Expansão pela austeridade?

Caffiso e Cellini (da Universiade de Catania) discutem recentemente a possivel viabilidade de uma via expansionista através das políticas de austeridade. As conclusões não são muito assertivas dessa viabilidade, como o próprio título do post indica: "Fiscal consolidations for debt-to-GDP ratio containment? Maybe … but with much care":

• The very simple problem with fiscal consolidations for debt-to-GDP ratio containment is that the restrictive effect of a fiscal consolidation on GDP might well offset the deficit reduction and cause an undesired debt-to-GDP ratio increase.
• the evidence suggest the case for fiscal consolidation is rather weak.

Krugman no seu blog atira-se às políticas "ignorantes" do BCE sob a anterior liderança (e não parece claro que a atual liderança siga vias muito diferentes):

• But from Trichet? After all, his hallmark during the crisis was his willingness, even compulsion, to throw the things we actually do know out the window. He tossed everything we know about aggregate demand out in favor of the fundamentally implausible (and now failed) doctrine of expansionary austerity. He ignored what we know about inflation and the difference between transitory shocks to raise interest rates in the face of an obviously temporary blip.
• And now, having willfully rejected and ignored what macroeconomics had to say, he complains that macroeconomics doesn’t offer useful policy guidance. Awesome.

Noutro post de Krugman:

• Specifically, if allowing an economy to remain persistently depressed reduces long-run growth prospects — and there’s pretty good evidence to that effect — then austerity in a depressed economy has enormous costs, and may even lead to a vicious circle of shrinking potential leading to even more austerity and so on. Indeed, maybe that’s happening to the Cameron government right now.
• So will the austerians admit that they might be making a terrible mistake, that far from safeguarding the future they may be destroying it?

(itálicos da nossa responsabilidade)