Month: August 2009

Policymaking: Before, During and After the Crisis

Michael O’Sullivan writes in today’s Irish Times about the importance of establishing a new policymaking institutional structure in the wake of the crisis: you can read his article here.   In his contribution, he identifies the pro-cyclical nature of fiscal policy as one of the main problems:

“The second related issue is the topsy-turvy nature of Irish economic policymaking. In an economy that is expanding too quickly, the normal approach is to try to slow it down; and when it is contracting, the typical response is to support or even stimulate it. In the early years of this decade, our politicians and policymaking “elite” responded to a very “hot” economy by lashing on more fuel. Now they respond to one of the sharpest contractions ever in a developed economy by squeezing harder on the brakes.”

It is certainly vital that the political system in the post-crisis era finds institutional mechanisms that can guard against procyclicality.  It would have been helpful in responding to the current crisis if the fiscal situation had permitted some level of counter-cyclical fiscal intervention.  However, the scale of the structural fiscal deficit (determined by the skewed nature of the pre-crisis tax system) means that the general nature of the government’s fiscal adjustment strategy is conditionally optimal  – it cannot un-do the past.  (Of course, there is still plenty to debate in terms of the precise design and timing of the fiscal adjustment.)

Innovation Taskforce: Request for Submissions

As suggested by Chris Horn in the comments,  you can make a submission to the Innovation Taskforce via this website.

Faith versus evidence

Michael Hennigan continues the debate on research funding in today’s Irish Times.

Research funding is good, but so are decent primary schools, a decent health service, and many other things. From what we read in the papers, it seems likely that the state is going to cut social welfare payments this winter. Against that background, vested interests seeking state money need to carefully justify their demands for public funding. If the argument people are making in favour of university research funding is economic, then we are entitled to expect rigourous cost-benefit analysis of some sort from them, rather than the faith-based appeals we generally get.

(My own view, for what it is worth, is that academics are very foolish if they allow the argument in favour of university research to become an economic one. If that argument becomes generally accepted, then the most important research funding which any of us receives — that is, the portion of our salaries not related to teaching, which allows us to study whatever we want, including such arcana as economic history — will presumably come under scrutiny, in which case it will be time to pack it in.)

More generally, Ireland is a small open economy, and we are only ever going to make a vanishingly small contribution to pushing back the world technological frontier. Does it not follow that the priority here should be on innovation policy — helping companies apply best-practice technology — rather than on invention policy — creating the best-practice technology ourselves? In order to evaluate such a proposition, I guess you would need empirical evidence on inter alia the extent to which new technologies are geographically mobile.

As a final note, I am pleased that Michael picks up on the utterly embarrassing references to Stanford we heard earlier in the summer.

Learning from the Financial Crisis: Globally and Locally

Colm McCarthy’s suggestion that an inquiry into what went wrong is gaining some level of support in political circles.  While there is plenty of material to digest in terms of what went wrong locally, there is also a lot of interest in understanding what went wrong in the international financial system.  Part of the debate concerns the role of economists, especially in terms of forecasting such crises.

A reader recommends this blog post which is critical of mainstream macroeconomic models.  Of course, Willem Buiter of the LSE issued a notorious critique a while back.

More recently,  a group associated with the British Academy wrote a letter to the Queen to answer her question to Luis Garicano of the LSE as to “if these things are so large, how come everyone missed it?”, while Robert Lucas defended mainstream macroeconomics in the Economist magazine in this article.

An important dimension of this debate is the relative roles of economists in policy organisations, the financial sector and academia in assessing the risks of a crisis and speaking out on these risks. While some of the debate has focused on the role of academic economists, it is maybe more difficult to evaluate from the outside the performance of economists in policy organisations in providing risk assessment, since their advice is often confidential.   In this regard,  the external evaluations of the performance of the IMF in previous international crises sets an interesting precedent, with the Independent Evaluation Office now playing this role on a regular basis.

In relation to Ireland,  the testimony of Kevin Cardiff of the Department of Finance at a recent Oireachtas Committee hearing is quite interesting in explaining the evolution of the thinking of the Department in the run up to the crisis.  You can read the transcript here.

Competitiveness Benchmarking Report

The NCC has released its benchmarking report (you can download it here).

The National Competitiveness Council (NCC), which reports to the Taoiseach on key competitiveness issues facing the Irish economy, today published its Annual Competitiveness Report: Volume I, Benchmarking Ireland’s Performance. The report provides an assessment of the competitiveness strengths and weaknesses of the Irish economy relative to competitor countries.

The Irish economy is experiencing a rapid and painful adjustment to the bursting of the property bubble, the international financial crises and the downturn in world trade. As a small, open and competitive economy, Ireland prospered from an export boom driven by globalisation and investment in the 1990s and early 2000s. In recent years, strong growth in the domestic economy, driven by housing and consumption, replaced exports as the key driver of growth. Though economic growth rates remained strong, our international competitiveness weakened as the domestic boom increased the costs of doing business here and as reforms to improve competitiveness were delayed.

Continue reading “Competitiveness Benchmarking Report”