I suppose one reason for the double checking in that area was surprise at seeing “only” €11 billion in income tax. That means that to close the budget gap we’d need to more than double income tax…significantly more than double it. That was/is surprising to me.

Again, thanks.

I don’t think there’s an error here, but a little variation or inconsistency in how some of these categories are used, which I think is confusing in the CSO document, if I might be so bold.

Just to focus on the 2009 for clarity, CSO NIE Table 21 has the two items (all in € millions)

Item 23. Taxes on Income and Wealth 16,534
AND
Item 24. Social Insurance Contributions 8,914

The total of these two of 25,448 appears (as 25,449 – somebody gained/lost a million in rounding) again in CSO NIE Table 22 as “Taxes on Income and Wealth” which I would say is a tad confusing/inconsistent.

But their Table 22 is very useful in that you’ll see this broad category includes “Income Tax (including sur-tax)” of 11,684 which is more less what you and I mean by Income Tax i.e., mainly PAYE, and that’s my number for “Income Tax” on my Table 2. Not sure if we still have sur-tax, by the way, but who knows ☺

Some would simply put Income Tax in the sense of PAYE together with Social Insurance contributions as “Income Tax” but I thought it worthwhile retaining the distinction here to emphasis that the Social Insurance stuff is not easily discernible, if at all, when looking at e.g., Exchequer returns.

In other words, their Table 21 number includes not only PAYE but Corporation Tax revenue of 3,889 and other ‘taxes on income and wealth’, apart from Social Insurance contributions.

When I check these numbers I look to see that my revenue and expenditure items independently give the same deficit number as the original data, which is not foolproof, but a good data entry check.

The CSO sheets I originally linked to make this clear enough: as indicated they report central and local (receipts and expend) separately, and also present the consolidated numbers (central + local, netting out inter-governmental transfers): those are the ones I used in my sheets. So no need to add the DoE sheet to the CSO ones: there’s enough expenditure there already

One thing that needs watching in looking at central and local separately is where there’s a change in administrative structure: a lot of health expend was classified as local pre-HSE, and central thereafter. Also on Health, check the CSO detailed notes: some of the increase under that head is due to the re-classification of voluntary hospital budgets to within the govt sector, reflecting the reality of greater state control

Thank to michael for the link to DoE for local budgets: while they cover a lot of the ground needed for the bird’s eye view, they’re not in the best format for those purposes, and I think from the data inventory I linked to earlier, that the CSO seeks returns from local authorities in national income format.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t_Ls5IutKMhwkmRrtPfBfig&authkey=CJnk5PYE&hl=en#gid=0

The question I have now is how much of Local Govt spending should be added to the central govt spending in order to have a better view of how much of GNP is state spending. I guess that the central funding is reflected in the CSO data, although I can’t see exactly where, but there’s a whole bunch of local specific revenue raising and spending too. It looks like bringing state spending up near 60% of GNP…………..

Again, the charts are scary. Businesses must have been suffering hugely under the rates burden in 2009, when commercial rates seem to have exceeded 1% of GNP.

@Paul Quigley - health is indeed interesting - 19.4% of expenditure. In the UK it was 17.5% last time I looked, but they have universal coverage.

Hugh’s chart ‘ Spending as % of GNP 1995-2009 (by government sector) ‘ certainly gives pause for thought.

Health is interesting. It encompasses the activities of several well entrenched professions, and is mostly a price taker for MNC products and services. It also generates a substantial chunk of long-term transfer payments as a byproduct of its own activity.
Principal-agent problems and conflicts of interest have blocked reform of our health sector to date. They have also had a corrosive effect on management authority, so that staff co-operation with cutbacks is liable to be grudging at best.

Lots of figures here:

Local Authority Budgets 2010

http://www.environ.ie/en/LocalGovernment/LocalGovernmentAdministration/LocalGovernmentFinance/PublicationsDocuments/FileDownLoad,23021,en.pdf

Hugh, CSO have done well here but lots of black holes still. Balance sheets in particular.

What on earth are “securities other than shares”?
What on earth is the government doing buying shares? (if that is what the later heading means).

Please tell me that the Irish state wasn’t the biggest shareholder in the ISEQ? That it isn’t the bank bondholder that needs to be paid that it is so worried about?

For others interested, Edgar’s paper is:

Morgenroth, Edgar(2010) ‘Regional Dimension of Taxes and Public Expenditure in Ireland’, Regional Studies, 44: 6, 777 — 789. link to paper.

More generally:

Some of the difficulties related to sourcing good local/regional public finance data for Ireland, and the gory details of the adjustments needed to go from national sources to EU formats, are evident in this 2007 Irish government document to Eurostat which is a detailed inventory of sources and methods in order for Ireland to report under the EDP i.e., Excessive Deficit Procedure.

Thanks very much, I’ll have a gander at the figures tonight and see can I come up with some accurate debt figures to match what’s the income and expenditure side.

The reason I used the National Debt figures (rather than the GGD) was to try and capture net assets - so the surplus wasn’t just sitting in cash and therefore not accounted (otherwise it would still be hanging around somewhere!). BTW, I think the National Debt includes local authority debt (e.g. the HFA debt). But I am not certain of the logic of either of these positions!

On the HSE/Health spend - there is a significant component of what is effectively social security spend in the figures, no? The HSE/Health budget is responsible for some class of social spending payments, IIRC.

Table 3B on page 14 of this Eurostat document gives details of this difference (again, between the General Government Deficit and Debt concepts not ‘national debt’ and the Gen Gov deficit–see my comment above.

(confusingly enough, this version seems to get to different estimates of Gen Govt receipts and expenditure, though the deficits is as per CSO/EU tables)

I thought first it might be caused by a data mismatch across years, but cumulatively it’s pretty big so there must be a line item somewhere else that plugs the gap.

Indeed I’d hope one could pull those numbers out: I think I’ll ask CSO whether they have some of the underlying component sheets available and see what falls out.

@hoganmahew

Two main things going on here, I think

1. The “National Debt” is (a) a central government (mainly Exchequer) concept and so doesn’t in particular include local govt debt.

The General Government Debt concepts includes this and other government debt, netting out any cross-indebtedness between sectors to give a consolidated number. So it’s this GGDebt rather than the “National Debt” concept which is, in principle, the stock counterpart to the flow deficit (the CSO version of which, is, as they document, very close indeed to the actual number used by the EU for Stability Programme/Excessive Deficit Procedure stuff.

The National Debt number is also (b) typically quoted as a net of liquid assets concept, i.e., mainly cash and other balances arising from the debt management activities of the NTMA.

(2) There’s a long list of factors which can account for a discrepancy between the deficit and debt, even when measured on a consistent sector of government basis. In the olden days, it was mainly I think governments issuing debt at less than par value, in which case the change in the debt would show up as bigger than the cash raised by way of borrowing. In the current context, I think that the gross-net issued arising from NTMA balances has more of an impact, as well as the treatment of recap.

The powers that be have been tracking this issue in detail, so thanks, hogan for prompting me to dig a little on it. Eurostat and the EU commission refer to it as the Stock-Flow Adjustment (happily known as “SFA”)…

Eurostat has a detailed set of notes on the issue at

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/STOCK_FLOW_2010/EN/STOCK_FLOW_2010-EN.PDF

where you’ll catch some of the details, but if I have a chance I’ll try to put together some numbers myself on Ireland alone, in way that’s a big easier to read than some of the official returns which DoF are required to make: but you’ll find those here:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/government_finance_statistics/excessive_deficit/edp_notification_tables

@Hugh

Thanks indeed: it’s one of the reasons I’d like our govt to distribute much more stuff in excel, rather than in pdfs. I think we need a quango to implement my suggestion On pay, I do have some questions of my own as to what is exactly captured in the CSO number, but if I can pull out more data, I’ll flag it here.

Looking at these data one thing struck me….that the bloat in spending was quite even but was, if anything, more in transfer payments than in contentious areas public sector pay. Public sector pay grew too, but has at least stopped growing. So far spending on transfer payments is continuing to grow, for unfortunate reasons, but the previous growth looks extremely unwise now.

To help myself visualize the data I made a copy of the tables and added charts. It’s on https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t_Ls5IutKMhwkmRrtPfBfig&authkey=CJnk5PYE&hl=en#gid=0

(Basically, there seems to be a discrepancy between how much the national debt rose and what the exchequer surplus was over the period you cover on sheet 1. Is this an, eh, artefact? Missing expenditure data? Something sinister? (I really hope it is something sinister, I love a good horror show).

I always knew that government tax and expenditures were netted down for transfers and the SIF but had no idea it was at this level.

Government spending was 57% of GNP in 2009! That must be one of the highest in the OECD or does similar netting down happen elsewhere?