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The international economy as a constraint on U. S. macroeconomic policymaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

M. Stephen Weatherford
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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International economic factors increasingly influence American trade and exchange policy, and interdependence also circumscribes the autonomous choice of domestic policies. But the growing concern of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) policymakers over the potential for macroeconomic policy coordination to enhance national as well as world welfare implies that international economic relations present opportunities rather than constraints under some circumstances. This suggests that understanding domestic economic policy choice within its international context involves not only how policy choices are made within the bounds of international constraints, but also when countries might cooperate to modify the constraints themselves. This research looks to four important historical cases for information on these questions: the first three are the series of cumulating crises in the international monetary system during the 1960s and early 1970s, the fourth is the energy supply shock of 1973 and the recession that followed. The article describes the process of policy selection in each of these cases, contrasting domestic versus international premises for policy choice. The economics literature has emphasized the magnitude of domestic welfare gains available from coordinated national economic policies. Although the cases considered here do not contradict the importance of payoffs, they underline the corresponding role of political, economic, and strategic uncertainty in conditioning elites' policy choices.

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Copyright © The IO Foundation 1988

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References

Several readers of earlier drafts of this article deserve acknowledgment for their helpful advice, especially Lorraine M. McDonnell, Stephen D. Krasner and anonymous reviewers for International Organization, John T. Woolley, Haruhiro Fukui, and Mary McKenzie. Richard Clucas provided valuable research assistance.

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16. Roosa's advocacy of a network of bilateral swap arrangements over SDRs is typical: “[Swap agreements] are far preferable, it seems to me, to the often proposed types of action (involving still more difficult decisions and negotiations) that basically involve an oath of allegiance by all governments and central banks to a synthetic currency device, created by an extra-national authority bearing neither the responsibilities nor the disciplines of sovereignty”. Roosa, Robert V., The Dollar and World Liquidity (New York: Random House, 1967)Google Scholar.

17. For instance, looking simply at direct contributions to the balance of payments, in 1960 short-term capital flows—the focus of virtually all the American policy efforts—were $1. 3 billion, while the sum of U. S. military expenditures abroad, government foreign aid and loan programs, and U. S. private direct investment amounted to $7. 6 billion.

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20. From a few hundred million in 1960, the market had grown to nearly $50 billion by 1970, an amount exceeding the sum of official gold or dollar reserves. Its largest influence was on the most open economies and exaggerated the system's asymmetries, having a net favorable effect on the dollar but producing serious difficulties for economic managers in Britain and Germany. Most observers agreed that the problem was fostered by the growing magnitude, technical sophistication, and volatility of the private market for gold and foreign exchange, but in the liberal international context, this development was consensually beyond the reach of national policy. Indeed, the market served both central banks (which intervened from 1966 to 1968 to dampen interest rate shifts and smooth exchange market fluctuations) and domestic financial institutions (allowing them to avoid restrictions on the growth of lending, thus inhibiting national governments' attempts to control the money supply).

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26. The IMF agreed to monitor the exchanges to assure that national monetary authorities did not buy gold at the official price and then sell it in the private market; and the French and others, who had so persistently opposed the institution of Special Drawing Rights, were forced to accept their expansion, lest further resistance should threaten their acknowledged first priority—maintaining the system's fixed link with gold.

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57. Theoretically, fixed real wages also imply that falling demand should be matched by declining wage rates, so that employment and inflation are held steady. But in practice an economy with fixed real wages is the natural counterpart to a polity with strong labor support for left parties, so that political constraints assure that the real wage is ratcheted against declines. See Cameron, David, “The Expansion of the Public Economy: A Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 72 (December 1978), pp. 1243–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Because the supply shock drove energy prices sharply upward, the overall inflation rate could be maintained only if political authorities were willing to implement contractionary stabilization policy. Since union economic and political power can prevent a fall in the wage rate, such a deflationary policy must produce a recession and a rise in unemployment. This, in brief, is the dilemma elites faced in most advanced European economies. In spite of such high domestic political costs, their sensitivity to balance-of-payments constraints forced European governments to adopt partially extinguishing responses to the oil shock. The depth of the resulting recession helps to explain the failure of European economies to receover as quickly as the United States after 1975.

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65. The administration was not unaware of these arguments: the weighing of domestic as against international claims was a considered one. See, for instance, W. Fellner/CEA memo to President Ford, “International Financial Conditions”, 4 October 1974 (Ford Presidential Library, White House Central Files/Business and Economics), describing “deepening worldwide concern”.

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69. Blinder and Goldfeld, “New Measures.”

70. The president and his advisors were sensitive to the possibility of recession but more concerned to quell price rises, and advisors consistently gave less emphasis to early indicators of cyclical downturn than to those tracking the inflation side of the supply shocks' effects. See for instance, the CEA's evaluation of trends in retail sales, inventories, and wholesale and retail price indexes (A. Greenspan/CEA to President Ford, 17 September 1974; 24 September 1974; W. Fellner/CEA, 10 October 1974; 11 October 1974); predictions of the economic outlook for 1975 (A. Greenspan/CEA to President Ford, 26 November 1974); or concern about excessive monetary growth (W. Fellner/CEA to President Ford, 14 December 1974) (Ford Presidential Library, WHCF, CEA files). See also President Ford's remarkably Eisenhower-like speech against inflation, in an economic address to the Congress in October 1974 (Public Papers of the President, 1974).

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73. Monetary policy authorities probably deserve less blame for pro-cyclical actions than fiscal policy managers, since the Fed's ability to control the growth of Ml was less during this period than in earlier years. But the justified exoneration is only partial. The demand function for M2 remained quite stable, so that changing the instrument might have increased the Fed's control (Goldfeld, “Missing money”); most of the change in velocity is attributable to changes in the Fed's policies regulating banks and thrift institutions, and hence was at least partially predictable (see Porter, Richard D., Simpson, Thomas D., and Mauskopf, Eileen, “Financial Innovation and the Monetary Aggregates,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1979), pp. 213–30)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and both the record of discussions in the FOMC and the observable decline of real balances over 1974 add weight to the evidence that the Fed was pursuing a consistent antiinflationary policy. A second consideration looks to the difference in the policy mandates of fiscal and monetary authorities (see Woolley, John T., Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Bryant, Ralph C., Controlling Money (Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution, 1983)Google Scholar; Phelps, Edmund S., “Commodity-Supply Shock and Full-Employment Monetary Policy,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 10 (05 1978), pp. 206CrossRefGoogle Scholar–21), suggesting that the policy may have been largely intentional. The Fed is naturally more closely conerned with inflation and with the value of the currency. The rate of inflation in 1974 was historically high, and although unemployment was rising faster, the rate of inflation increased over the year (the annualized quarterly rate for the PCD was 10% in fourth quarter 1973; 10.9% in fourth quarter 1974). Thus what may appear to be neglect of real output losses for the sake of small gains in price stability may have reflected the attempt, in an environment of instrument uncertainty, to approach the Fed's historically preferred position on this tradeoff. See Enzler and others, “Problems of Money Demand”; Jianakopolos, Nancy, “The FOMC in 1975; Announcing Monetary Targets,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review 55, no. 3 (03 1976), pp. 1024Google Scholar; Lindsey, David E., “Recent Monetary Developments and Controversies,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1982), pp. 245–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74. Bruno and Sachs, Economics of Worldwide Stagflation; Oudiz and Sachs, “Macroeconomic Policy Coordination.”

75. Keohane, “Foreign Economic Policies”; “Theory of Hegemonic Stability.”

76. See Odell, International Monetary Policy; Gowa, Closing the Gold Window, on the monetary case; Oudiz and Sachs, “Macroeconomic Policy Coordination,” on the supply shock; and see Stewart, Age of Interdependence; Cooper, “Economic Interdependence”; Putnam and Bayne, Hanging Together.

77. Ruggie, John Gerard, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Post-War Order,” in Krasner, Stephen D., ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 195232Google Scholar; Rohrlich, Paul Egon, “The Concept of Economic Culture,” International Organization 41 (Winter 1987), pp. 6192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78. See Axelrod, Robert and Keohane, Robert O., “Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions,” World Politics 38 (October 1985), pp. 226–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79. Keohane, Robert O., After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar

80. See Steinbrunner, John D., The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.