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At the end of the 1960s, after the discovery of natural gas deposits in the North Sea, the Dutch economy changed drastically for a relatively short period. In 1964, the country had almost not exported gas; A decade later he exported the equivalent of 74 million tons of oil.
Gas exports increased the value of the Guilder, and taxes on unexpected gain allowed the Dutch increasing social spending, as shown by Michael Ellman’s research of the University of Amsterdam in the late 1970s. These manufacturers squeezed outside the oil sector at both ends. Costs increased at home and exchange rates hindered export.
In the Netherlands, an obvious advantage, a sudden boom in natural gas exports, became a disadvantage: a success for national manufacturing. By 1975, the production of the clothing industry in the Netherlands had decreased by 15 percent. For footwear, more than 50 percent fell.
Now we call this phenomenon “Dutch disease.” It has become a useful way to analyze countries that export products, since it provides an explanation of why they have difficulty converting export wealth into diversified and productive economies in the home.
Many now think of Dutch disease as a phenomenon of the developing world, since developed economies tend to be diverse and productive, with strong sectors of added value manufacturing. However, if we take the United States in the last 25 years, it is possible to think about its current account deficit as its strongest and most durable export.
Until this year, people around the world have constantly desired active in dollars, which Americans believe when they borrow. And Americans have been more than happy to give people around the world what they wanted.
Americans argue with each other, opportunistically, on debt levels. Democrats tend to be better to find ways to pay their programs. But in general terms, if we pay attention not to what the Americans say, but what they do, then the United States is a country that discovered debt as a natural resource around 2000, and has been exporting it since then.
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The United States has a Dutch disease. Its export is the dollar. Everything that is necessary to see what is to stop treating the United States as if it were magical, and not subject to the same forces as any other country.
The dollar lost approximately 8 percent of its value in the last six months, which has renewed the old discussion about whether to maintain the world reserve currency is an exorbitant privilege or an exorbitant load. The most direct response is: Of course, it has been a privilege for the United States to issue $ 36TN in debt. However, part of the literature on Dutch diseases can help us understand how a privilege becomes a burden.
In the 1990s, development economists began to document that countries with strong exports of basic products had less growth. In 1999, Aaron Tornell, now in UCLA, and Philip Lane, now European chief economist from the Central Bank, offered a theoretical framework to explain what had happened. The export of basic products changed the budget process, they argued. After unexpected gain, powerful groups will fight to obtain any new expense.
If the country has strong institutions and social solidarity, this capture for expenses will fail. With weak institutions, it will succeed: instead of going to things that increase productivity, such as roads and schools, new expenses go to powerful groups, such as unproductive gifts.
Tornell and Lane called this the “effect of voracity.” They applied it to the data of Nigeria, Venezuela and Mexico, but if we accept that the United States is not magical, we can also easily ask these questions. How voracious are your powerful groups? How strong are your institutions? The answers in order are: quite, and not as strong as we think.
The effect of voracity helps explain the audacity of the governments of the so -called “Big Beautiful” invoice by Donald Trump, with a cost of $ 3.4TN in 10 years and the benefits that are overwhelmingly to the rich. In the past, Republicans have tried to present tax cuts for the rich as a policy to publish a productive investment. They have even tried to model this idea as a process called “dynamic score.”
But even the dynamic cost of BBB seemed shameful. The party shrugged; The rich were voracious. The primary logic of the invoice, until its name, adds to: we are doing this because we can. That is at least honest. The United States can borrow, and the most powerful groups will take what they can.
The US institutions were never up to this challenge, and they will not be until the United States suddenly confronts a theoretical framework in which it has not had to think since at least 2000. Let’s call it the “scarcity effect.”
