The opportunity cost of subsidies
People who defend subsidies for particular sectors often highlight the goods or services that have been produced, or the new jobs created. What they do not normally acknowledge is that the benefits to society of that money, if it had been spent otherwise, or left in the pockets of taxpayers, might have been even greater.
Economists refer to the value of an expenditure in its highest alternative use as its "opportunity cost." The concept of opportunity cost is reasonably intuitive. At the household level, if a person spends $100 on a night on the town, that $100 is no longer available to buy necessities, like food. Similarly, if a government spends $100,000 on a bridge that few people will use, that money is not available to be spent on education, or health care, or any other government priority. Because of taxes and other feedback mechanism in an economy, the analogy between the government and a household is not perfect. But in the presence of a budget constraint, all spending decisions, at the margin, imply trade-offs.
Ideally, a government would strive to structure its expenditures so as to achieve a return to society that is roughly similar for each dollar spent. Subsidies can easily upset that balance.
Consider a hydro-electric project that also provides water to irrigate adjacent farmland. A cubic metre of water from its reservoir has a high value when it passes through turbines and generates electricity, but also to a farmer growing thirsty crops. Nevertheless, the incremental value of an additional cubic metre of water may well be much higher when used to generate electricity than to irrigate the farmer's crops. Policies - such as subsidies that allow the farmer to pump out the water from the reservoir at a very low cost, or that artificially increase the profitability of farming - will result in some of the water being diverted to its lower-value use. In that case, the economy as a whole generates a smaller surplus.
The static effects of subsidies on efficiency
Economists may not agree among themselves on the precise definition of a subsidy, but they do generally agree on their static, first-order effects. Theory shows that these depend on a number of factors, among which are the responsiveness of producers and consumers to changes in prices (what economists call the own-price elasticities of supply and demand), the form of the subsidy, the conditions attached to it, and how the subsidy interacts with other policies.
In general terms, elasticities of supply and demand determine to what extent the actual, economic incidence diverges from the intended impact incidence of a subsidy: in a seller's market, consumer subsidies will be shifted onward to producers, and vice-versa. Other policies can also influence outcomes, as when production quotas are imposed on the subsidised activities.
Critics often point to the economic distortions created by subsidies, especially subsidies that are used to promote specific sectors or industries. Generally, such subsidies tend to divert resources from more productive to less productive uses, thus reducing economic efficiency.
Those who take a more benign view argue that subsidies can serve redistributive goals, or can help to correct market failures. But, as the public-finance economist Ronald Gerritse once warned, subsides defended on such grounds "may have externalities that we did not bargain for." Indeed it is such second-order effects that have come under attack by environmental economists in recent years.
The dynamic effects of subsidization
There is a tendency over time for the benefits from subsidy programmes to become capitalised into the least elastic factor of production. The economist Gordon Tullock labelled this phenomenon "the transitional gains trap". As Professor Tullock explains, the gains from subsidies tend to be transitional, accruing mainly to those who can immediately take advantage of a new scheme. Their successors end up paying higher prices for land, fishing licences, mineral rights, ect. As such, removing the subsidy thus risks imposing a transitional loss on the subsequent owners of these assets.
The beneficiaries of a subsidy can become entrapped in a social sense as well. This is especially the case when subsidies are used to support employment in rural industries, such as agriculture, fisheries and mining, which require specialised skills but not necessarily much formal education. The resulting low mobility of the affected labour force itself becomes a barrier to policy reform, increasing subsidy dependency, and making structural adjustment all the more traumatic when it finally does come.
Subsidies that are linked to particular technologies can have profound, long-term effects on dynamic efficiency. Many energy-related subsidies (and regulations) have been of this sort. The more prescriptive they are, and the less targeted at the achievement of policy outcomes, the greater the opportunities for distortions and unintended consequences. The challenge for policymakers is to achieve a balance between the benefits of stimulating R&D and innovation, while not forcing technological responses to economic and environmental forces down irreversible paths. Once governments had invested billions of dollars supporting the development of civilian nuclear power, for example, there was a strong impetus to continue with the original designs. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the development of corn-based ethanol in North America, where even if costs fall for making ethanol from cellulosic feedstock fall, the dominant feedstock will likely remain corn (maize) for many years to come.
The distribution of subsidies
Many subsidies are defended as benefiting disadvantaged groups, or groups the politicians like to make us believe are disadvantaged. Some do that, but even those that do benefit disadvantaged groups often benefit richer people or companies even more.
Perversely, the distributive consequences of subsidies are often precisely the opposite of what the framers of the policies intended. Most countries that subsidise farmers or fishers profess to be looking out for the small owner-operator. Yet, by design, subsidies that are tied to outputs or inputs tend to favour larger producing units. Recently, for example, the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit organization, counted up all the direct payments made by the U.S. Government to farmers between 1994 and 2005 and found that ten percent of subsidy recipients collected 73 percent of all subsidies, amounting to $120.5 billion Analyses of agricultural support programmes in other countries appear to lend credence to the 80:20 rule - the impression that 80% of support goes to 20% of the beneficiaries.
The conduit between a government and the intended recipient of a subsidy is often more like an open sluice than a pipeline, with plenty of opportunities for others to dip into the stream before it reaches its final destination. Any subsidies that are linked to the production of a good or services require the recipient to spend money on inputs used in producing that good or service. For example, if a farmer is paid by the government to grow corn, she will first have to spend some of that money on seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and fuel for the tractor. What is left as an increase in income may be only 20% or 25% of the cost to the government.
Economists call the ratio between what ends up in the pockets of the target group and what the government spends the transfer efficiency of the subsidy. Subsidies for the purchase of inputs, by lowering the producer's costs, can have a fairly high transfer efficiency, but only if the supply is not limited. If the seller of the subsidized good is a monopoly, or there is a finite supply of the input, the subsidy will mainly enrich the input provider.
Effects on the environment
Governments do not set out intentionally to damage the environment just for the sake of it. They may not care very much about the environmental consequences of the activities they support, but that is not quite the same thing. Rather, when people speak of "environmentally harmful subsidies" they generally mean subsidies that support production, transport or consumption that ends up damaging the environment. The environmental consequences of subsidies to extractive industries are closely linked to the activity being subsidized, like fishing or logging.
Subsidies to promote offshore fishing are a commonly cited example of environmentally harmful subsidies, with support that increases fishing capacity (i.e., subsidies toward constructing new boats) linked to the depletion of important fishery stocks. In other industries, subsidies that promote consumption or production have led to higher volumes of waste or emissions. For example, irrigation subsidies often encourage crops that are farmed intensively, which in turn leads to higher levels of fertilizer use than would occur otherwise. Moreover, irrigation subsidies can lead to the under pricing of irrigated water, which in turn fosters the overuse and inefficient use of water.
While many subsidies have unintended negative consequences on the environment, well designed subsidies can be beneficial when they work to mitigate an environmental problem. In the context of fisheries, for instance, these would include subsidies to management programs that help ensure that fisheries resources are appropriately managed and that regulations are enforced, or to research and development (R&D) designed to promote less environmentally destructive forms of fish catching and processing.
The political economy of subsidies
Given the various shortcomings of subsidies, why do governments keep resorting to them?
One basic problem is that, although governments are often motivated to provide subsidies in order to benefit specific groups of people - or, more specifically, voters - they rarely like to be seen doing it through such blatant devices as direct income payments. Activities or things ("merit goods") tend to get subsidised rather than people.
The tendency to subsidize things, instead of helping people directly, contributes to the second, and related, problem, which the economist Gordon Tullock labeled "the transitional gains trap". This refers to the tendency over time for benefits flowing from subsidy programmes to increase the value of associated fixed assets, like land or dairy quotas.
Accordingly, the gains from subsidies tend to be transitional, accruing mainly to those who can immediately take advantage of a new scheme. Their successors end up paying higher prices for farmland, fishing licences, mineral rights. Removing the subsidy thus risks imposing a transitional loss on the subsequent owners of these assets.
Subsidies themselves create a pool of money out of which recipients can influence the very political process that channels money to them in the first place. In many instances subsidies redistribute wealth from a large number of unknowing contributors to a smaller number of beneficiaries. The latter lobby vigorously to defend their handouts; the former seldom bother, or are empowered, to prevent them.
Finally, the bureaucracy itself can present an obstacle. Government ministries rarely admit to having a vested interest in the continuation of the support programmes they administer, but it is hard to imagine total disinterest being the norm. More subtly, the bureaucratization process often feeds a pervasive notion that the subsidised activity forms part of the natural order of things. Subsidies thus metamorphosize into entitlements, and any attempt to curb them becomes politically hazardous.
