Investimento Público: Uma ciência

Alex Taborrok, no Marginal Revolution, cita um artigo de Linda Bilmes sobre um problema pouco explorado (ou referenciado) quanto ao estímulos fiscais:

...We will be attempting to ramp up spending in a very rapid way in a government bureaucracy not set up to deal with this kind of effort. In any organization that starts to increase spending very rapidly there are risks of waste, fraud and inefficiency....

A good play to start looking for lessons is by analyzing the three biggest recent examples of heavy government spending on infrastructure: the Iraqi reconstruction effort, Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, and the Big Dig artery construction in Boston. Let me start by pointing out that all of these were plagued by a number of serious problems.

Iraqi reconstruction: [T]he Special Inspector General for Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen,...has found that the effort has been riddled with cost overruns, project delays, fraud, failed projects and wasteful expenditures...even though the first tranche of $19 billion in Iraqi reconstruction money became available in October 2003, the Defense Department did not issue the first requests for proposals for this money until 10 months later...

Hurricane Katrina: ...the US has appropriated, over $100 billion in short and long term reconstruction grants, loan subsidies [etc]...GAO found that FEMA made over $1 billion--or 16% of the total in this particular category--in fraudulent payments...items like professional football tickets and Caribbean vacations.

The Big Dig: ...the largest single infrastructure project in the US...many lessons on how not to run a project...officially launched in 1982, but it did not break ground until 1991, due to environmental impact statements, technical difficulties and jurisdictional squabbles...not "completed" until 2007.

Lembro-me também de um trabalho de faculdade que fiz sobre as derrapagens nas obras públicas portuguesas e os resultados não eram nada promissores em obras normais programadas por uma eternidade (como o Centro Cultural de Belém, os prolongamentos do Metro de Lisboa...). Não percebo como é que alguém pode confiar que em casos de investimento público apressado "para combater a crise", essas derrapagens vão ser menores.

Ou seja:

• investimento público leva muito tempo a entrar em acção;
• grandes projectos de investimento público levam sempre a desperdício de dinheiro ineficientemente;
• retira possiblidades de crédito a entidades privadas.

Mas, de alguma forma, Paul Krugman insiste em chamar à "belief in tax-cut magic" voodoo economics. (adoro a forma como Krugman coloca republicanos ao lado de charlatães e aldrabões... basicamente, se não tens a mesma ideologia polítca que ele, então és um aldrabão)

Estimulo fiscal: mais comentários

Apenas mais algumas leituras, para a época natalícia.
Primeiro, Tyler Cowen, sobre o já aqui referido capítulo sobre a crise japonesa, deixa alguns comentários:

A few observations:

1. This is a piece of evidence in favor of fiscal stimulus and so we should take it seriously.

2. It is, quite literally, only a single data point.

3. In November 1994 there was a big cut in personal income taxes and that may be responsible for some of the increase in economic growth in 1995-6. (There was also reconstruction from the 1995 Kobe earthquake, as one reader notes in the comments.)

4. Japan was much weaker automatic stabilizers than does the United States. Some of the fiscal policy boost was to strengthen those economic stabilizers. The case for doing that is indeed much stronger than the case for initiating new government expenditures in the form of specific projects.

5. The history is fully consistent with an alternative interpretation, as I have discussed in my post on the fetishization of measured gdp. Namely, the Japanese spent more money putting unemployed resources to work on construction projects. Measured gdp went up, but the Japanese didn't get much of value for their money. (Japanese construction projects from this era are notoriously ugly, wasteful, and unpopular.) The spending also didn't set off any kind of lasting recovery. It was the proverbial ditch digging without much in the way of later-order benefits or multipliers. In these circumstances a boost in measured, temporary GDP is very different from an economic recovery.

6. There is a deeper question of why governments so often back away from aggressive fiscal stimulus, if that policy indeed will bring so much recovery and thus bring in so many votes and so much revenue. Posen in his chaper suggests that ideology is at fault but I am not convinced. After all Japan is not ruled by Grover Norquist. The alternative null hypothesis is simply that governments see the fiscal stimulus is not working.

Anyway, that is the evidence we are being asked to spend $600-700 billion on -- or $2 trillion for some --so I thought you should see it.

Depois, uma carta de um leitor do blog de Greg Mankiw:

I work for the DoD and when the Department of Homeland Security was established,we helped them with many things, not the least of which was contracting. To make a long story short, you cannot juice up a government agency's budget by tens of billions (or in the case of the stimulus package, hundreds of billions) and expect them to be able to process the paperwork to contract it out, much less oversee the projects or even choose them with any kind of hope for success. It's like trying to feed a Pomeranian a 25 lb turkey. It's madness.

It was years before DHS got the situation under control and between the start and when they finally assembled a sufficiently capable team of lawyers, contracting officials, technical experts and resource managers, most of the money was totally wasted. Now take the DHS situation and multiply it by 20 and you've got the Obama stimulus package. Even if they hand the money to existing governmental agencies, the situation will be the same. Those existing agencies are working full time administering the
budgets they have. They can't just add a zero at the end of each contract and be done with it.

Os grandes investimentos

... para combater a crise em 2018.