Hugo Dixon

Solving the euro crisis is a race against time. Can peripheral economies reform before the people buckle under the pressure of austerity and pull the rug from their politicians? After two months of optimism triggered by the European Central Bank’s plans to buy government bonds, investors got a touch of jitters last week.

The best current fear gauge is the Spanish 10-year government bond yield. After peaking at 7.64 percent in late July, it fell to 5.65 percent in early September. It then poked its head above 6 percent in the middle of last week because there were large demonstrations against austerity; because Mariano Rajoy’s government was dragging its heels over asking for help from the ECB; and because the prime minister of Catalonia, one of Spain’s largest and richest regions, said he would call a referendum on independence.

But by the end of the week, the yield was just below 6 percent again. That’s mainly because Rajoy came up with a new budget which contains further doses of austerity. The move prepares the way for Madrid to ask for the ECB to buy its bonds and so drive down its borrowing costs.

Rajoy didn’t want to be seen to be told to do anything by his euro partners. Hence, this elaborate dance – where he has now done what he knew he would have been told to do but can claim it was his choice. It’s hard to believe that anybody is fooled by this subterfuge; indeed, from investors’ perspective, it looks childish. But, at least the show is on the road again: the government has had the guts to press ahead with reform despite the immense unpopularity of the measures.

The question is whether Madrid and other governments in Lisbon, Dublin, Rome and Athens can keep up the reforms long enough to restore their economies to health. That, in turn, depends on three factors: how much farther they have to travel; how unruly their people are going to get; and how much help they will receive from their partners.

Economic health requires both that fiscal deficits are eliminated and that competitiveness is restored. The peripheral economies have made some progress on both fronts. But shrinking economies makes it hard to balance their budgets while fiscal squeezes undermine growth. The austerity vicious spiral is still whirring away.

That’s why Spain is unlikely to hit its target of cutting its deficit to 4.5 percent of GDP next year. It can get there only on the optimistic assumption that the economy will shrink by just 0.5 percent in 2013. The same could be said of France, not yet a full member of the periphery, whose budget unveiled last Friday calls for a deficit of 3 percent of GDP next year. Paris is assuming 0.8 percent growth. The French prime minister describes the projection as “realistic and ambitious”. Just ambitious would have been a more accurate description.

Meanwhile, restoring competitiveness is painful because it involves cutting people’s pay. Ireland and Spain have made good progress, covering respectively 80 percent and 50 percent of what they needed to achieve by the end of last year, according to a report last week by Open Europe, a British think-tank. Portugal and Greece have done less well.

Current account deficits paint a similar picture. Spain’s had shrunk to 3.5 percent of GDP last year while Ireland actually had a small surplus. Portugal, though, had a deficit of 6.4 percent of GDP and Greece was struggling with one of 9.8 percent.

Big falls in pay are forecast for the deficit countries over the next two years by Eurostat. It sees unit labour costs dropping 4.7 percent in Spain between end-2011 and end-2013; 3.8 percent in Portugal; and 9.5 percent in Greece. If that happens, competitiveness could be restored. Citigroup forecasts that Spain and Portugal will have current account surpluses next year while Greece’s deficit will have shrunk to 2.8 percent.

The snag is that such pay cuts – especially when combined with higher taxes and rising unemployment – provoke howls of outrage from the population. Short of leaving the single currency and devaluing, the only other medicine for improving competitiveness is so-called fiscal devaluation. This involves cutting the social security contributions paid by employers and, in return, putting up other taxes.

Germany succeeded in pushing through such a fiscal devaluation in 2007. But that just made it more competitive vis-a-vis the weaker euro zone economies. More recently, Spain did a mini fiscal devaluation. But the most ambitious attempt, by Portugal, provoked such a massive backlash earlier this month that the government backed down.

Help from abroad is the main way of easing the pain of adjustment. The ECB’s promised bond-buying plan is the most dramatic example. But solidarity has its limits. There has been a backlash in the German media over the central bank’s plan. Meanwhile, Berlin has been trying to persuade Madrid not to ask for help. The German finance minister also clubbed together with his Dutch and Finnish counterparts last week, proposing rules that will make it harder for Spain to shift the cost of bailing out its banks onto the euro zone.

The consequences of a breakup of the euro zone would be so ghastly for both the periphery and the core that they will probably pull through what looks like it is going to be at least another year of hell. But the risks have certainly not vanished.

Semantics could help save the euro zone. There is a crying need to distinguish between fiscal austerity and structural reform.  The endless austerity programs adopted by the GIIPS — Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain — threaten to crush their economies so much that they are socially unbearable. By contrast, reforming pensions, labor markets and the like would be good for long-term growth. A policy mix that emphasizes the latter and draws some sort of line under the former is needed to stop the euro crisis spinning out of control.

Europeans have become grimly familiar with austerity spirals over the past two years. A government that needs to cut its fiscal deficit embarks on a program of tax hikes and spending cuts. The snag is that this fiscal squeeze, in turn, squeezes the economy — partly via the direct impact of cash being sucked out of the private sector and partly because the private sector loses confidence. The depressed economy means the government’s tax take doesn’t rise nearly as much as envisaged. So the deficit doesn’t decline much and, as a percentage of shrunken GDP, it falls even less. The governments’ creditors, led by Germany, then demand another round of austerity to get the program back on track. With each round, the howls of pain from the population increase, belief that there is light at the end of the tunnel declines and the government’s political capital shrinks.

The Greeks, Irish and Portuguese have been trying to run up this down escalator the longest. Italy and Spain are now embarking on the same regime. Yet more doses will be required over the coming year if the policy mix is unchanged. After all, last year’s budget deficits are expected to be about 10 percent for Greece and Ireland, 7-8 percent for Spain and Portugal (if a one-off pension transfer is ignored) and 4 percent for Italy.

Some austerity was needed given that expenditure had run out of control in the boom times and that, in some cases, there was a deliberate fiscal boost in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008. In Greece’s case, there was also a failure to implement the programs properly, meaning time and credibility were lost. But endless rounds of austerity are debilitating. The better approach would be to have one chunky program that is properly implemented and then rebuild.

Of course, the creditors aren’t willing to give something for nothing. But this is where a semantic distinction between austerity and structural reform could be helpful. Both require political courage by a government and sacrifices by its people. But the former pushes an economy down, while the latter boosts it — albeit in the long term. A virtuous cycle is even possible with the economy reviving, tax income rising, the deficit falling and confidence returning.

Pushing up retirement ages is a case in point. This doesn’t just reduce government spending, especially in the long run as savings build up year after year;  it also increases the productive potential of an economy by expanding its work force. Or take labor reform. Making it easier to hire and fire people puts downward pressure on wages, improving an economy’s competitiveness and reducing unemployment — which, in turn, cuts government spending on social security.

Other desperately needed reforms — privatization, liberalization of product markets, and increasing the efficiency of the public sector and the judiciary — would also improve long-term growth. Privatization would have the added benefit of cutting government debts, as would crackdowns on tax evasion.

The GIIPS have all done something in the field of structural reform. Italy, Spain and Greece, for example, are pushing up retirement ages. But the reforms have been slow in coming and sometimes half-hearted. Greece is the worst example: little has happened on tax evasion or privatization. Meanwhile, the new governments in Rome and Madrid have yet to get to grips with labor reform, although they are indicating that they will do so soon.

If the GIIPS could convince their creditors that they were serious about such reforms, they would win brownie points. That would put them in a better position to avoid yet more rounds of austerity. After all, Germany’s Angela Merkel would still be able to argue to her people that the peripheral economies were serious about change. What’s more, the economies of Germany and other creditor nations would benefit. Austerity in their neighborhood combined with the threat that the whole euro zone could blow up is not good for business. But to start the process, policymakers and pundits need to stop talking about austerity and reform as if they are the same.

PHOTO: A one euro coin is held in an adjustable spanner in this picture illustration taken in Ljubljana, January 4, 2012. REUTERS/Srdjan Zivulovic