Boris Vujčić, Governor of the Croatian National Bank
Convergence: is it here to stay?
Dinner speech at the 7th Annual National Bank of Poland Conference on the Future of the European
Economy, Warsaw 20 October
Thank you for this opportunity, it is always a great pleasure to be in Warsaw at a NBP
conference. I feel at home here, because it is not the first time I am here. But tonight this is even
more so, after listening to Croatian songs in this beautiful castle. That really completes the 'feels
like home' atmosphere for me.
Now, I'm the last one to speak at this year's conference, on the topic of the role of the CEE in
Europe, and, some people would compare that feeling to how the seventh and the last husband
of Elisabeth Taylor, Lary Fortensky felt coming back home, poor guy wondering what can I
can do here that has not been done before?
Most of what I planned to say about the convergence of CEE has already been said, but let me
try to put additional flavour to what has been said without keeping it too long.
The CEE has not been in focus so much, after the start of the crisis, as for the last few years
most of the EU countries have been preoccupied with problems of either public finances, or the
financial sector, or both. Rightfully so, as these issues have been threatening the very existence
of the euro area and maybe even the future of the EU. While we are still not entirely out of the
woods, great progress has been achieved in these areas. Government deficits have been
substantially reduced and in most of the EU Member States public debt has been put on a
downward path. Equally important, as Guntram was saying this morning, we now have the
mechanisms in place to try to prevent or to deal with the next crisis more efficiently. The
Stability and Growth Pact has been strengthened, the SSM and the SRM as the first two pillars
of the banking union are now in place and ESM has been established and financially loaded.
With a number of other institutions (EBA, ESRB, ...) that creates ramifications of what he
labelled EMU2.0
Somewhere along the way when these big issues have been resolved people have noticed that
the convergence of CEE countries towards the income levels of their Western peers has, on
average, slowed down. The question is why, and what can be done about that. Potential rates of
growth are lower and with ageing populations, significant emigration and decreasing
investment rates, focus has turned to structural reforms and institutional quality. Labour and
product market liberalisation, or business friendly environments almost became mantras of
central bankers in their communication with governments and the broader public. European
institutions have started to stress the importance of the quality of the institutions. And not only
their quality, of course. Yesterday morning I spoke in Croatia about the need to improve the
efficiency of the judicial system.
It is fair to say that many reforms have already been undertaken across Europe and that many
countries are now seeing the benefits of such policies. For the last couple of quarters, every new
GDP data release by Eurostat has been a positive surprise, while forecasters have been raising
their GDP forecast for the EA and the EU. However, while growth has resumed in all countries,
medium-term growth potential in the region is insufficient to ensure pre-crisis pace of real
convergence. Namely, for convergence to be sustainable, long-term potential per capita growth
must be consistent with an expansion of demand. In other words, GDP growth that results from
strong capital inflow, foreign demand shock, or fall in interest rates due to perhaps euro area
enlargement process, could prove to be unsustainable.
So, the question is, did we take convergence for granted? Was one of the great features of the
European integration process only a temporary and unsustainable phenomenon related to the
initial 'low-hanging fruit' reforms that corrected vast resource misallocation problems, followed
by a huge inflow of foreign capital before the crisis? Will convergence return back to a faster
speed, will it continue at a slower speed, or maybe even stop or reverse?
Is convergence still here and, even more importantly, is it here to stay?
Well, as it has been shown already at this conference, convergence is still present but it has
slowed down compared to the pre-crisis period. Of course, having said that, we have to keep in
mind that CEE has come a long way since the beginning of the transition. Our progress has
been tremendous. If we go back to 1995, the average level of income per capita in CESEE
countries was below 40% of the old Europe's income (in PPS terms). By 2008 it increased by
a half and reached 60% of the EU15 level of income. And in some regions, like the Baltics,
developments were even more spectacular with relative income per capita doubling in this
relatively short period of time. It almost seemed that such developments were in line with so
called absolute or unconditional convergence where lower-income economies grow faster than
higher-income economies, simply because the marginal productivity of capital in those
countries is higher.
However, today no one actually believes in absolute convergence theory which builds on the
assumption that across all countries, the level of technical knowledge (and its change), the rate
of savings, the rate of population growth, and the rate of depreciation are all the same. This
notion is clearly rejected by the data: countries differ in many, if not all, of these features. And
this is the case also for our group of countries in the CESEE region with relatively similar
backgrounds. Therefore, concluding that real income developments before the onset of the crisis
were in line with unconditional convergence theory would simply be spurious.
Since the onset of the crisis positive income convergence trends were first reversed in many of
the countries in the region and, when convergence reappeared, its pace was significantly slower
than at the beginning of the 2000s. At the current pace of convergence, most countries in the
region would need decades to reach German, Austrian or Swedish levels of income, countries
that are often referred to as the benchmark for the CEE region. Which, in a way, brings us to
the notion of conditional convergence. The theory of conditional convergence implies that if
there are persistent differences across countries in preferences and other institutional features,
divergence is possible in terms of both levels of income and growth rates. And the last crisis
has reminded us of this quite roughly. Just take a look at the countries of Europe's periphery.
The average level of income of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal in 2016 was only at around
67% of the German income, compared to 80% at the beginning of the millennium. Similarly,
in Croatia, Slovenia or, to a lesser extent, also the Czech Republic, the relative level of income
in 2016 was lower than in 2008. Therefore, growth and convergence can be held back for a
protracted period of time before they reappear, or forces can even work in an opposite direction,
leading to divergence. The South of the EU has actually not been converging towards the North
for more than two decades.
Therefore, the convergence of standards of living is not a sure thing, and should not be taken
for granted. And we all know the notion of keeping up with the Joneses, or in a more modern
version - keeping up with the Kardashians, a notion that is apparently even more important
today in a highly globalised world with a free flow of information. If the Joneses or the
Kardashians are getting a new Mercedes, people are bound to like something similar even
though just two decades ago they were driving Ladas or Trabants or Polski Fiat. So despite the
progress achieved so far, citizens will continue to want more. And why shouldn't they?
Converging to what?
Since the EU stopped converging, and actually diverged, from the US in mid 1990s the question
is should the goal be to converge towards the EU style labour, product and financial markets,
or maybe more efficient ones? Converging towards the structures that are themselves
underperforming might not be a right choice.
For example, integration of the CEE banking markets with the West European ones through
entry of banks into the CEE region at an early stage of the transition has certainly being
beneficial in bringing better technology and banking culture, as well as facilitating the transfer
of capital. However, today, when it is clear that bank-based systems are inferior to more capital
market-based ones, and when loan-to-deposit ratios are close to one, the goal should probably
be to turn towards developing more efficient structures of the financial markets.
How should we, as policymakers, react to this? What are the next steps that we have to take?
How much do we know?
Well, we know that when it comes to standards of living, in the long-run it is all about labour
productivity. And labour productivity, in turn, depends on the amount of capital per unit of
labour and something that we call total factor productivity (TFP) or multifactor productivity.
The problem is that both of these components are hard, or impossible, to measure, so we have
to estimate them, and that is by no means an easy task. Much has been said about the TFP
growth in the context of the discussions on the slowdown in the productivity growth, or
discussions of the convergence in Europe. However, if you try to decompose the data that are
used in these discussions, I believe that you'll come to realise that there are serious measurement
issues. For example, it is hard to believe that there has been almost no increase in capital stock
per worker in Romania and at the same time, the country managed to increase its TFP by far
the fastest rate compared to any other country in the region, or to believe that an almost similar
situation was seen in Slovakia. In terms of data, however, this is the best we have at the moment.
So, notwithstanding substantial data issues, the question is how can we, as policymakers,
influence these unobservables?
While we can expect a re-launch of capital investment growth, I am quite certain that growth
rate that we have witnessed in the 2000s, with strong inflow of FDIs and real estate bubbles in
some countries will not be seen again in the near future. That is why so much focus is on the
total factor productivity, ultimately seen as the only source of long-term growth. Of course, the
TFP is an unobservable variable, usually measured by the Solow residual. What drives the TFP
growth is a much trickier question. Is it innovations, technology advances? For us as policy
makers, understanding the determinants of technology adoption, the TFP growth, is key, as this
gives us the channel to act through. There is an increasing number of theory and empirical
papers linking development and the adoption of technologies to the role of institutions defined
in a very broad way. And data seem to be supportive of the link - there is a strong positive
relationship between the quality of institutions and human capital on one side, and growth on
the other.
But then, when it comes to the quality of institutions, or human capital, there has been little or
no convergence of the CEE. If quality of institutions is proxied by the World Bank's Worldwide
Governance Indicator (which includes six broad dimensions of governance: Government
Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, Control of Corruption, Voice and
Accountability, and Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism), there has hardly
been any convergence of the CEE region towards Germany. Notable exception are the Baltic
countries where we have seen positive developments also in the aftermath of the global financial
crisis. A very similar conclusion can be drawn when looking at the human capital quality, not
only that the CESEE countries lag substantially behind the EU countries that achieve the best
results in PISA tests in Math and Science (Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Germany), but the
developments over time are also not encouraging as in many countries the results actually
worsened during the last decade. So, one can raise the question of how did we manage to
converge at a relatively high pace before the crisis, or why convergence continues, with such
institutions and human capital?
On one side, such developments are worrisome, but, on the other, they give us the opportunity
to streamline reforms. Gains from reforms can be substantial. The European Commission
estimated that structural reforms that close only half the gap with best performers in different
areas (market competition and regulation, R&D expenditure, skill structure, tax structure,
labour market participation, unemployment benefit 'generosity' and active labour market
policies), which is not overambitious, could have significant macroeconomic effects. The level
of GDP in 10 years after the reform would be around 7% higher in the CESEE countries and
around 12% after 20 years compared to the "no reform" scenario, and effects on employment
are of similar magnitude. The OECD, or the IMF also point to significant benefits of structural
reforms in terms of TFP improvements. Even given the uncertainty around these estimates,
welfare advances would most probably be substantial.
But the billion(s) dollar question is, how to get structural reforms right? There are, in general,
two dimensions of structural reforms. First, and in principle the easier one, are the reforms that
bring us closer to the efficiency frontier. That said, it is possible that easy productivity gains
from sectoral reallocation and imports of foreign technology have been exhausted. The second
are the reforms that expand the frontier. But there is so many different policies that are on the
table here: Product market reforms, Competition policy, Labour market reforms, Public finance
and taxation (including Social security system), Human capital development, Innovation policy,
etc. Can we, and should we, act on all, or most of these different fronts simultaneously?
Probably yes. Do we as economists and policymakers truly understand all the synergies,
complementarities and marginal effects of different reforms? Do we understand political
economy of moving individually or in parallel on all these fronts? Probably not.
The bottom line is - there are no guarantees. There are no guaranties that levels of income in
the CESEE countries are going to converge towards those of the developed Western economies.
No guarantees that these countries are not going to form one, or more, of the so-called
convergence clubs at a lower level of per capita income compared to their developed peers.
However, it is our job to dare to introduce reforms even if we are not a 100 percent sure about
the timing and the scale of the effects, as these are often not under our direct control. But if
history teaches us anything, and if we follow the best practices from around the world, not only
the EU, then the path we have to follow becomes much clearer. And the closest thing to a recipe
for reducing the probability of being caught in the middle income trap (of low growth and slow
or no convergence) would be to dare to reform. Be it the education system with an aim to
increase the quality of human capital, be it liberalising product and labour markets controls, be
it the reform of justice or public administrations systems, or anything else that is proven to
enhance the business environment in the country. It is as simple or as difficult as that.
But, and this is my final thought - we have to keep in mind the political economy dimension of
the process, and there things do not look encouraging.
We need to ensure broad support for the reform agenda especially since there might be some
short-term costs of certain reforms. However, according to the EBRD data not only is the
difference in the percentage of people who support market economy approximately twice lower
in our region than in Germany, but it has actually declined in the last ten years, diverged, and
the same applies to the support of democracy as a political system. This is where policy
transparency and communication will play a tremendously important role. And clearly, not
everything we do will always get full support from the broad public, especially in the case of
structural reforms with long-term gains and short-term costs, but boldness is often rewarded
beyond our expectations.
Thank you.