Observations on the Salvadoran Economy
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OBSERVATIONS ON THE SALVADORAN ECONOMY (Principal Themes Presented at a Meeting Sponsored by USAID and FUSADES), San Salvador May 2007 Arnold C. Harberger University of California, Los Angeles At the outset, let me inform some and remind other Salvadoran listeners and readers that I come to today’s task as an old friend of this country. My first visit took place in the early 1970s (most likely in 1972) and I worked quite regularly here, under USAID auspices, during the rest of that decade. My next major stint of work took place in 1988-89, when I organized a team of foreign experts to study the economy of El Salvador, and then compile a series of policy suggestions that might be useful as a new president took office. Our visits spanned a period of over 6 months, prior to the presidential election. We met with all the candidates and all their economic teams. That election resulted in the installation of Alfredo Cristiani as President of El Salvador. From the standpoint of our own mission, which had its headquarters in FUSADES under the sponsorship of USAID, this was an extremely serendipitous outcome. The reason was that our Salvadoran counterparts (for our own studies) were all connected to FUSADES in one way or another, and it then turned out that President Cristiani selected many of them as members of his cabinet, as President of the Central Bank, and as technical experts. These and other members of President Cristiani’s team were instrumental in implementing the important wave of economic liberalizations and other reforms that were carried out at that time. I believe that much of the subsequent success of the Salvadoran economy can be attributed to these reforms. I subsequently returned several times to this country, a few times at the invitation of FUSADES to 2 update my own impressions and diagnosis of the economic panorama, and then several times in connection with the work of ESEN (Escuela Superior de Economia y Negocios), on whose Academic Advisory Board I serve. Over the three-plus decade time span of these visits there is one topic that seemed always to be present -- the real exchange rate. Let me recount to you two experiences -- one from the latter part of the 1970s, the other from the late 1980s, to give you an idea of the persistence of this topic, and also how its specific form changed with the tides of history. Some of you will recall that the middle to late 1970s were a boom period in Central America, fueled in part by high coffee prices in the world market. In El Salvador, one manifestation of this boom was a rise in the general price level. What was the mechanism by which this came about? The first point to realize is that the rising price level of that time did not reflect a textbook-style inflation -- with the Central Bank printing money to finance huge government deficits. No, the printing of money that occurred came as the Central Bank did exactly what it was supposed to do under a fixed exchange rate regime. It bought dollars at the stipulated rate of 2.50 colones per dollar. It thus had hard currency backing for the great bulk of its monetary emissions. What we were seeing in El Salvador at that time was not a standard inflation but a process of real exchange rate adjustment to an increased flow of foreign exchange earnings. If foreign exchange earnings increase by 5% of GDP, the Central Bank (with a fixed exchange rate) buys these dollars, thus expanding the supply of local currency base money. If nothing happened to adjust the economy in light of this new situation, the Central Bank might keep on buying dollars and expanding the money supply forever. But adjustment not only typically occurs -- it occurs quite naturally and with no further help from the authorities. The way the process works is that the people receiving all that extra money will normally not want just to add it to their bank accounts or stash it under their mattresses. They will want to spend at least some of it, and as they do so they will cause 3 the country’s imports to increase. As a consequence the Central Bank, instead of accumulating 5% of the GDP in increased dollar reserves, will add the dollar counterpart of maybe 4 or maybe 3 percent of GDP to its reserves. Of course the prices of nontradable goods will begin to rise as a consequence of demand pressure, and thus a price differential will appear, with imports looking ever cheaper as domestic goods prices rise. This causes people to divert additional expenditures from domestic goods to imports. Ultimately a new equilibrium will be reached, where the extra inflow of foreign exchange (5% of GDP in this case) is matched by an induced outflow of like amount (for additional imports in this case). Now the Central Bank is no longer a net buyer of dollars. What it buys from the extra export proceeds, it now sells to pay for the extra imports that have been induced by the process of real exchange rate adjustment. Adjustment is complete. But a critical part of the process of adjustment was the rise in the price of nontradables (which I also sometimes call domestic goods) relative to tradables. Now we come to the key to the Salvadoran situation in the latter 1970s. This process of adjustment was underway, but in a context of a highly protectionist, highly restrictive import regime. When the access of the public to additional imports is artificially curtailed, it obviously will take a lot longer time, and will clearly also entail a much greater increase in the domestic price level (relative to the fixed exchange rate) in order to induce the needed increase in the demand for imports. As domestic prices rise, another force also enters the picture -- the costs of producing exports increase -- which in this case particularly hurt the (non-coffee) exports whose world prices had not increased. So an added element of adjustment appears -- a decline in exports to the extent that these are squeezed out by rising domestic costs of their production. Now the reason why I’m giving you this background is to recall a speech that I gave before a large audience like this one, in El Salvador, at that time. Almost every time I have come to this country since the late 1970s, somebody has reminded me of that speech; it seems to have 4 established some sort of bond between many Salvadoran old-timers and myself. In that speech I drew the analogy of you being home alone, with a wild tiger racing around your house. What should you do to deal with that problem? “Open all the doors, open all the windows,” I said, so the tiger will have the opportunity to get out of the house. The analogy is perhaps too vivid, but it certainly made the point. The tiger was the extra money that was circulating in El Salvador as a consequence of the coffee boom. The closed doors and windows were the restrictions placed on imports, impeding the escape of that extra money. The lesson -- that the equilibrium price level would rise less from its starting point, the more decisively the country liberalized its import restrictions and controls -- was plainly evident. The second episode that I want to recount occurred during our 1988-89 visits to this country. In the course of our preparations, our team met not only with the candidates and their advisers; we also arranged numerous meetings with representatives of key interest groups -- manufacturers, agriculturists, importers, exporters, teachers, civil servants, etc. In the course of those meetings, I was particularly impressed, and later very frustrated, by an opinion that we kept hearing from exporters and from export-oriented producers. These groups were obviously suffering at that time from the low price of the dollar (in real terms). What had happened was that the internal price level had risen significantly, while the exchange rate had remained constant at 5 colones per dollar. What we heard from these groups was a continual complaint against the Central Bank and against the government authorities more generally. The complaint ran something like this. “Here we are, suffering terribly in economic terms, some of us going bankrupt, others near bankruptcy, and all because the Central Bank refuses to adjust the exchange rate. Don’t they realize that they could bring real prosperity to all of us, if only they would raise the exchange rate from 5 to 8 or 10 colones per dollar? How can they be so dense, so unperceptive, and ultimately so irresponsible?” 5 We would hear this complaint time after time. And in each such case we took pains to explain that the situation was not so simple. Yes, the dollar was cheap in real terms, we would say, but it was cheap not because of mistaken policies by the Central Bank, but because the dollar was so abundant. What we were looking at was an equilibrium real exchange rate adjustment to a very big inflow of dollars, period after period. The big new actors in the scene were foreign aid and emigrant remittances. Each of these sources was contributing an annual flow of dollars equal to 5% or more of GDP -- this on top of the traditional flow of dollars stemming from exports. So our retort to the complainers was that the low real price of the dollar was a natural outcome of the situation which the Salvadoran economy was living through.