Feasta (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) are holding an interesting conference on Thursday and Friday of this week titled National Strategies for Dealing with Ireland’s Debt Crisis: Exploring the Options. The webpage for the conference is here and the conference programme is here.
Month: September 2011
TASC’s Progressive Economy blog has an interesting post by Tom McDonnell, Michael Burke and Michael Taft on restructuring promissory notes. I think it is important that there be more public discussion of this issue. With payments of €3.1 billion a year stretching into the middle of the next decade, these notes are going to impose a far greater burden on the Irish people than the remaining unsecured Anglo bonds which receive a lot more attention.
Good news is always welcome. Dublin is the 2nd most Intelligent Community. Who cares it’s Dublin, Ohio? There is a chuckle in the capital, an opportunity to bitch, and as not too many people know about the other Dublin, its reputation adds to ours.
Dublin (Ireland) is ranked 9th (out of 80) on the list of most Bicycle-Friendly Cities in the world. The Lord Mayor rightly called this astonishing. I agree. Any town (that I’ve visited) in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands is more friendly to cyclists, including Hamburg (ranked 13th).
The list was put together by Copenhagenize. They do not reveal their methods. Dublin got 12 bonus points for trying, without which it would not have been in the top 20. Dublin’s high ranking is explained by “a wildly successful bike share programme” (true), “visionary politicians” (since booted out of office) “who implemented bike lanes and 30 km/h zones” (although the 30 km/h zone is fiendishly hard to navigate by bike), and “a citizenry who have merely shrugged and gotten on with it” (although the few available statistics suggest that people cycle less and less).
Copenhagenize claims that “[t]he new cycle track along the [Grand] [C]anal is brilliant”. It sure looks shiny and new. It has a small ridge between the road and the cycle line, the sort that was abandoned elsewhere because if you’d hit it accidentally, you’d go head first into traffic. Right of way is confusing. I use one crossing of the new cycle lane on my way back from work. In the few months since it was opened, I’ve spend some 10 minutes there and witnessed four near misses as cars turn on bikes. Fortunately, Dublin bikes are equipped with above-average brakes.
Copenhagenize has used the old let’s-rank-something trick to generate publicity. Unfortunately, they did not add to our understanding of what makes a city friendly to cycling.
Although there are some problems with the aggregate figures estimated by the CSO from the Quarterly National Household Survey, the percentages provided by the survey have continued validity. In these cases we can expect that the ‘missing’ 97,000 people who were ‘found’ by the Census will affect both the numerator and denominator.
Here are some unemployment rates from the first quarter of 2006 up to the second quarter of 2011. The rates are provided by gender, age, region, education and nationality. When making overall judgements the size and the labour force participation rate of each group should also be considered but those are not the focus here.
1. Overall unemployment rate
2. Unemployment rate by gender
3. Unemployment rate by age
4. Unemployment rate by education
5. Unemployment rate by region
6. Unemployment rate by nationality
The annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General contains lots of useful information. However, one criticism I would level at the report is its use of an accounting framework that differs from the General Government Budget that we report to Brussels.
The report states that “Overall State expenditure in 2010 was €53.8 billion, a reduction of 9.5% on the 2009 level” figures that are being widely reported in the news today. The report also lists “Total Receipts” at €35.6 billion up from €34.7 billion the year before.
However, if one looks at the more comprehensive accounts that we provide to Brussels—and which are used as the basis for reporting and compliance with our EU-IMF programme—one finds (page 49) that total expenditure by the Irish government last year was €103.2 billion while total revenues were €53.2 billion.
The €103.2 billion expenditure figure includes €30.8 billion for promissory notes, and one can understand that there are various possible accounting treatments for these notes. However, that still leaves non-promissory-note spending at €72.4 billion, almost twenty billion higher than reported by the C&AG. So despite the use of “overall” and “total”, it’s pretty clear that these are not overall totals at all.
Some of these differences are accounted for by the exclusion of capital spending and on the tax side there’s differing treatment of PRSI contributions. I could go on listing other differences but, frankly, who cares? The GGB figures provided to Brussels are the most comprehensive indicators of our fiscal position and they are being closely watched by the EU and IMF.
As I’ve written about before, these kinds of figures also mislead the public about key magnitudes, thus undermining public debate about fiscal options. For example, you will hear various expenditure items compared against a total tax revenue figure of €31.7 billion—those who’ve read the C&AG report will think total revenue was €35.6 billion. This usually ends up distorting the actual fraction of revenues devoted to these expenditures.