A question that has increasingly concerned many of us is whether the mounting pressure of economic slowdown and other mostly unpleasant macroeconomic changes we are experiencing are cyclical or structural. Is it the legacy of the global financial crisis (GFC), i.e., the ongoing cyclical adjustment that follows a balance sheet recession? Or has the world reset itself because of several structural transformation that have long been underway independently of the GFC? This article discusses Thailand’s new normal, paying particular attention to what future growth and inflation will be.
1. New normal for growth
There are two possible explanations for slow growth: a slowdown in trend growth or a persistently negative output gap. Consequently, a framework for thinking about an economy’s future growth can be organized in two ways: the long-run potential and the deviation from potential.
Lower potential growth
The most familiar notion of the new normal is the GDP trend that is projected to become flatter; from the supply-side perspective this could be a result of aging population, structural constraints affecting capital growth, and moderation in the rate of productivity gains as the economy has approached the technological frontier.
abpic2015_010_01
Chart 1 shows the sources of potential growth for Thailand over 2000-2025 estimated using the growth accounting approach (Amarase, Apaitan, and Tanboon, 2014). Prior to the GFC the acceleration in total factor productivity explains the bulk of the increase in trend output. This is consistent with the proliferation of global supply chains, technology spillovers that enabled the expansion of the production possibility frontier, and reallocation of factors of production to higher-productivity sectors. This development also happened in various emerging market economies (IMF, 2015).
Over the next 10 years, the positive contributions from both productivity and labor are estimated to be smaller relative to the pre-GFC period. Trend productivity will account for potential growth less due mostly to (1) the inadequacy of domestic R&D and (2) the moderation in technological spillovers following slower expansion in global value chains. Labor also contributes less due to aging population in line with declining birth rates and increasing longevity. Meanwhile, capital is expected to contribute more. Over the past decade Thai investment was restrained by successive negative shocks (notably, policy uncertainty caused by protracted domestic political instability). The adverse impacts of these shocks are expected to gradually dissipate going forward. In sum, Thailand’s potential growth is estimated to fall from 5 percent over 2000-2007 to around 4 percent over 2014-2025.
Secular stagnation?
A number of economists have pondered a disturbing possibility that the recently observed low growth is characterized by a persistent aggregate-demand shortage (as opposed to lower potential growth described above). Prolonged reluctance of consumers to spend and businesses to invest leaves the output gap persistently open.
This notion of “secular stagnation” has the origin in a question by Alvin Hansen, an American economist, about 80 years ago. The question was whether there would be sufficient investment demand to sustain future economic growth given excess capacity and the lack of good investment opportunities at the end of the Great Depression. With investment deficit and hence excess savings, there would be a persistent decline in the economy’s equilibrium real rate of return, which is an important characterization of secular stagnation. Today, Summers (2013) sees limited investment and the slow overall growth in the U.S. as relevant for the new normal of secular stagnation.[1]
Many economists are skeptical of secular stagnation. Bernanke (2015) argues that the availability of profitable investment opportunities elsewhere in the world should reduce the likelihood of secular stagnation. If domestic households and firms turn to investment overseas, the resulting financial outflows would be expected to weaken the exchange rate, which in turn would promote exports. Increased exports would raise production and employment at home, helping the economy to reach full employment. Moreover, it is questionable that the economy’s equilibrium real rate of return (also known as the natural rate of interest) can really be negative for an extended period, as some of the forces that drive the real interest rate trend down during the recent years are slowly fading.
What are the evidence that might possibly dispute secular stagnation for Thailand? Chart 2, obtained using the Kalman filter à la Laubach and Williams (2003), shows the real policy interest rate (solid, in black) and the estimated natural rate of interest (dashed, in red) — the latter is defined as the real interest rate consistent with output converging to potential and inflation converging to the target. Prior to the GFC the natural interest ra