Economist Brian Easton says despite the headlines, things are not much worse than at the time of the 2023 budget - but fiscal management is always difficult

This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.

The Treasury is required by law to publish a Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (PREFU) a few weeks before a general election, just as it is required to publish one before the (May) budget (BEFU) and a half (fiscal) year one in December (HEFU). The purpose of a PREFU is to minimise any surprises to the new government.

PREFU is an independent assessment by the Treasury. There is no input by politicians other than to advise the decisions that Cabinet has made which might affect it. That means that some of Labour’s election policy promises are excluded; in any case, the announced ones involved only small increases in government spending phased in over the next three years.

The reality is an EFU is usually a very boring document, as no doubt the Treasury officials who work on it think too. It is packed with detailed information of great interest to economic wonks, but there are rarely any headlines of public interest. So the politicians make them up, predictably exuding confidence if they are in government or claiming the EFU reflects a disastrous state of the nation if they are not. The media trawl through the detail to identify as spectacular a story as they can find, while the commentariat mixes in their political views. What is a straight-down-the-centre columnist to do, other than bore readers with a factual summary?

A PREFU is particularly difficult from this perspective, since it is published only four months after the BEFU, so there are only four months more data (often just one more data point if a series is compiled quarterly). Not surprisingly then, there is no great revision to the Treasury’s macroeconomic outlook.

The Treasury, bless them, provided a comparison with their previous BEFU forecast. Often it is very hard to see any difference, indicating that the new data was consistent with their May forecast. The biggest difference is that migration is surging more than was expected. Smaller differences, well within forecasting error, are that interest rates are fractionally higher and yet house prices will stop falling sooner (the effect of the migration?); the external terms of trade are fractionally lower and so the current account deficit is slightly higher but still coming down. Consumer prices are now thought to be falling a little more slowly than PREFU projected. But the GDP and unemployment tracks are much the same.

Yes, I am assessing the changes in terms of the margins of forecasting error. As I explained here, it would be better to provide ‘fans’ rather ‘point’ estimates. PREFU almost does, because it looks at alternative macroeconomic scenarios, reflecting the uncertainty of economic forecasting and various minority views within the forecasting teams. (A healthy forecasting team should have dissent and hard-fought arguments over the different scenarios.) The bands of uncertainty can be wide. For instance, the 90-day interest rate is forecast to be 3.9 percent per annum in June 2025. but the upper band is 5.4% p.a. and the lower one 2.4% p.a..

The PREFU also devotes more than a page to what is going on in the Chinese economy which it judges as weakening with some impact on our external terms of trade. I think what it is saying is that Treasury is concerned, they are monitoring China closely, but they don’t know enough to work how events will evolve there.

To summarise, there has been a tendency for the commentariat to highlight bad economic news, but things haven’t changed much since May (which is good news for all the political parties which have been using BEFU as the base of their election policies). Share prices dipped on the day before the PREFU was released. The reason given is that the share market expected a bad update. It wasn’t. (Mind you share prices often fluctuate for no rational reason; although the commentariat always has an explanation after the event.)

Treasury needs to forecast the macroeconomy to underpin its fiscal forecasts. To nobody’s surprise, these show some weakening. In particular, the Treasury has lowered its corporate tax forecast since the BEFU. As far as I can assess, if that had not happened the fiscal position would be much the same between the two EFUs. (There are, of course, numerous minor positive and negative changes.) Forecasting business profits is one of the most difficult parts of the macroeconomic forecaster’s job; I have never had to forecast corporate tax, but I know there is a long history of Treasury struggling with the exercise.

As widely reported, the forecast date for the planned budget surplus has been pushed out from the June 2026 year to the June 2027 year. Year measures are a bit coarse. The actual delay is probably about seven months rather than twelve. So with four months more data the surplus date has been delayed seven months, a sobering reminder of the volatility of a number which is a small difference between two very large numbers. (A one percent error in the forecast of revenue for the June 2024 year and an accurate expenditure forecast, could generate a 15 percent mistake in OBEGAL, the standard measure of the deficit.)

Remember too, that much of any borrowing is for capital spending. In 2027 the net worth – its assets minus debt – of the Crown will be higher than today. It is a proper economic discussion to debate how much of the government’s capital investment should be funded from current revenue and how much from borrowing. (I can hear a Treasury official grumbling ‘don’t forget we still have to borrow the bloody money’.)

What the PREFU is saying to the Minister of Finance after the election, is that the books are not in too bad a position (providing you have not promised anything stupid), but always – always – you will be under fiscal pressure. And you may have to deal with unexpected shocks.

The Treasury gives little guidance as to the particularities of the current pressures (other than the implications that politicians always want to reduce taxes and increase spending). Clearly the war resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is among the big impacts on the world economy. China’s difficulties may be yet to come.

However, what I don’t think we have appreciated sufficiently is the impact of the Covid pandemic and the measures taken to reduce deaths. They had a substantial immediate economic impact – you can see it in the PREFU. But that is still unwinding three years later. It would be naive to think that those economic measures were a free lunch and almost as naive not to think about having to pay for the lunch. Trade-offs are central to economic management as the next government – whoever it may be – will find, even if in the heady days of election campaigning trade-offs are largely ignored.

*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.