There is a new overview of the economics of bank restructuring in the IMF staff position note series: you can read it here.
Month: June 2009
Brad gives Mountiford Longfield the nod.
You might view the accolade as underwhelming, but I suspect most of us would be both delighted and astonished if anyone were still reading us more than 170 years from now.
The ‘smart regulation’ dimension of the ‘smart economy’ has not been much discussed. Conceived of properly and implemented well smart regulation offers a way for governments to better understand and harness the different ways of mixing instruments and actors to get regulatory tasks done. It invites all stakeholders to think outside the usual boxes and then frequently re-visit institutional choices to fine tune regimes where outcomes are inappropriate.
In the Government’s White Paper Building Ireland’s Smart Economy ‘smart regulation’ was linked to broader public sector reform. The smart regulation measures were described in the following way:
‘Reduce the administrative burdens for citizens and improve the quality of regulation through tools such as e-government, regulatory impact analysis and by enhancing the accessibility of the statute book.’
In essence this usage is consistent with that of the Canadian Government’s 2004 Smart Regulation programme which adopted a business usage of the acronym SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. The best examples of SMART regulation, in this sense, involve reviewing proposed and existing regulatory rules to ensure they are proportionate to the aims sought and targeting enforcement more effectively at higher risk areas of activity. These measures are the primacy focus of Better Regulation programmes adopted in Ireland and in most OECD member states.
Today’s release shows that the standardised unemployment rate, which is based on the Live Register, rose to 11.8% in May from 11.4% in April and 11.0% in March.
As I wrote last month, it’s tempting to be relieved at seeing increases that are less than the huge jumps recorded at the start of the year. But a four-tenths increase in the unemployment rate implies an annual rate of increase of almost five percentage points and this is huge. Certainly, the economy appears to be still contracting, if not at quite the shocking pace of late last year and early this year. In the seventeen months since December 2007, the unemployment rate has increased by 7.2 percentage points or four-tenths per month. Today’s release is exactly in line with that pace of increase.
On a more mundane note, expect to hear plenty over the next few days about how we have “400,000 unemployed” (the total listed on the Live Register). This is despite page one of the release stating:
The Live Register is not designed to measure unemployment. It includes part-time workers (those who work up to three days a week), seasonal and casual workers entitled to Jobseekers Benefit or Allowance.
I’m interested in making sense of the massive gap between exports and imports of royalties and licences.
How do we interpret the high level of imports? Most of which are bought, according to the annual services inquiry, by the computer services industry (74% in 2006) with the rest split largely between R&D companies and wholesale trade companies (c. 10% each)
1. Are the royalties and licences being bought as inputs into production/ innovation? In which case it reflects a continuing dependence on international intellectual property and an ongoing weakness in innovation (particularly given the low level of exports of royalties etc)
2. Are they being bought as a way of repatriating profits? In which case, it may either point to high levels of transfer pricing in the sectors that are importing these royalties and licences, or may reflect improved performance of their international operations by indigenous companies that are then re-patriating profits. if we had data on purchases by sector and nationality of firm we could get some insight into this question, but I haven’t seen that anywhere.
The data do not seem to be publicly available in order to figure out which of the above is at work, and to what degree.
Any tips on additional data or evidence – or interpretations – welcome.