Abstract
Political instability is often exacerbated in periods of aggregate demand shortfall. It has been conjectured that inadequate policy responses to recessions may be inimical to free economic institutions. This paper uses the Economic Freedom of the World index as its measure of economic institutions, and finds that the change in economic freedom in the following five, ten, and fifteen years is negatively impacted by an aggregate demand shortfall as measured by negative NGDP growth.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The precise mechanism by which this may occur is not developed in this paper explicitly beyond the description of the narrative. Sumner’s description (2015: 398) follows, comparing policies in the Great Recession in America to recent day Argentina:
[Argentina] adopted the dollar peg in the early 1990s as a reaction to its experience with hyperinflation (recall 1920s Europe). And Argentina experienced deflation in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the real value of the dollar rose in the foreign exchange markets (recall the real appreciation of gold after 1929). And Argentina hung onto its dollar peg until the economic pain was so great that a new and more left-wing government decided to devalue its currency and tear up promises that debts would be convertible into dollars (recall FDR revoking the gold clause). And the left-wing government moved away from the neoliberal policies that they wrongly thought also contributed to Argentina’s problems (recall the NIRA). And the powerful expansionary effects of the devaluation helped cover up the drag on the economy that normally would have resulted from the adoption of more statist policies (recall the U.S. recovery after 1933). The point is often overlooked; if depressions do encourage statist policy interventions, then deflationary policies may impose costs that are much larger than those predicted by natural rate models of the business cycle.
In a footnote, he continues,
The extraordinarily large and wasteful public works expenditures undertaken during the recent Japanese deflation are another example of this phenomenon. The most dramatic example of nominal shocks leading to harmful policies is World War II, which might have been avoided had the Great Depression not occurred.
References
Barro, R., & Lee, J.-W. (2013). A new data set of educational attainment in the world, 1950–2010. Journal of Development Economics, 104, 184–198.
Bologna, Jamie, Andrew Young. (2015). Crises and government: some empirical evidence. Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming.
Bordo, M. D., Landon-Lane, J., & Redish, A. (2009). Good versus bad deflation: lessons from the gold standard era. In D. E. Altig & E. Nosal (Eds.), Monetary policy in low inflation economies (pp. 127–174). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caplan, B. (2003). The idea trap: the political economy of growth divergence. European Journal of Political Economy, 19, 183–203.
Christensen, Lars. (2013). Deflation – not hyperinflation – brought Hitler to power. The Market Monetarist, http://marketmonetarist.com/2013/11/17/deflation-not-hyperinflation-brought-hitler-to-power/.
Clark, J. R., Lawson, R., Nowrasteh, A., Powell, B., & Murphy, R. (2015). Does immigration impact institutions? Public Choice, 163(3–4), 67–78.
de Haan, J., Sturm, J.-E., & Zandberg, E. (2009). The impact of financial and economic crises on economic freedom. In In Economic Freedom of the World 2009 Annual Report, James Gwartney and Robert Lawson. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Fraser Institute.
Gwartney, J., Lawson, R., & Hall, J. (2015). Economic Freedom of the World. Vancouver, BC: Fraser Institute.
Hall, J. C. (2015). Institutional convergence: exit or voice? Journal of Economics and Finance, 44(4), 829–840.
Hall, J. C., & Lawson, R. A. (2014). Economic freedom of the world: an accounting of the literature. Contemporary Economic Policy, 32(1), 1–19.
Hayek, F. A. (1931). Prices and production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hayek, F.A. (1973). Economic freedom and representative government. Institute for economic affairs occasional paper no. 39.
Heston, Alan, Robert Summers, & Bettina Atan. (2012). Penn World Table Version 7.1. Center for international comparisons of production, income and prices at the University of Pennsylvania. http://www.rug.nl/research/ggdc/data/pwt/.
Higgs, R. (1987). Crisis and leviathan: critical episodes in the growth of American government. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Ikeda, S. (1997). Dynamics of the mixed economy: toward a theory of interventionism. New York: Routledge.
Laffer, Art. (2009). “Get ready for inflation and higher interest rates.” The Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124458888993599879.
March, R., Lyford, C., & Powell, B. (2017) Causes and Barriers to increases in economic freedom. International Review of Economics, 64(1), 87–103.
Marshall, M., Gurr, T., & Jaggers, K. (2014). Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions 1800-2013. Vienna, VA: Center for Systemic Peace.
Meltzer, Allen. (2014). How the fed fuels the coming inflation. The Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303939404579527750249153032.
Mises, L. V. (2011). A critique of interventionism. Auburn: The Mises Institute.
O’Brien, Matthew. (2013). Unveiled! Lenin’s brilliant plot to destroy capitalism. The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/unveiled-lenins-brilliant-plot-to-destroy-capitalism/280006/.
O’Reilly, C., & Powell, B. (2015). War and the Growth of Government. European Journal of Political Economy, 40(Part A), 31–41.
Rode, M., & Revuelta, J. (2015). The wild bunch! An empirical note on populism and economic institutions. Economics of Governance, 16(1), 73–96.
Sennholz, H. (1979). Age of inflation. Belmont, MA: Western Islands.
Sumner, S. (2015). The Midas paradox: financial markets, government policy shocks, and the great depression. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute.
Wagner, R. (2014). Entangled political economy: a keynote address. Advances in Austrian Economics, 18, 15–36.
White, L. (1999). Hayek’s monetary theory and policy: a critical reconstruction. Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, 31, 109–120.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
APPENDIX A. Regression Results by Area of Economic Freedom of the World
APPENDIX A. Regression Results by Area of Economic Freedom of the World
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Murphy, R.H., Smith, T.L. Aggregate demand shortfalls and economic freedom. Rev Austrian Econ 31, 111–122 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-017-0377-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-017-0377-0