Modelling Shocks to New Zealand's Fiscal Position
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Fookes, Craig Working Paper Modelling Shocks to New Zealand's Fiscal Position New Zealand Treasury Working Paper, No. 11/02 Provided in Cooperation with: The Treasury, New Zealand Government Suggested Citation: Fookes, Craig (2011) : Modelling Shocks to New Zealand's Fiscal Position, New Zealand Treasury Working Paper, No. 11/02, New Zealand Government, The Treasury, Wellington This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/205615 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ www.econstor.eu Modelling Shocks to New Zealand’s Fiscal Position Craig Fookes N EW Z EALAND T REASURY W ORKING P APER 11/02 J UNE 2011 NZ TREASURY Modelling Shocks to New Zealand’s Fiscal Position WORKING PAPER 11/02 MONTH/ YEAR June 2011 AUTHOR Craig Fookes 1 The Terrace PO Box 3724 Wellington 6140 New Zealand Email [email protected] Telephone +64 4 917 6254 Fax +64 4 473 0982 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the large number of Treasury staff who have provided comment including Renee Baker, Chris Ball, Matthew Bell, Nic Blakeley, Tim Hampton, Ruth Isaac, Natalie Labuschagne, Marcus Jackson, Tracy Mears, Samara McDowell and Oscar Parkyn. Thanks also to Michael Reddell at the RBNZ for input at an early stage and to Paul Dyer. External review was provided by Aaron Drew from the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and by Mario DiMaio at the IMF. NZ TREASURY New Zealand Treasury PO Box 3724 Wellington 6008 NEW ZEALAND Email [email protected] Telephone +64 4 472 2733 Website www.treasury.govt.nz DISCLAIMER The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Working Paper are strictly those of the author(s). They do not necessarily reflect the views of the New Zealand Treasury or the New Zealand Government. The New Zealand Treasury and the New Zealand Government take no responsibility for any errors or omissions in, or for the correctness of, the information contained in these working papers. The paper is presented not as policy, but with a view to inform and stimulate wider debate. Abstract This paper explores the use of scenario analysis as a contingency planning tool to examine how various purposefully-severe shocks could impact on the Crown’s fiscal position. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake and a process of domestic deleveraging are used to test the resilience of the fiscal position (respectively) to a one-off spike in spending and a more protracted downturn in the economy. A New Zealand economic crisis is not considered imminent, but historically unprecedented levels of private sector debt present a risk for the country’s finances. Scenario analysis can model hypothetical shocks based on past experience either in New Zealand or abroad. However, the results cannot take into account many of the factors that allowed New Zealand to come through the recent global financial crisis in a better position than many other developed economies. The tool’s usefulness is in considering how the size and structure of the balance sheet affect policy sustainability in a shock. Our results suggest that a sustained decline in tax revenue represents a key risk to the fiscal position. The adjustments necessary to continue debt repayments and avoid a liquidity crisis are compared to historic episodes of fiscal consolidation. While low government debt provides a significant buffer, the resulting (necessary) burden of adjustment in a larger crisis could still fall heavily on taxpayers through fairly rapid changes to tax or government spending. JEL CLASSIFICATION E65 Fiscal policy KEYWORDS fiscal policy, risk management, Crown balance sheet, sovereign debt WP 11/02 | Modelling Shocks to New Zealand’s Fiscal Position ii Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. ii 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 2 Crown risk and crisis management ........................................................................ 2 2.1 Sovereign risk management ...........................................................................................2 2.2 Sustainability, liquidity, and debt dynamics ....................................................................3 3 Methodology ............................................................................................................. 5 3.1 Scenario analysis ............................................................................................................5 3.2 Economic modelling ........................................................................................................5 3.3 Estimating liquidity risk ...................................................................................................9 4 Scenario 1: A one-off spending shock ................................................................. 12 5 Scenario 2: Weaker growth ................................................................................... 15 5.1 Economic shocks ..........................................................................................................15 5.2 Adjustment mechanisms in the economy .....................................................................16 5.3 Changes in trend spending or tax .................................................................................16 5.4 Other debt reduction mechanisms ................................................................................17 5.5 Comparative OECD countries ......................................................................................18 5.6 Impact on the New Zealand fiscal position ...................................................................19 5.7 Risk summary for each scenario ..................................................................................23 5.8 Probability assessment .................................................................................................25 6 Future work ............................................................................................................. 26 7 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 27 8 References .............................................................................................................. 28 Appendix 1: Debt dynamics ............................................................................................ 31 List of Tables Table 1: Select examples of major economic shocks .........................................................................6 Table 2: Liquidity risk scale for the New Zealand government .........................................................10 Table 3: Credibility risk associated with large fiscal contractions .....................................................12 Table 4: GDP impacts of an earthquake scenario (nominal % deviation from forecast) ..................13 Table 5: Earthquake scenario summary statistics ............................................................................14 Table 6: Country imbalances prior to the crisis (2007) .....................................................................18 Table 7: Nominal GDP growth rates used to model each scenario ..................................................19 Table 8: Liquidity risk summaries for OECD scenarios ....................................................................24 WP 11/02 | Modelling Shocks to New Zealand’s Fiscal Position iii List of Figures Figure 1: The interaction between fiscal policy and the balance sheet ..............................................3 Figure 2: The fiscal strategy model with interest rate feedback ..........................................................7 Figure 3: A cross-country comparison of debt ..................................................................................10 Figure 4: Large historic contraction (% GDP) ...................................................................................11 Figure 5: Gross debt following an earthquake in Wellington ............................................................13 Figure 6: New Zealand structural deficits followed a decline in revenue ..........................................17 Figure 7: Comparative OECD growth rates ......................................................................................18