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ASPECTOS ANAL TICOS DA POL TICA

ANTIINFLA O AP S 40 ANOS
Autor: Robert M. Solow
Data: janeiro a março de 2001
ExtraÃdo de: International Journal of Applied Economics and Econometrics (Vol. 9, Edição 1)
Editora: Transaction Publishers, Inc.
Tipo de Documento: Artigo
Comprimento: 2.410 palavras

Full Text:
Robert M. Solow [*]

ABSTRATO

Este artigo reconsidera o artigo de 1960 de Samuelson e Solow à luz de desenvolvimentos posteriores na teoria da inflação e
nos factos da inflação. O artigo de 1960 tinha um tom bastante hesitante e cético, qualidades que nem sempre são
encontradas nas discussões atuais. Mas pode ter sido demasiado optimista quanto à estabilidade da relação inflação-
desemprego.

FUNDO

Na recessão de 1948-49, a primeira depois da guerra, os preços no consumidor caÃram efectivamente. A segunda recessão do
pós-guerra ocorreu em 1953-54, e novamente os preços no consumidor caÃram, com um ligeiro atraso. A terceira recessão, em
1957-58, foi visivelmente mais profunda do que as duas primeiras; a taxa de desemprego passou de quatro por cento no pico para
pouco mais de sete por cento no nÃvel mais baixo. Mas os preços não caÃram; na verdade, a taxa de inflação aumentou de
2,4 por cento durante a recuperação de 1955-57 para 2,8 por cento ao ano durante o seu curso.

Esta surpreendente reviravolta nos acontecimentos passou a ser chamada de inflação "rastejante" e desencadeou uma intensa
discussão sobre a natureza do processo inflacionário, tanto dentro como fora da profissão económica. O vocabulário de uso
comum não era o mesmo que o nosso hoje. A principal divisão situava-se entre aqueles que atribuÃam a inflação crescente Ã
"atracção da procura" e aqueles que pensavam que ela era descrita mais correctamente como um caso de "empurrão de
custos".

Much subtle reasoning was devoted to refining that distinction, and thinking of ways to let facts choose between them. It is not
straightforward to translate that discussion into today's vocabulary, and may be there is not much point in doing so. A demand-pull
partisan might have something in common with an economist today who would say: "Simple enough if inflation speeded up during the
recession of 1957-58, that just tells us that the natural rate of unemployment or NAIRU is now higher than seven percent." From that
standpoint the fact that the economy seems to have plenty of slack is just irrelevant. A cost-push partisan might have been more like
an economist who would look first for more or less autonomous sources of cost increases, like higher import or food prices or, more
likely in those days, greater trade-union militancy. Today one might think that some cost increases might be interpreted as the very
forces that cause the natural rate to rise. But those words and concepts were not available to economi sts who had not yet read the
later works of Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps, or Robert Gordon and George Perry.

That is the highly relevant context in which Paul Samuelson and I were asked to contribute a paper to a discussion of "the problem of
achieving and maintaining a stable price level" at the annual Christmas convention of the American Economic Association in 1959.
The paper we produced, with the tittle "Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy" was read at the convention and published in the
Papers and Proceedings number of the American Economic Review (Vol. L, no.2, May 1960, pp. 177-94). That paper is now almost
exactly 40 years old, and has been much discussed in its lifetime. I thought that a look back at it would be a suitable vehicle for my
tribute to my beloved friend and colleague on this occasion.

THE PHILLIPS CURVE

Perhaps the most notorious thing about the 1960 paper is that it (very likely) marked the introduction of the work of A. W. Phillips into
American discussion of the inflationary process. (Phillips's paper (Economica, 1958) was brand new; I believe that we may have used
the phrase "Phillips curve" in print for the first time.) It is sometimes said that our paper domesticated the pernicious notion of a
"permanent trade-off between inflation and unemployment." I intend to suggest that there are more interesting ideas in the paper than
the Phillips curve; but it is probably a good idea, in view of the history, to discuss the role of the Phillips curve first.

The most surprising aspect of Phillips's empirical work was that the relationship he found between unemployment and wage inflation
in the U.K. for the long period 1861-1913 seemed to fit without change for 1913-48 and 1948-57. Samuelson and I thought that he
was on to something real; but it was clear that any application to the U.S. would have to accept occasional shifts in the curve, and
considerably less tight a fit. But it seemed to us that a scatter diagram of U.S. data for 1946-58 looked promising. (It is a remarkable
fact that we made no attempt to fit a multiple regression. I was teaching econometrics regularly at the time, so we knew how; but we
both thought that running regressions after so much eyeballing of the data would be inappropriate. Neither of us would have thought
the simple bivariate relation to be an adequate representation.)

The main analytical use we made of the Phillips curve was to see if it could make sense of the cost-push vs. demand-pull debate.
Changes in inflation describable as movements along the Phillips curve, presumably driven by variations in aggregate demand, could
be ascribed to demand-pull; changes in inflation originating in shifts of the Phillips curve could be ascribed to cost push. But we were
explicitly skeptical about that identification, and one of the reasons we gave for doubt was the possibility that the expectation of
continued high employment might by itself shift the curve adversely. More fundamentally, we were doubtful in advance about the pure
labor-supply interpretation of the curve that was later adopted by monetarists.

WHAT KIND OF TRADE-OFF?

Of course we were interested in the possibility that the Phillips curve might represent an exploitable trade-off between unemployment
and inflation. Here I think that hindsight reveals some ambiguity. On our side, it has to be said that we were very skeptical about the
durability of any such trade-off. We wrote, for instance: "But would it take eight to ten percent unemployment forever to stabilize the
money wage? Is not this kind of relationship also one which depends heavily on remembered experience? We suspect that this is
another way in which a past characterized by rising prices, high employment, and mild, short recessions is likely to breed an
inflationary bias...." So, without formalizing it--we formalized nothing in that paper--we were obviously wondering about something like
an expectations-augmented Phillips curve.

There is another, even more explicit passage: "...it might be that the low-pressure demand would so act upon wage and other
expectations as to shift the curve downward in the longer run--so that over a decade, the economy might enjoy higher employment
with price stability than our present-day estimate would indicate." This is not at all to say that we had the later Friedman-Phelps
vertical long-run Phillips curve in mind. (Neither of us ever had much confidence in the accelerationist model when it was finally
formulated and took the profession by storm.)

When we reflected on the likely consequences of a prolonged low-pressure economy, engineered in order to squeeze creeping
inflation out of the system, we had other things in mind as well. "A low-pressure economy might build up within itself over the years
larger and larger amounts of structural unemployment (the reverse of what happened from 1941 to 1953 as a result of strong war and
postwar demands). The result would be an upward shift of our menu of choice, with more and more unemployment being needed just
to keep prices stable." We were suggesting that what would later be called hysteresis might work against the favorable expectational
effects of contrived low pressure. My own belief--I do not implicate Samuelson--is that Europe has still not learned this part of the
lesson.

That is the case for the defense: the required qualifications are there, and the tone is appropriately tentative. But the prosecution has
a case too. It is that the qualifications are just qualifications, and the reader is left with the impression that the recorded Phillips curve
really does provide what the just-quoted passage calls "a menu of choice." There is certainly no hint in the 1960 paper of a "natural
rate of unemployment." Even the very last sentence of the paper, speaking of the drastic institutional changes that might be needed
to "lesson the degree of disharmony between full employment and price stability," describes the goal as moving the Phillips curve
downward and to the left. To a true believer, the "downward" gives the game away. A reader of that paper would not have been
prepared for the 1970s. There is truth in that charge. (But a small voice tells me that the same reader might have been better
prepared for the 1990s.)

IDENTIFICATION AND OTHER QUESTIONS

Half of the 1960 paper goes by before the Phillips curve is even mentioned. That first half is directed mainly to the demand-pull and
cost-push discussion.

The emphasis is on the kinds of empirical evidence that could hope to discriminate between theories, and the sorts of policy
experiments that the two theories suggest. The general direction of the discussion is that, when account is taken of the general-
equilibrium character of the inflationary process, many of the simple claims and nostrums fail.

We pointed out that both quantity-theorists and Keynesians favor demand-pull theories. Our remarks on the quantity theory were
fairly standard, and mainly insisted that policy discussion could not intelligently ignore the likely interest-rate-induced variations in
velocity. On Keynesian economics, our main point was that a mostly imperfectly competitive economy was its natural habitat, actually
needed for some of the characteristic propositions. But it is exactly in this imperfectly competitive environment that the idea of cost-
push inflation can make logical sense. But consistency is not the same thing as identification; we worried that nature and history had
not provided the observations that could pin down the causality underlying events.
We rather liked a notion that Charles Schultze had proposed just then. It was that there had indeed been excess demand for capital
goods in 195557, though not general excess demand. The natural rise in the relative price of capital goods had been converted into
generalized creeping inflation by the combination of cost-push and downward-rigidity in other markets.

But we spent more time criticizing what we thought to the fallacies, in both professional and popular discussion, that tried to infer
causality from simple observations. Some of these were elementary errors, like the belief that nominal wage rates rising faster than
productivity implies cost-push inflation or that aggregate expenditure rising faster than real output implies demand inflation. A student
of elementary macroeconomics would realize that both circumstances would characterize any inflation, whatever its originating
impulse.

But we also found more sophisticated inferences to contain holes. Timing relations --do wages rise before prices or afterwards? -- are
unreliable indicators of causality. There is almost never an identifiable "normal" state of affairs from which any change must have a
specific cause; and anyway effects can precede causes in situations where expectations govern behavior. More subtly, in a multi-
market economy, some of the markets highly competitive and some highly imperfectly competitive, man alternative price-quantity
scenarios are compatible either with demand-side impulses or cost-side impulses as the main originating force in an inflation. We did
conclude, however, that sector-by-sector analysis could provide important hints about causality. But we argued strongly that causality
might be different from sector to sector; there is no presumption that the right theory in any historical instance has to be monolithic.

INTERESTING RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Then we went on to suggest a couple of questions whose answers would throw light on the analysis of the inflationary process, but
where we thought too little research had been done.

The first was the behavior of real aggregate demand under inflationary conditions. It is too easy and too tempting to argue from the
presumption that real demands are homogeneous of degree zero in all prices to the notion that real aggregate demand is invariant to
regular inflation. In any historical inflationary situation there will be distributional effects among wages, profits and fixed incomes, and
there will be others that arise because, for instance, the service sector and the manufacturing sector will have different pricing
practices. Other non-homogeneities arise from tax progression and the variety of tax bases. But we wondered it recent quasi-
institutional developments, e.g., the existence of larger accumulations of savings, might have the effect of making real demand less
subject to erosion by inflation than in the past. We thought that research might be able to provide useful answers to such questions. I
am not sure that it has done so yet.

The second question that we proposed for more research was precisely the relation between nominal wage rates and inflation. That
was where we made reference to the work of Phillips and introduced the discussion that filled the second half of the 1960 paper and
the first half of this review of it.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

From the 1970s on, discussion of inflation within the economics profession had as its main focus the "natural rate of unemployment."
The vertical long-run expectations-augmented Phillips curve was taken for granted. Those macroeconomists with a more institutional
interest, and those with intellectual ties to labor economics, generally did not challenge the basic framework, but worked instead on
the determinants of the natural rate itself. Paul Samueslon did not participate in this discussion, except perhaps casually and
fleetingly. We can safely conclude that he did not find the underlying theoretical framework attractive or plausible. It was too simple-
minded, and Samuelson has never found simple-minded accounts of complex economic events convincing. So he found more
interesting things to do. Perhaps I should say that I shared the views that I have imputed to Samuelson. From time to time I
mentioned that I found the whole natural-rate theory flimsy on both theoretical and empirical grounds. But it was, as sa ilors say, like
spitting to windward.

Today that consensus seems to be cracking up. In just the way that, according to Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent, the stagflation
of the 1970s cut the ground from under the unvarnished Phillips curve--Sargent much later expressed a far more nuanced view--so
the long non-inflationary boom of the 1990 seems to expose the weakness of the accelerationist model. Once the natural rate is
endogenous--my own doubts go beyond that--the policy implications are quite different.

Forty years after, the open, eclectic, theoretical-institutional view of inflation espoused by Samuelson and his junior colleague in 1960
is looking better.

(*.) Departamento de Economia, Memorial Drive, Cambridge, EUA

Direitos autorais: COPYRIGHT 2001 Transaction Publishers, Inc.

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Citação da fonte (9ª Edição do MLA)
Solow, Robert M. "'ASPECTOS ANAL TICOS DA POL TICA ANTIINFLA O' AP S 40 ANOS." Jornal Internacional de
Economia Aplicada e Econometria , vol. 9, não. 1º de janeiro a março. 2001, pág. 71. Gale Academic OneFile ,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/A75098105/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=7674d47d . Acessado em 8 de
dezembro de 2023.
Número do documento Gale: GALE|A75098105