¿Competencia desigual o subsidio excesivo?

Los topes de gasto de campaña y los ingresos de los partidos para 2006

 

El IFE acaba de anunciar el tope de campaña para la elección presidencial de 2006.  De acuerdo a las fórmulas establecidas en el COFIPE, ese dato permite inferir el tope de gasto para diputados y senadores.   También se puede calcular el gasto máximo en que podría incurrir un partido político si gastará hasta el tope en todas las campañas de la elección del 2006 (ver Tabla 1):  El gasto máximo en que podría incurrir un partido en 2006 es de 1,475.3 millones de pesos.

 

Tabla 1

Topes de Gasto de Campaña
(en pesos corrientes)
	Diputado Federal	Senador a	Presidente	Gasto Máximo por partido
1997	676,092			202,827,456
2000	738,737	6,256,181	491,816,871	1,113,833,652
2003	849,249			254,774,565
2006	978,483 b	8,286,528 b	651,428,442	1,475,311,170
a Tope promedio por estado. b Cifras estimadas.

 

Para saber si los topes de gasto han crecido en términos reales, es decir descontando la inflación del período, es necesario calcular los topes de gasto en pesos constantes, por ejemplo, a precios de 2002 (ver Tabla 2).  De acuerdo a estas cifras, los topes de gasto de campaña para 2006 sólo son 2.4% superiores a los del año 2000.

 

Tabla 2

Topes de Gasto de Campaña
(en pesos constantes de 2002)
	Diputado Federal	Senador a	Presidente	Gasto Máximo por partido
1997	1,052,446			315,733,684
2000	792,227	6,709,174	527,427,991	1,194,483,315
2003	793,720			238,115,972
2006	811,548 b	6,872,795 b	540,290,654	1,223,613,809
a Tope promedio por estado. b Cifras estimadas.

 

Los topes de gasto de campaña tienen un impacto distinto en los partidos, dependiendo de los recursos, en su mayoría públicos, con que cuentan en el año.  La Tabla 3 detalla el financiamiento público para cada partido, así como los ingresos combinados de dos alianzas posibles (PRD-PT-Conv., y PRI-PVEM).  La última columna calcula la proporción del financiamiento público como porcentaje del gasto máximo por partido.  Como se puede apreciar, el PRI y el PAN por si solos podrían cubrir más del 77% del gasto máximo posible por partido, mientras que el PRD sólo alcanzaría a cubrir el 50.4%.  Sin embargo, si la alianza PRD-PT-Convergencia sumara todos sus ingresos públicos, podría financiar el 88% de gasto máximo.  Por último, los ingresos combinados de una alianza PRI-PVEM podrían cubrir sobradamente este gasto máximo (112.5%).  Claramente, más allá de los votos, esta es una razón más por la cual algunos partidos buscan entablar alianzas

 

Tabla 3

Financiamiento Público a Partidos en 2006
(cifras en millones de pesos)
Partido	Actividades Ordinarias	Gasto de Campaña	Apoyo para  programas de radio y TV	Total	Financiamiento / Gasto máximo por partido
PAN	573.3	573.3	0.2	1,146.8	77.7%
PRI	632.7	632.7	0.2	1,265.6	85.8%
PRD	372.0	372.0	0.2	744.2	50.4%
PT	139.3	139.3	0.2	278.8	18.9%
PVEM	196.7	196.7	0.2	393.6	26.7%
Convergencia	137.3	137.3	0.2	274.8	18.6%
Nueva Alianza	41.0	41.0	0.2	82.2	5.6%
Alternativa SDC	41.0	41.0	0.2	82.2	5.6%
Total	2,133.3	2,133.3	1.6	4,268.2
Ingresos combinados de alianzas
ALIANZA         PRD-PT-CONV	648.6	648.6	0.6	1,297.8	88.0%
ALIANZA          PRI-PVEM	829.4	829.4	0.4	1,659.2	112.5%
Nota: El gasto máximo por partido para 2006 será 1,475.3 millones de pesos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stiglitz on the Rule of Law

Stiglitz is going at it again.  This is a very nice paper where the authors tackle not only Shleifer & Co. but also Coase and many Coasean wannabes...

The Creation of the Rule of Law and the Legitimacy of Property: The Political and Economic Consequences of a Corrupt Privatization
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Karla Hoff
NBER Working Paper No. 11772
November 2005
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w11772.pdf

ABSTRACT
How does the lack of legitimacy of property rights affect the dynamics of the creation of the rule of law? We investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-Communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have "stolen" assets cannot be fully protected under a change in the legal regime towards rule of law, and that the number of agents with control rights over assets is large. We show that a demand for broadly beneficial legal reform may not emerge because the expectation of weak legal institutions increases the expected relative return to stripping assets, and strippers may gain from a weak and corrupt state. The outcome can be inefficient even from the narrow perspective of the asset-strippers.

From the paper conclusions:

"At the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the states owned assets of immense value that had been created in some cases by collective efforts over a period of 70 years. The privatization of state enterprises increased private opportunities for wealth creation, but also—given the absence of effective corporate governance systems—for theft. We showed that even when all agents are better off building value in the rule of law state than stripping assets in a lawless environment, once agents have engaged in asset stripping, at least some of them will have in an interest in prolonging a weak, corrupt state that does not interfere with their theft. Thus, the path of institutional change can be inefficient even from the narrow point of view of the asset strippers, who do not internalize the effect of their economic choices on how the political environment evolves."

Neoliberalism and Development

This is Brad DeLong on Easterly's book, The Elusive Quest for Growth:

Today the industrialized world as a whole is embarked--half-heartedly, I admit--on yet another crusade to try to make the poorer parts of the world rich. The ideology behind this crusade--an ideology that I believe in--is called "neoliberalism." It has two guiding principles. The first is that close economic contact between the industrial core and the developing periphery is the best way to accelerate the transfer of technology which is the sine qua non for making poor economies rich (hence all barriers to international trade should be eliminated as fast as possible). The second is that governments in general lack the capacity to run large industrial and commercial enterprises (hence save for core missions of income distribution, public-good infrastructure, administration of justice, and a few others, governments should shrink and privatize).

However, this neoliberal crusade is not the first such crusade for economic development. Since World War II there have been at least six such crusades: the "building socialism" crusade, the "financing gap" crusade, the "import substitution" crusade, the "aid for education" crusade, the "oil money recycling" crusade, and the "population boom" crusade. All of them failed to spark rapid economic development. Does what went wrong then have any lessons to tell us about the future of the crusade we are undertaking now? Yes--and now is a good time to take a look back at the history of crusades-for-development since World War II, for World Bank economist Bill Easterly has just written The Elusive Quest for Growth (published by MIT Press), his own take on the largely dismal history of government-led programs to spark development.

(...)

In Easterly's view, there are a few big lessons from the history: "Prosperity happens when all the players in the development game have the right incentives. It happens when government incentives induce technological adaptation, high-quality investment in machines, and high-quality schooling. It happens when donors face incentives that induce them to give aid to countries with good policies where aid will have high payoffs, not to countries with poor policies where aid is wasted. It happens when the poor get good opportunities and incentives... It happens when politics is not polarized between antagonistic interest groups, but there is a common consensus to invest in the future. Broad and deep development happens when a government that is held accountable for its actions energetically takes up the task of investing in collective goods like health, education, and the rule of law..."

It is clear that the neoliberal policy prescriptions--try to make government honest and smaller (so it doesn't have its fingers in as many economic decisions), try to keep the macroeconomy stable, and boost world trade and thus cross-border economic links as much as possible--affect only a small proportion of these requirements for successful economic development. Neoliberal policy prescriptions have little ability to create governments that energetically invest in collective goods, a political system that enforces accountability, a national consensus for growth, and a commitment by donors to reward success only.

Thus there is a sense in which neoliberalism as we know it is a counsel of despair. Most of what is needed is beyond its reach. The hope is that privatization and world economic integration will in the long run help create the rest of the preconditions for successful development. But we are playing this card not because we think it is a winner, but because it is the last one in our hand.

Writing Tips for Ph. D. Students

This short paper--from the witty John Cochrane--has lots of good advice on structuring and writing papers, powerpoints and seminars... 

 

Writing Tips for Ph. D. Students

http://www-gsb.uchicago.edu/fac/john.cochrane/research/Papers/phd_paper_writing.pdf

 

 

Here's is some advice on what to avoid when giving a seminar:

 

"Most seminars are a disaster. They start with pointless motivation and policy implications, which the audience can’t follow since we don’t know the result. Then we get a long literature review, which is even more boring since we don’t know the point of this paper much less what everyone else did.

 

Then we get a results preview. Usually, the presenter says “I’ll preview the results now because I may not have time to get to them all,” a strangely self-fulfilling prophecy. Since showing the main results is the only reason you came, why not just start right now! Worse, the reason we run out of time is because we wasted half an hour on the stupid preview!

 

The seminar then bogs down as people start asking questions about the previewed results; most of the questions are dumb (“I measure the demand elasticity at 0.3.” “But how did you identify supply shifts?”) since they will be explained in a proper presentation of the results. But the questions are totally reasonable since the claim with no documentation is meaningless.

 

Next, we get (in empirical papers) some “theory” that is really beside the point and only serves to provoke more needless argument (no, there really is no way to distinguish the “behavioral” and “rational” explanation. Clever audience members will come up with stories that reverse all the signs.)

 

Then we get some distracting preliminary results and tables and graphs of unrelated observations. More pointless discussion erupts; people don’t know what point the speaker is trying to make and the discussion goes off in to tangents. Finally the speaker sees there is only 10 minutes to go, tells people to be quiet, and the main results go by in a big rush. Everyone is tired and confused and doesn’t follow anything. I timed the finance workshop last winter quarter and not one paper got to the main results in under an hour!"

 

 

Beware of Economists Bearing Advice

Food for thought

Beware of Economists Bearing Advice: "Beware of Economists Bearing Advice
Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson
(Policy Options 18, no. 7 (September, 1997): 16-19.)

(comments in brackets are mine)

"Beware of economists bearing advice. Though some of it is valuable, the framework of theoretical welfare economics from which economic advice usually issues has serious normative limitations and distortions. When economists go beyond identifying consequences of policies to making recommendations, they typically rely on a theory whose only normative concern is welfare and its distribution and that mistakenly identifies welfare with the satisfaction of preferences [what if your preferences are bad for you?, or if you do not know what is best for you?]. Their advice about how to increase welfare must accordingly be regarded with caution, and policy makers must not forget that increasing welfare should not be their only goal. [what about the other dimensions of freedom and happiness other than preference-satisfaction?]"

"The sensible policy maker needs to understand the limitations of welfare economics and to regard its policy recommendations with skepticism. Welfare economics vulgarizes the problems of policy making by its limited concern with only one moral objective -- the enhancement of well-being -- and by its distorted identification of well-being with the satisfaction of preferences. The pronouncements of welfare economics must therefore be treated with caution. The recommendations -- like providing cash in favor of in-kind benefits -- seem so straightforward, and the arguments -- like the one we have examined -- so watertight. But what makes welfare economics so clear cut is that so much has been left out and that what has been left in has been distorted. Sometimes the omissions and distortions may not matter, but policy makers had better understand the limitations of the framework economists employ."

Higher education: Europe vs. the US

There is an ever going debate between public vs. private univeristies--and comparing the US and European university systems yields some insights.  Now, if you look within the US only, some public universities are just as competitive as their private counterparts--which may indicate that private education does not crowd out public education nor its quality. 

 

This is from the survey on higher education from The Economist, sep. 10th:    

 

"Europe created the modern university. Scholars were gathering in Paris and Bologna before America was on the map. Oxford and Cambridge invented the residential university: the idea of a community of scholars living together to pursue higher learning. Germany created the research university. A century ago European universities were a magnet for scholars and a model for academic administrators the world over.

But, as our survey of higher education explains, since the second world war Europe has progressively surrendered its lead in higher education to the United States. America boasts 17 of the world's top 20 universities, according to a widely used global ranking by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. American universities currently employ 70% of the world's Nobel prize-winners, 30% of the world's output of articles on science and engineering, and 44% of the most frequently cited articles. No wonder developing countries now look to America rather than Europe for a model for higher education.

Why have European universities declined so precipitously in recent decades? And what can be done to restore them to their former glory? The answer to the first question lies in the role of the state. American universities get their funding from a variety of different sources, not just government but also philanthropists, businesses and, of course, the students themselves. European ones are largely state-funded. The constraints on state funding mean that European governments force universities to "process" more and more students without giving them the necessary cash-and respond to the universities' complaints by trying to micromanage them. Inevitably, quality has eroded. Yet, as the American model shows, people are prepared to pay for good higher education, because they know they will benefit from it: that's why America spends twice as much of its GDP on higher education as Europe does.

The answer to the second question is to set universities free from the state. Free universities to run their internal affairs: how can French universities, for example, compete for talent with their American rivals when professors are civil servants? And free them to charge fees for their services-including, most importantly, student fees.

The standard European retort is that if people have to pay for higher education, it will become the monopoly of the rich. But spending on higher education in Europe is highly regressive (more middle-class students go to university than working-class ones). And higher education is hardly a monopoly of the rich in America: a third of undergraduates come from racial minorities, and about a quarter come from families with incomes below the poverty line. The government certainly has a responsibility to help students to borrow against their future incomes. But student fees offer the best chance of pumping more resources into higher education. They also offer the best chance of combining equity with excellence. "