for cheaper than it is worth. And it seems completely implausible that the UK could have influenced the ECB enough to see it ditch its destructive hard money policies during the crisis, instead it seems more likely the UK would be just another country suffering under its negligence.

Devaluing the pound won't do what its advocates want it to do

Civitas this week released a pamphlet, written by import-export businessman John Mills, arguing that the UK government should target an exchange rate a third lower than the current one, in order to boost demand and UK manufacturing by raising net exports. In turn, this would lessen the burden on the welfare state, allow the government to extricate itself from the economy, alleviate long-term unemployment, improve the self-help ethos and traditional work ethic, and even arrest the UK’s international relative decline, Mills argues.

While making this case Mills ties himself up in a few apparent contradictions (e.g. a strong pound is terrible because it is bad for purchasing power) and with no argument dismisses hundreds of years of economic consensus (with a very crude mercantilism) but I will try to distil the most coherent and convincing argument out of the monograph, in order to make the fairest possible critique.

While China has wound its exchange rate policy down, and Japan does not explicitly target the price of the Yen, Civitas founder David Green holds up Switzerland as a good example of how a country can target its exchange rate. Switzerland buys up foreign currency with newly-created money from the central bank in order to keep Swiss Francs at the desired target. While a Civitas blog post from a third author, Daniel Bentley, comes out against a similar money printing means of achieving a lower rate, it’s unclear what else Mills would propose, since he doesn’t suggest any mechanism at all.

In any case, the price of a pound is governed by demand and supply. Economic authorities could either cut demand or boost supply. Since the whole point of the scheme is to raise the demand for British goods by cutting their price a demand-cutting plan would have to be careful. Green thinks that investment into UK housing and gilts is “artificially” propping up sterling, so perhaps he’d like to ban or limit these. Presuming this outrageous interference with trading freedom was legal; it’s unclear if the pound could actually be cheapened by the desired third by cutting these demands.

Still, foreigners hold about 30 per cent of gilts and foreign buyers have recently been responsible for a majority of transactions in prime London property. If previous investments could be hit as well as new activity, sterling would surely come under serious pressure. This would slash home-owning Londoners’ wealth and hike the government’s borrowing costs, but it should also make UK manufactures (and services) cheaper.

However, even with this printing-free mechanism there should be inflation. Any import business will face higher prices on its imports. Presuming margins are already competitive, the entirety of the exchange rate driven cost hike should feed through into prices. Depending on demand elasticities – the responsiveness of consumer choices to price rises in all the different affected markets (the UK currently imports about £570bn of goods, services and oil per year) this might produce some substitution in demand for these goods, along with a secular fall in demand. But it seems highly likely that this demand dip will not be enough to bring prices back to where they were – and bear in mind if it did this would mean a big fall in consumption for the same prices.

The necessity to bluntly interfere in investment and housing decisions make the above method a very unpleasant one, and we have seen how Mills’ promise that there will be no inflation (based on the dip in the pace of price rises seen after the exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism) appears very unlikely. Of course, as suggested, the above demand-based scheme is highly distortionary aside from its philosophical issues. So the supply-based method of cheapening the pound – money printing, and inflation – starts to look much more attractive.

But – aside from going against Bentley’s blog post, and Mills’ promise not to create inflation – printing has very clear problems as a means of boosting exports. If $1 buys £1 when the money supply is £100, and we print £100, we’d expect – all things being equal, for the dollar to now buy £2. But since all things are equal, UK factories are still only churning out 100 widgets. These originally went for £1 (and hence $1), but now they will go for £2, so despite the fact the pound is cheaper, the widgets still cost $1. We get all the costs (and benefits) of inflation and none of the supposed benefits (and costs) of cheaper sterling.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Printing extra money is futile if your goal is to boost UK net exports past the very shortest of short runs. But it is by no means futile if your goal is to boost UK inflation to overcome the nominal rigidities (cash prices that won’t fall) particularly wages. UK unemployment is still well above the natural rate, even though employment recently hit an all-time record. One of the key reasons it reached the 29.75m peak is that real wages have been falling throughout the crisis.

A further bout of inflation would give the space for relative real prices to adjust to clear markets and bring the UK much closer to full employment of all resources. So while the paper is muddled and wrongheaded, I would actually support an exchange rate target as a misguided way of getting the extra demand we need.