This ESRI conference is taking place this morning.
The new Governor Patrick Honohan delivered an opening address which provides an interesting analysis of the Irish economic and fiscal situation: his speech is here.
The ESRI has also released its new quarterly forecast: here.
The conference also features a number of research papers, which can be found here.
In addition, there was a roundtable on the Commission on Taxation Report: my contribution to that roundtable is available here.
Morgan discusses NAMA in today’s Irish Times.
The Sunday Business Post reports that the sentence in the programme for government referring to individual debt likely refers to the potential introduction of individual voluntary insolvency arrangements in Ireland. Worth some discussion of this in the context of the ongoing concern about negative equity in Ireland.
See the BBC Report here. As a non-economist it is intriguing to have the prize awarded to to two people whose work (separately and not jointly) has profoundly shaped the fields of regulation and law in which I work. I wondered what the impact of their research had been on the field of economics in Ireland.
Dave Thomas (general secretary of the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants) argues that pay cuts for civil servants are ‘not the answer’ : the article is here.
Without having the time today to fully discuss this contribution, I will note the following sentence:
“First and foremost, public servants did not cause the economic crisis.”
This type of argument has been used by many interest groups to argue against expenditure cuts of various forms. However, it is also the case that ‘group X did not inflate the property bubble’ and the problem is that the windfall tax revenues during the bubble period allowed a rapid increase in public sector pay and many expenditure lines. The goal now is to restructure the economy and the public finances in order to undo the the adverse impact of the whole bubble-crisis episode and the relevant benchmark is not the level of earnings or public expenditure at the peak of the bubble but the appropriate levels of earnings and spending in order to ensure that Ireland can grow along a sustainable, non-bubble path.