State Aid Policies in Response to the COVID-19 Shock: Observations and Guiding Principles

Motta, Massimo; Peitz, Martin Article State Aid Policies in Response to the COVID-19 Shock: Observations and Guiding Principles Intereconomics Suggested Citation: Motta, Massimo; Peitz, Martin (2020) : State Aid Policies in Response to the COVID-19 Shock: Observations and Guiding Principles, Intereconomics, ISSN 1613-964X, Springer, Heidelberg, Vol. 55, Iss. 4, pp. 219-222, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10272-020-0902-4 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/224750 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics 219 Forum Thanks to COVID-19, markets have disappeared from one day to the next, and fi rms’ assets in most sectors have been rapidly depleting. This has increased the need for many fi rms to obtain funding. However, the ongoing economic uncertainty has made it even more diffi cult for fi rms to obtain credit from the fi nancial sector. Thus, fi rms that are profi table in normal times face liquidity problems as a result of a negative supply and/or demand shock, and the fi nancial sector does not satisfy the individual needs for liquidity support because of the large macroeconomic risks. In such a case, governments have to step in and assist with liquidity support or the appropriate guarantees so that banks and other fi nancial institutions can provide the needed liquidity. Governments may also design other support schemes that protect workers or help demand to recover. In the current crisis, there are no doubts that state support is necessary to avoid long-run consequences for fi rms, workers and their human capital. Many countries, including most EU member states, have announced various measures (and are considering new ones) to control the public health crisis and address the economic fallout due to the COVID-19 pandemic. State aid can be seen as a response to a system failure resulting from a severe economic shock, either hitting one sector (with possible contagion effects in other sectors) or – as in the case of the coronavirus crisis – simultaneously hitting several sectors. DOI: 10.1007/s10272-020-0902-4 Massimo Motta and Martin Peitz* State Aid Policies in Response to the COVID-19 Shock: Observations and Guiding Principles Massimo Motta, ICREA – Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; and Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, Spain. Martin Peitz, University of Mannheim; and Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation, Germany. © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Open Access funding provided by ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. * This article is based on, but reorganises and adds to, Motta and Peitz (2020a,b). End of previous Forum article Intereconomics 2020 | 4 220 Forum the former so that it can cover its losses, the villagers will continue to be served lousy food in this restaurant. If this restaurant were to exit the market, a different restaurant may serve the villagers better food. This increases the competitive pressure on the other restaurant and encourages it to strive even harder. Therefore, state support schemes and in particular state aid that applies to a particular sector or to particular fi rms run the risk of supporting fi rms that are not viable in the long run even without the COVID-19 shock. It is therefore important that support schemes are temporary in nature. Also, to be eligible, well-established fi rms should provide evidence that their business was not in the red prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In line with these two observations, the European Commission (2020a, 2020b) adopted a Temporary Framework for state aid schemes aimed at ensuring fi rms’ access to liquidity and fi nance, and at preserving employment. This framework provides some limiting principles, establishing the temporary nature of such public interventions, and favouring their effectiveness and their incentivising nature. For instance, fi rms that were already having diffi culties on 31 December 2019, and hence before the crisis, cannot have access to most measures; credit guarantees for loans beyond €800,000 cannot apply to more than 90% of the loan; the loan principal should normally not go beyond certain amounts (25% of yearly turnover, or twice the yearly wage bill); and wage subsidies given to workers who would have otherwise been laid off because of the crisis should not exceed 80% of the monthly gross salary. Sectors and fi rms hit by a temporary shock may also be subject to a long-term shock Some industries may never look the same after COVID-19. If large portions of temporary shocks become permanent, state aid will become more problematic for the sectors or fi rms that aim to preserve the status quo ante. Given the large fi scal strains on many countries, we submit that such support schemes for sectors that are unlikely to fully recover should not go ahead. We admit that such decisions are politically particularly hard to sell if the respective sectors are labour-intensive and have powerful trade unions or industry lobbies. To the extent that this is foreseeable, support schemes should not use the status quo before the shock but rather the conditions that will prevail afterwards for reference. Thus, forward-looking state aid may also apply to sectors that were in decline before the shock or that will feel the long-run effects of the shock. Such sector-specifi c As a general principle, state aid to fi rms and sector-spe- cifi c support schemes should be used only when there are market failures; that is, when there are good reasons to believe that the market would not deliver effi cient and/ or equitable outcomes. Aid should also be effective and proportional to the aims it intends to achieve. While there seems to be wide agreement that government inaction is not an option during the COVID-19 crisis, a few observations may guide the design and revision of state support schemes. Sectors are hit differentially by the COVID-19 crisis It has been documented that supply chain disruptions and demand shocks have had differential effects on sectors (for the UK, see for instance Bloom et al., 2020). This implies that some sectors need very little to no support, while others are in dire need. Clearly, liquidity support can then be targeted so that only those fi rms in need of such support sign up for the support programme. This implies that fi rms unaffected by the shock do not have the incentive or the ability to move under the umbrella of a liquidity support scheme. This also applies to state assistance for the labour costs of a fi rm (in particular, covering a fraction of the costs of furloughed employees). Keeping viable fi rms alive and enabling them to keep their staff makes it possible to quickly restart and scale up economic activities when demand picks up again and supply constraints have disappeared. By covering part of the wage bill for unemployed or underemployed staff, there is an incentive for fi rms hit by the shock to participate in this support scheme, while fi rms not hit prefer not to do so. Thus, well-designed liquidity support and employment subsidies can be applied across the whole economy, provided they are effectively targeted in the sense that only those fi rms negatively affected will participate in the programme. Some fi rms were struggling even before the COVID-19 shock Some fi rms would have diffi culties regardless, and the risk of a badly designed, overly generous support scheme is that it would keep those fi rms alive. The entry and exit of fi rms is an important process in any fl ourishing economy, as it leads to a better allocation of resources. Since such a view may be dismissed as ‘neoliberal’ in the public debate, it is important to refl ect on what happens when non-viable fi rms are kept alive. Consider the following constructed example: a village has a zoning law in place such that two restaurants have a license to operate. Suppose that one of the restaurants serves lousy food and cannot pay its bills, while the other serves decent food. If the village authorities provide support to ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics 221 Forum innovation plans. To the extent that such plans meet important EU policy objectives, for instance in energy transition and the digital agenda, aid that will enable their roll out may exceptionally be allowed (we proposed this in Motta and Peitz, 2020a; and this is also the position tak- en in European Commission, 2020c). If recapitalisation takes the form of partial state ownership, as a matter of principle, this should be temporary and fully repaid shortly after the recovery of the sector, that is, after a period of a couple of years at most. Shares should be assessed at the market valuation after the crisis has hit but before the rumour of state aid support has spread. The longer the participation of the state, the bigger the dilution for current shareholders should be. (If a hybrid instrument allowing converting debt into equity is the chosen form of state support, similar principles should apply.) The EC has adopted these principles in the extension of the Temporary Framework (European Commission, 2020c). Taking into account the arguments made above, a credible restructuring plan should be approved before any recapitalisation to ensure that public money does not support a level of activity by a fi rm or in an industry that is unlikely to be viable in the long run. A sector-specifi c demand-side stimulus has serious drawbacks Another instrument to revive a sector is a demand-side stimulus, e.g. in the form of vouchers for particular purchases. Such an instrument has been used in the past to stimulate car sales and is also on the table in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. There are several problems with a broad demand-side stimulus (e.g. covering car purchases broadly). First, demand expansion may be limited if vouchers are redeemed mostly by people who would buy anyway – e.g. if transaction prices are increased by the amount of the voucher, in which case the instrument simply leads to a cash transfer from the government to the fi rms in the sector. Second, if consumers pay less after redeeming the voucher and demand picks up, this increased demand may come at the loss of future demand because of intertemporal substitution. To a certain extent, such intertemporal substitution may be socially desirable, but it should be considered when introducing the subsidy. Furthermore, a programme introduced in one member state but not in others may still be distortive even if applied to all purchases within the country in case there is a home bias in consumption. For example, the home bias is well documented in the car industry. support schemes may include measures that facilitate scaling down and restructuring (e.g. a move away from fossil fuels in the case of the car industry). Such state aid has to be carefully designed so as to avoid spending funds on a lost cause and preserving an outdated industry structure. In the EU Single Market, some countries have more fi scal freedom for support programmes than others In the EU context, there is the risk that public support for national companies creates trade and competition distortions within the internal market, and for this reason the European Commission (EC) has been given powers to control state aid. State aid programmes by EU member states require the approval of the EC. The founders of the EU understood very clearly that the internal market has to be protected from member states favouring their own companies, and introduced provisions in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to this effect awarding the EC the task of state aid control. The size of the economic shock and the ability to cushion its impact through state aid do not go hand in hand. In the current crisis, most countries hit severely by the COVID-19 pandemic are not in a strong fi scal position. This negatively affects the functioning of the Single Market. In particular, there is the risk of tilting the level playing fi eld and creating a ‘domino effect’ (see Motta and Peitz, 2020a). If only some fi rms in a given industry are eligible for aid while others are not, competition will necessarily be distorted. This is inevitable when aid is provided by some countries and not by others, for instance, because only some member states can afford such aid or because different states support different industries. A fi rm that is generously funded by its home country becomes artifi cially more competitive, to the detriment of other effi cient or more effi cient rival companies, and the latter may be relegated to niche markets or even forced out of business. Or, to the extent that some of these rivals come from a home country that can afford state aid as well, a subsidy race among member states may be triggered, signifi cantly wasting public money. Some viable businesses may need recapitalisation The EC extended the state aid Temporary Framework well beyond liquidity support and employment preservation so as to include the recapitalisation of businesses (see European Commission, 2020c). In some circumstances, short-run liquidity support may not be enough and a lack of fi nance may have long-term consequences: a fi rm that just barely keeps up with its payment obligations may have to abandon or postpone investment and Intereconomics 2020 | 4 222 Forum eliminate a source of distortion, namely, that only fi rms from some member states (and possibly the wrong ones) may receive aid within the sector. One of the advantages of the EC playing a central role in designing a European aid programme is that it would reduce horse-trading between member states. The track record of the EC in this regards gives some reasons for hope: the EC has (in general) been able to resist the recurrent pressure for it to relax state aid control over the years. In addition to competition policy objectives, there are other policy objectives that are linked to EU-wide goals and may justify a leadership role by the EC. Individual member states may not have the resources or, because of cross-country externalities, may not be willing to provide suffi cient resources to pursue other objectives, such as climate and digital ones, or may lack resilience in times of crisis that would generate benefi ts in other member states as well (see Bénassy-Quéré et al., 2020; and Motta and Peitz, 2020b). State aid in the member states and EU funding schemes should also be aligned with those goals. References Bénassy-Quéré, A., R. Marimon, P. Martin, J. Pisani-Ferry, L. Reichlin, D. Schoenmaker and B. Weder di Mauro (2020, 20 April), Repair and reconstruct: A recovery initiative, VOX CEPR Policy Portal, https:// voxeu.org/article/repair-and-reconstruct-recovery-initiative (2 June 2020). Bloom, N., P. Bunn, S. Chen, P. Mizen and P. Smietanka (2020, 27 March), The economic impact of coronavirus on UK businesses: Early evidence from the Decision Maker Panel, VOX CEPR Policy Portal, https:// voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-coronavirus-uk-businesses (2 June 2020). European Commission (2020a), Temporary Framework for State aid measures to support the economy in the current COVID-19 outbreak, Communication of 19 March 2020, Offi cial Journal of the European Union, C 091I, 1-9. European Commission (2020b), Amendment to the Temporary Framework for State aid measures to support the economy in the current COVID-19 outbreak, Communication of 3 April 2020, Offi cial Journal of the European Union, C 112I, 1-9. European Commission (2020c), Amendment to the Temporary Framework for State aid measures to support the economy in the current COVID-19 outbreak, Communication, Offi cial Journal of the European Union, C 164, 3-15. Motta, M. and M. Peitz (2020a, 18 April), EU state aid policies in the time of COVID-19, VOX CEPR Policy Portal, https://voxeu.org/article/eustate-aid-policies-time-covid-19 (2 June 2020). Motta, M. and M. Peitz (2020b, 30 April), The EU recovery fund: An opportunity for change, VOX CEPR Policy Portal, https//voxeu.org/article/eurecovery-fund-opportunity-change (7 June 2020). A voucher programme for an industry is an indirect subsidy to the fi rms in the industry. It may be popular as it could be presented as benefi tting primarily consumers. Industry lobbyists also prefer it as the fi rms operating in the industry may get the support with few strings attached (e.g. on managerial compensation and dividend policies). Strings can more easily be attached when state aid goes directly to fi rms. It should be stressed that a voucher programme might have further pitfalls. For instance, if vouchers for the purchase of cars running on fossil fuels were introduced, this would also confl ict with the EU’s climate objectives and other environmental goals (e.g. the reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions). EU-wide sector support system would avoid the distortions created by national programmes A truly European public support programme would not suffer from risks to the internal market‘s functioning as funding decisions would be made at the European level and based on common goals. Moreover, all companies operating in a sector covered by such a programme could be benefi ciaries, independent of the country they originate from (Motta and Peitz, 2020a). In line with this observation, the European Commission (2020c) stated that [i]f support were to be granted at EU level, taking into account the EU common interest, the risk of distortion to the Internal Market could be lower, and may therefore require less stringent conditions to be imposed. The Commission considers that additional EU level support and funds are necessary to make sure that this global symmetric crisis does not transform into an asymmetric shock to the detriment of Member States with less possibility to support their economy and the EU’s competitiveness as a whole. (C164/4) In some countries, some individual companies are particularly close to political decision-making and may lobby for particularly generous support programmes with few strings attached. While an individual company’s infl uence at the member state level may be strong, its position is much weaker at the EU level. This provides another strong argument in favour of an EU-wide programme, as the EC is less likely to be captured by special interests than individual member states. For the sake of well-func- tioning economies in all member states, it would help if they publicly acknowledged the advantages of EU-wide programmes. An advantage of an EU-wide sector support system compared to national programmes is that all fi rms in that particular sector would be eligible for aid, which would