Quarry Australia

Glenn Stevens' address to the Economic Society of Australia in Brisbane yesterday reiterated the RBAs forecast of our future - Quarry Australia. Is that where we want to be?

The speech was full of useful analysis and commentary on domestic and global economic trends, but I have many concerns.

First, I'm not sure why the benefits of the mining boom are not spreading to the States with the largest mining investments. The Queensland government is broke yet still feels the need to stimulate the construction sector to the tune of $10,000 per new home. Further, if the property market is a good indicator of overall economic performance, the resource states seem to be taking a hammering. And by the way, the federal government stimulus is still ongoing, with $2billion still to be spent even in June 2011. So the unstimulated state of the economy is yet to be seen in the data. I didn’t hear a peep about that.

Stevens did raise the issue of falling home prices in Brisbane and Perth, suggesting that the reasons were all down to population growth and risk aversion by households. If we believe his population explanation for home price (which is rubbish anyway), then we have to believe the whole country’s property market is due for a crash, with immigration rates falling rapidly since mid 2008 (see chart below).

Some of his comments on housing follow, but the bolded sentence still confuses me. I could paraphrase - "the bank has no idea why Brisbane and Perth prices are down, but most likely it is because they were too high. We have no idea if prices elsewhere are also too high"

It surely is no coincidence that the two state capitals that have had the clearest evidence of declining house prices over the past couple of years – Brisbane and Perth – are the two that previously had the highest rate of population growth and that have since had the biggest decline in population growth. Moreover, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that changes in relative housing costs between states, while certainly not the only factor at work, have played an important role. Relative costs are affected by interstate population flows, but those costs then in turn have a feed-back effect on population flows. This is particularly so for Queensland.
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The rate of interstate migration to Queensland then slowed further, to be at its lowest in at least a decade. The effects of that on state population growth were compounded by a decline in international migration, something seen in all states. At the same time, finance became more difficult to obtain and lenders and borrowers alike became more risk averse. This happened everywhere, but its effects in Queensland seem to have been more pronounced. Since then, Brisbane housing prices have been declining relative to those in the southern capitals and the construction sector here has found it tough going.

My other major concern is the following comment which is the justification for placing all of Australia’s bets on mining and energy.

For a long time, the world price of foodstuffs and raw materials tended to decline relative to the prices of manufactures, services and assets. But for some years now the prices of things that are grown, dug up or otherwise extracted have been rising relative to those other prices. This is mainly due to trends in global demand. At any point in time for a particular product we can appeal to supply-side issues – a drought, a flood or a mine or well closure, or some geo political event that is seen as pushing up prices. But stepping back, the main supply problem is really that there has simply been more demand than suppliers were prepared or able to meet at the old prices.

We do not have to look far for the cause: hundreds of millions of people in the emerging world have seen growth in their incomes and associated changes in their living standards, and they want to live much more like we have been living for decades. This means they are moving towards a more energy- and steel-intensive way of life and a more protein-rich diet. That fact is fundamentally changing the shape of the world economy. Even if China's growth rate moderates this year, as it seems to be doing, these structural forces almost certainly will continue.

The graph of Autralia's terms of trade (below) show the pattern of declining raw material prices since WWII, which changed some time in the early 2000s (assuming that our terms of trade is somewhat representative of the relative prices of raw materials and manufactured tradeable goods).

As a general rule, raw materials should become relatively cheaper over time as capital makes us more productive and raw materials easier to extract. This is always true even if there are natural barriers to resource extraction. Changes from this trend caused by a surge in demand are almost by definition temporary.

The generic argument is that China and India are making huge capital investments, thus they need a lot of energy and minerals. These countries are also getting wealthier and consuming more (and meat in particular). But the boom is driven by capital investment – building roads, rail, bridges, dams, buildings etc – which cannot be sustained for long at such a high pace. 

Remember, this a change in relative prices, not quanitites. Prices can fall extremely easily with the smallest of changes to the volumes of minerals and fossil fuels being traded.

The RBA, however, seems to think this price structure will be sustained for some time even though it never has in the past - the natural limit for the terms of trade appears to be around 80.

My main concern is that frighteningly, the RBA, and probably much of the government, sees Australia’s future as a single bet on mining, and is willing to sacrifice much of the remaining economy for this to happen. Unfortunately this is a lose-lose proposition for most of the country.

All other sectors of the economy lose while the mining investment booms. When it crashes, we all lose because there is nothing else left in the economy to absorb capacity in a relatively short period. Remember, the minerals will be in the ground if we don’t mine them now, but the decades of production chains elsewhere in the economy are easily destroyed and slow to rebuild.

I acknowledge that the RBA has a single tool in its toolbox, but surely the message we should be hearing is that a strong and stable economy is a diverse economy. Quarry Australia is a very volatile and risky place to want to be.

Realities of cycling

I've probably whinged about the inadequacy of bike lanes before, but this guy makes the point with a little more style. Enjoy the video.

Australian retail playing catch up

Almost every day now I am drawn into conversations about how much cheaper common consumer products are to buy online. The following is a list of products my immediate circle of friends has bought online from overseas (mostly from US and UK web stores) in the past month – books, shoes, DVDs, dresses, tailor made shirts and suits, camera accessories, toys and computer parts.

The price differences are astounding. Books delivered to your door from the UK for $8 when local bookstores are asking $24 for the same book. Shoes that retail locally for $200 are just $100 delivered from the US. It seems that if you can’t find online prices for less than 50% of the local retail price you just aren’t trying.

The Australia Institute (TAI) conducted a survey of online shopping and has some great examples of the price differences between local and online foreign retailers. A Sony Bravia television is half the price to buy online from the US ($995 instead of $1999), DVDs are usually half the price online, and even high end bicycles are half price if you get them delivered from the UK ($1599 instead of $2999).

Even more bizarrely my local bottle shop has a six-pack of imported German beer for $10 – that’s $4 less than the XXXX that is delivered a mere two kilometres from the brewery (and yes that is the brewed in Germany beer, not the locally brewed German style).

And one thing that really bugged me was that at the Hofer supermarket in Vienna a couple of years ago - Australian wine was 2.5euros a bottle, but the same wine here is more than $10.

What is going on!

We have a situation where not only are Australian products more expensive locally, but so are imported products!

My theories are -

1. Adjustments to higher exchange rates are very slow. If the dollar appears to stabilise around $1.05USD we can expect local prices to slowly converge to international prices.

2. Australian retailers are simply years behind their European and US counterparts in terms of adopting more efficient business models (think Aldi, Ikea),and especially for online retailing. Again, we can expect this to change slowly.

3. Australians still feel wealthy and don’t feel compelled to hunt for the best deals. This is changing as the TAI survey showed.

4. Many have suggested high rents for well located retail space as part of the explanation. This might be a contributing factor but I imagine that the trend for retail rents is down.

5. People get upset when prices fall. Remember the milk wars, the beer wars?

6. Local producers have no incentive to sell locally below the price they receive from export markets (as I discussed here).

I’m open to any other suggestions, but there really doesn’t seem to be one factor to explain this retailing discrepancy. I also believe that the price differentials between local and foreign online retailers are likely to shrink from now on.

Dwelling finance springs back

The ABS released their April dwelling finance data today, and there was quite a bounce for owner occupiers across all States, but investor finance continues to fall.

Taking a look at the big picture it is hard to know whether this one month's data is particularly meaningful.

Great Stagnation?

Tyler Cowen has an ebook that presents his hypothesis that America is undergoing a great stagnation. What he means is that teh rate technological change and economic growth has slowed since about 1973. You can get most of his message from the TEDx talk in the below video.

While Cowen acknowledges the great leaps in communication technology, I feel his presentation glosses over a lot of medical technology which is highly valuable and has continued to improve life expectancy.

He also glosses over a lot of other changes that people value but don't get recorded in the statistics (for example greater equality of genders and races or lower crime rates). The more effort society directs towards these social advances, the less effort it can direct towards technological marvels.

Overall it's a very interesting video for anyone curious about economics and modern history.

Queensland’s Strategic Cropping Land

I have been critical about the farming lobby’s reaction to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, and I have also been very critical about the value of food security, especially when used as a justification for agricultural subsidies.

My general belief is that farmers should be treated like any other business and face risks from their investment decisions.  Because this belief I strongly support Queensland’s new Strategic Cropping Land Policy. 

The policy under development gives farmers a chance to opt out of mining and gas production on their land. Currently land owners must allow mineral and gas exploration and development on their land. The mining industry has legislative power behind it to explore for, and mine, the States mineral resources (have a look at your title deed and you will note that even freehold land owners don’t own the minerals under their land).

This means that miners do not need to buy any property rights from existing land owners to conduct activities on privately owned land. They do however need to provide some compensation for disruption to activities (as prescribed under the relevant acts).

In the greatest of ironies, agricultural policies in this country have protected farmers from their own business decisions (eg. subsidising water supplies, making drought and flood payments - I argue these events are part of the natural weather cycle and should be anticipated), yet have not protected farmers from external threats to from mining.

It took a while for the food security lobby to realise that the food production of the country rests in the land, soil and water, not in the individual businesses of farmers. If a farm business fails, the productive capacity remains for the next buyer of the property. But if land, soil and water is irreversibly damaged, then potential food production capacity is destroyed.

With these bizarre policies in place it is possible to have the situation where a farmer is receiving drought relief payments on the one hand to save his business, while the government is supporting the demise of his ability to farm on the other hand by allowing coal seam gas wells to be peppered across his fields.

In the Darling Downs the preservation of the water quality in underground aquifers is especially important. These aquifers are a significant source of water for agriculture and there is a reasonable probability that drilling through this aquifer many thousands of times to reach the deeper coal seam will contaminate the water. And unlike a river system which flushes water readily, underground aquifers may take hundreds of years to recover (or water users will need to treat the now contaminated water before applying to crops).

The irreversibility of mining and coal seam gas impacts is one of the key reasons that farmers should be given some ability to opt out of such activities on (or even near in some cases) their land.

The outcomes from this type of policy should satisfy a broad range of interests.

1. Land use conflicts are more easily resolved by given some powers back to existing land owners.

2. By protecting the land itself those who want food security and local food produce benefit.

3. Those who want ‘agricultural open space’ benefit (people actually like knowing there are farming communities and driving through the country).

4. Farmers who want to be free to run their own business, protected from irreversible land damage benefit.

5. Those who want mining can do so if the impacts on surrounding land owners are sufficiently low.

Of course there will be problems to overcome during implementation, but in principle the policy appears sound. An indeed, the minerals and gas remain in the ground should future circumstances require their extraction.

The telco confusopoly

The one frustration that started me blogging more than three years ago was the confusing pricing practices of phone and internet service providers. It was quite obvious to me that their 'plans' where meant to be confusing to ensure the consumer could not easily identify the cheapest provider. Today, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has released a report that recommends improving price information for telecommunications contracts to avoid a 'confusopoly' (here).  Amongst other things -

The authority also wants to prohibit what it says are misleading advertising practices, such as the use of the term "cap" on mobile and broadband plans.

"It's not a cap, it's not a maximum, it's a minimum," Mr Chapman said

"We want to prohibit that unless its a genuine hard cap, so that if you exceed your limit the service ends or you get the opportunity to upgrade." (here)

Most recently I have been comparing mobile phone plans. Some of the cheap plans don't allow you to call 13, 1300 and 1800 numbers under the cap, and they all have different call rates, flag fall and penalties for exceeding cap limits. To actually compare providers you need to know your calling needs in advance and have the mathematical skills to run this call profile, and other scenarios, through a model of each available phone plan. Insanity.

As I previously wrote -

By consciously manipulating these two criteria of a free market [low barriers to entry and perfect, or at least good, information], all firms in the market are able to avoid a state of true competition that would produce the most efficient allocation of services, and are able to artificially inflate the value of the commodity, hence producing more profit for each firm in the market.

This is not meant to sound like a conspiracy, because indeed each firm does not need to meet in back rooms with the other firms in the market and all agree to limit customer information and the comparability of their products. They each simply need to aspire to the great marketing ideal of product differentiation, a concept that is fundamentally designed to artificially eliminate direct competition by removing direct comparability.
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The power of product differentiation, through its ability to remove comparability and create an information gap to distort what could be a perfectly competitive market, can be demonstrated by the case of the term life insurance market in the US in the late 1990s. There was a mysterious and dramatic drop in prices across all firms that did not correlate to price drops in other forms of insurance, which themselves where steadily rising.

According to economist Steven D. Levitt, this can be attributed to the realisation of a perfect market through the power of the internet. Although term life insurance policies had been quite homogeneous before this period of time, the process of shopping around for the cheapest price had been convoluted and time consuming, whereas websites such as Quotesmith.com suddenly made the process almost instantaneous.

In just a few years, the value of the term life insurance market in the US had dropped by USD$1bilion because of the new found ease of comparability. What insurance firm would want this to happen? Even if you were a small player in the market, say a 1% market share, your turnover had just dropped by $10million. It is perhaps one of the great recent examples of the power of perfect competition in allocating resources efficiently, yet possibly one of the greatest blunders by the insurance industry.

I believe that the power of private enterprise is its innovative response to the financial risks it incurs, but with very simple regulation the innovative confusopoly, which comes at a cost to cosumers, can easily be avoided.  Indeed, most of the pushback against the telco confusopoly is from webpages which keep up-to-date tabs on plans from each service provider and enable you to take some rough guesses about future use and compare the cost effectiveness of each offering (eg here)

GDP down 1.2% for the March qtr

In the next 24 hours there will be a frenzy of economic commentary about the national accounts data and the importance of the last quarter's figure for the RBA board meeting next Tuesday.  My money is on no move by the RBA and more poor economic data this year.

For interest, below is the GDP per capita and Real net national disposable income per capita over the past deacde.  Notice the last few years (since end 2007) have been very flat for GDP per capita, and volatile but not really moving for net national disposable income per capita.

Brisbane and Perth housing slide continues

RP Data-Rismark released their dwelling price data for April today (here).  Brisbane and Perth are leading the price slide with Sydney and Canberra showing small gains.  This follows a stream of poor economic data recently.

I March 2010 I suggested that the next interest rate move by the RBA would be down.  I was wrong.  They increased another 75 basis points in total in their April, May and November decisions. 

My reason for suggesting they must move down is that the economy was much weaker than they anticipated, and the outlook far less bouyant.  Given this recent data one must think that their optimism is slowly fading.

2011 will be a very interesting year indeed. 

Learning to judge risk

No, this is not a post on financial risk. It is about child development and learning to judge risks yourself (a hot topic in my household).

As an economist parent this article, and the comments that follow, is very interesting. It begins...

Play equipment designed by  "safety nazis " doesn't allow children to learn from risk-taking, an expert has warned.

More kids aged two to seven were getting injured in playgrounds because they didn't know how to take calculated risks.

While it may seem obvious, learning to take risks involves... taking risks! There is an old saying that epitomises this attitude – if you want to learn to swim, jump in the water.

But it seems that Councils are not going to replace their plastic low velocity slippery slides and bouncy foam ground covers with splintered old wooden climbing frames in hurry. The experts still haven’t grasped the implications of their research. They conclude with the following advice.

To improve playgrounds, Ms Walsh suggested longer and bigger slides built into embankments to eliminate falls.

Also, smooth boulders for balancing, shallow ponds for exploring and plenty of vegetation to provide nooks and crannies for children to crawl around.

But if children learn from risk taking, shouldn’t they build high fast slides, with no ground protection and sharp jagged boulders for balancing and deep ponds for exploring?

In any case, the finger pointing at engineers and playground designers was thoroughly dismissed in the comments, with molly-coddling litigious parents copping a bit of heat.