TSCG Fiscal Rules: EU Mandate for Bad Policies

John Weeks

The EU: Hold Your Nose and Vote “Stay”

Most Americans and many U.S. progressives hold a favorable view the European Union. This positive assessment persists despite the crushing of the Greek challenge to austerity conditionalities set by the European Commission and European Central Bank aided and abetted by the International Monetary Fund.

The primary basis for pro-EU sentiments may be that Americans consider the European Union a bastion of social democracy in contrast to the neoliberal ideology of the Republican and Democratic parties, which Bernie Sanders has so eloquently attacked. However, the institutions of the European Union, especially its executive the European Commission practice a neoliberal ideology and pro-business policies as aggressive as counterparts in the United States.

This is not a recent change, but a long-maturing trend going back at least to when Helmut Kohl of the right-wing Christian Democratic Union replaced the Social Democrat Helmut, Schmidt, as chancellor of Germany. The misplaced belief that Jacques Delors, EC president for ten years, was committed to social democracy perpetuated the illusion of a progressive EU. While no reactionary like Kohl, the French socialist politician supported market oriented “reform” of the European Union’s economic policies.

By the 2000s neoliberals had taken firm control of the European Commission, manifested most obviously in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The step-by-step legal codification of EU reactionary economic policies goes far beyond legislation enacted in the United States. As a result, it should surprise no one that in Britain and on the continent support for membership in the European Union splits progressives. In Britain the issues looms large, with a referendum on continued membership scheduled for 23 June.

The progressive case of membership is a hard row to hoe.

Loss of Democracy in the European Union

History provides many examples of authoritarian rule achieved through formally democratic procedures. To these we should add the 2012 EU Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (TSCG), adopted by 25 democratically elected EU governments (the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom took opt-outs). On an EU website we find the overall purpose of the TSCG boldly highlighted:

This bureaucratically bland sentence asserts the power of the unelected European Commission, as the executive of the European Union, to monitor (“detect”) whether the public budget of an elected member government conforms to EU fiscal rules.  If it does not, the Commission claims the power to prevent the implementation of that budget and to specify the changes (“corrections”) required.

No one can miss the ideological asymmetry of the “governance framework” – deficits can be excessive, but not surpluses. In practice a budget surplus usually goes along with a trade surplus, so that the contractionary effect of the former will be offset the expansionary impact of the latter. Thus, not restricting surpluses carries an implicit mercantilist message.

The EU website goes on to explain “detection” or “monitoring” as follows,

When the EC implements this paragraph literally as it did in Greece, the role national legislatures is to endorse what the Commission judges as “compliant.” The TSCG de facto makes member governments formulate their budgets for the Commission not their legislatures, because there would be little point and considerable embarrassment by submitting to parliament a budget that the EC would reject.  After the Commission judges the budget as satisfactory the national legislature goes through a pro forma approval process.  It will be a small step to require, as in Greece, approval by the EC before revealing the budget to the public.

The TSCG transfers sovereignty from democratic institutions to an unelected bureaucracy. Were it the case that the EU parliament possessed substantial control over the Commission (which it does not), the TSCG would still be profoundly authoritarian because of the power of the EC bureaucracy over what should be decided democratically.

Treaty-Protected Mismanagement

EU fiscal rules, from the Maastricht Treaty to the TSCG are anti-democratic, as well as inflexible to change. The Treaty specifically commits the adopting government to embed the fiscal rules in law in a manner ensuring their “permanent character, preferably constitutional.” Embodied in treaties, they can only change through repeal or adoption of additional treaties. Both involve extremely cumbersome and time consuming processes.

Were the fiscal rules theoretically and practically sound their anti-democratic and inflexible nature would still discredit them. Far from sound, they are technically flawed, mandating macroeconomic mismanagement. The Treaty mandates specific limits to fiscal policy.

Before considering the wisdom of the 0.5% deficit target, two major technical mistakes standout, 1) the Treaty uses an unsound measure of the fiscal deficit; and 2) the key concept, “structural deficit,” is theoretical nonsense.

The TSCG adopts the Maastricht deficit specification, total revenue minus total expenditure, which is the overall deficit. As the IMF explains in its guidelines for fiscal management, the appropriate measure for sound fiscal management is the primary deficit, which excludes interest payments on the public debt (which if reduced would imply partial default).

When the TSCG specifies the 0.5% as a “structural deficit” we go from the inappropriate to the absurd. The Commission as well as the usually competent OECD defines “structural deficit” as the deficit that would appear by eliminating cyclical effects; i.e., the deficit when an economy operates at normal capacity.

Making this concept operational requires an analytically sound method of eliminating cyclical effects, then a clear and consistent measure of normal capacity. The EU structural deficit fails on both criteria. In practice the EC bean-counters make no attempt to eliminate cyclical effects. The method of calculation of normal capacity ignores the cycle altogether by defining normal capacity to the level of output at which the rate of unemployment implies stable inflation (the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment,” NAIRU). Again, the EC bureaucrats reveal their ideology by taking inflation not output or unemployment as measure of economic health.

The NAIRU would be sufficiently problematical were attempt made to adapt it to the specific institutional characteristics of each country at specific time periods. For example, if the concept has operational validity, it is extremely unlikely that it would assume the same value before and after the 2008-10 global recession. An inspection of the eurostat tables for the actual and “structural” deficits shows no evidence of estimations with country specific adjustments.

The decidedly dubious nature of the NAIRU is indicated by its nom de guerre, “the natural rate of unemployment.” This phrase betrays an underlying ideology that 1) unemployment is a natural phenomenon to which all economies automatically adjust; and 2) inflation always results from excess demand. If the first were true the global recession would not have occurred. The second ignores price pressures arising from traded goods and services, petroleum being the most obvious and price-volatile.

The possibility of calculating country and time specific normal capacity would not save the 0.5% rule the realm of ideological nonsense. First and foremost, it represents static analysis applied to a dynamic process. The formal statement of the 0.5% would be as follows:

The 0.5% rule is a hypothetical outcome based on analytically unsound calculations. This “what if” calculation by statisticians is used by an undemocratic bureaucracy to force elected governments to implement contractionary economic policies. The technically unsound, hypothetical 0.5% target mandates a pro-cyclical macroeconomic policy. To render the rule Kafkaesque, after the EC bureaucracy calculates that a government will not meet the hypothetical target, it then mandates contractionary policies that guarantee that the target cannot be achieved. The problem is imaginary and the solution contradictory.

The wording of the TSCG makes it clear that deviant fiscal behavior by a member country will not be tolerated,

The “independent institutions” include the European Commission itself, which adds a distinctly Orwellian character to the already Kafkaesque Treaty.

Painted into a Recessionary Corner

Market economies pass through cycles of recession and expansion. They suffer from fiscal deficits in recessions, because falling or slow-growing output results in falling or slow-growing revenue. Such circumstances typically result from a drop in private investment or exports. Economies most effectively overcome recessions by the public sector using its spending powers to compensate for the inadequate private demand.

The TSCG legally prohibits the implementation of this effective countercyclical fiscal policy. It forces member governments to apply policies analogous to the practice 200 years ago of bloodletting to restore health to the ill. It is a Treaty designed to maintain perpetual stagnation across the European continent.

The term “Six-Pack”, the secondary legislation linked to the treaty, is frequently used as synonymous with the TSCG. This is a singularly appropriate nickname for the enabling legislation. The Six-Pack contains the economic equivalent of a pernicious snake oil, a witch’s brew to turn minor fiscal problems into recessionary downturns. For those dedicated to a prosperous and harmonious European Union, repeal or replacement of the TSCG stands out as an urgent priority. Fiscal integration on the basis of the TSCG would be disastrous.

John Weeks is a member of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) in London, one of the founders of the UK-based Economists for Rational Economic Policies, and part of the European Research Network on Social and Economic Policy.  Receive podcasts of his weekly radio program by twitter, @johnweeks41.

Triple Crisis welcomes your comments. Please share your thoughts below.

Triple Crisis is published by