On Secular Stagnation in the Industrialized World

Lukasz Rachel and Lawrence Summers

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2019, vol. 50, issue 1 (Spring), 1-76

Abstract: We argue that the economy of the industrialized world, taken as a whole, is currently - and for the foreseeable future will remain - highly prone to secular stagnation. But for extraordinary fiscal policies, real interest rates would have fallen much more and be far below their current slightly negative level, current and prospective inflation would be further short of the 2 percent target levels, and past and future economic recoveries would be even more sluggish. We start by arguing that, contrary to current practice, neutral real interest rates are best estimated for the bloc of all industrial economies, given capital mobility between them and the relatively limited fluctuations in their aggregated current account. We show, using standard econometric procedures and looking at direct market indicators of prospective real rates, that neutral real interest rates have declined by at least 300 basis points over the last generation. We argue that these secular movements are in larger part a reflection of changes in saving and investment propensities rather than the safety and liquidity properties of Treasury instruments. We highlight the observation that, ceteris paribus, levels of government debt, the extent of pay-as-you-go old-age pensions, and the insurance value of government health

Keywords: stagnation; fiscal policy; economic recovery; industrial economy. market indicators; interest rates; monetary policy; regulatory policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-falling-neut ... -secular-stagnation/ (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: On Secular Stagnation in the Industrialized World (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bin:bpeajo:v:50:y:2019:i:2019-01:p:1-76

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity from Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Haowen Chen ().