The latest report is here.
Month: September 2011
The Third Review by the IMF can be read here.
The proposed reform of waste collection policy was again in the news today.
The Examiner has a funny story. The proposed reform would cut costs (5,000 people less on the payroll) and increase charges at the same time. The Times is more thoughtful, although it is still curious. In our textbooks, regulators fight against market power. Here, the regulator wants to establish private monopolies and the companies that would likely obtain those are dead against.
Mr Kells issues an implicit threat of court action. Presumably, the companies would argue that they have a customary right and reasonable expectation to compete in any waste collection market.
A lot of the fuss is due to poor communication. As far as I know, the department wants to sell waste collection concessions to the highest bidder, rather than take waste collection back into the public sector (as the private waste companies seem to think).
Here is one way to get around this. Instead of auctioning concessions, they could be grandfathered.
AFAIK, there are four private waste collection companies in DLR. Counting bins on my way to work, I guess that one company has 50% of the market, two have 20%, and one has 10%. DLR should thus be carved into 10 concessions, with 5 going to company A, 2 to companies B and C, and 1 to company D. In two years time, the first concession should be auctioned, the second one two months later, and so on.
A previous post looked at the overall government accounts using Table 21 from the CSO’s National Income and Expenditure Accounts. Here we use the figures from Table 24: Transfer Payments to focus on the largest expenditure item. As we saw in the previous post expenditure on current transfer payments rose from €21.3 billion in 2006 to €28.9 billion in 2010.
Table 24 provides a breakdown of current transfer payments in 43 different categories. Here we combine many of them together to form ten main groups. For example, Pensions includes contributory, non-contributory, retirement and invalidity pensions, Unemployment includes unemployment assistance, unemployment benefit and redundancy payments. Other transfers such as Child Benefit and the Supplementary Welfare Allowance are used as standalone groups.
The two largest named categories in the Other Transfer Payments group are the local authority housing rental deficit (€660 million in 2010) and the social employment scheme (€361 million). Apart from miscellaneous categories all other elements of this group are smaller.
If required Table 24 provides the figures for all 43 categories but the ten categories used here provide sufficient detail for this glance into our transfer payments where the purpose is to inform rather than advocate. Some details and 2010 figures of the classifications used by the Department of Social Welfare are available here.
Anyway this is the table produced using the ten groups.
About 40% of the increase since 2006 is as a result of the increase in direct unemployment payments. The increased level of unemployment will also have led to the increase in other payments. Pensions form the largest category and account for about one-fifth of the increase. Child Benefit payments were actually lower in 2010 than they were in 2006.
UPDATE: An extended table with details going back to 1997 can be seen by clicking here.
I’m getting better at scraping the web and I’ve now been able to calculate some things that IDEAS/RePEc does not.
This graph has the number of economists in Ireland registered at IDEAS/RePEc. It is not a natural number to account for joint appointments. The number has been rising steadily over time. I expect that trend to reverse in the coming months.
This graph shows Ireland’s position in the total population of economists. We’re a small country. I highlight Massachusetts because it is ranked highest by IDEAS/RePEc.
This graph shows the number of unique publications per person. In recent times, Ireland has done reasonably well in terms of productivity.
However, visibility cq interest is less impressive, as shown in this graph. It should be noted, though, that “abstract views” is the metric that can be most easily manipulated. That said, Ireland does not do so well either on the number of citations per publication, as shown in this graph, or on the number of citing authors per person, as shown in this graph.
As always, these results can be interpreted in a number of ways. In order to improve Ireland’s standing at IDEAS/RePEc, we’ll need to convince more people that our papers are worth citing.
The great thing about the Public Data Explorer is that you can make your own graphs. You need to go back two positions to return to this blog.
I used these Matlab scripts to scrape the web.