The Irish Times and other media today carried a report on the publication of a new globalisation index produced by Ernst & Young which places Ireland third on the globalised states list. The EY index joins an increasingly crowded field, so what follows is a bluffer’s guide to globalisation indices. As always, a good starting point (but never more than that) is the relevant Wikipedia entry.
Author: Alan Matthews
The Irish Exporters’ Association has just published its end year review for 2009. It has some useful tables showing the sectoral and destination breakdown of both merchandise and services exports – the latter are now 44% of the total. The overall picture is well known, but some of the details are revealing. While overall exports (merchandise + services) fell by just 1%, the declines were 9% for the indigenous sector, 14% for food and 21% for drink. The IEA itself concludes that when the Life Sciences sector is excluded, exports fell by €6.1 billion making it one of the worst years on record for traditional Irish manufacturers selling on export markets. It foresees 2% growth in exports next year, with most of this coming from the services sector.
While attention today is understandably fixed on tomorrow’s budget, it is important not to forget what is happening in the real economy. The advance estimate of the value of farm output and income in 2009 published yesterday by the CSO underscores the severe impact which the drop in milk prices has had on farm output and incomes in the current year, although a dramatic drop in the volume of cereals produced as well as a continuing decline in sheep production also contributed to the dismal result.
Overall, the value of agricultural output at market prices fell by 18.9%. This includes a fall in the value of milk production of 34.8% and in cereals production of 52.1%, while the value of cattle production fell by 10.7% and pig output by 12.6%.
A draft Commission communication on reform of the EU budget has been widely leaked yesterday. The full communication is expected to be published next month in response to the consultation exercise on the EU budget which was mandated as part of the Inter-Institutional Agreement in May 2006 on the EU medium-term financial framework (MFF) for the 2007-2013 period. It is not, in itself, a proposal for the next MFF to start in 2014 which will be the prerogative of the new Commission when it takes up office at the start of next year, and which will not be presented until the first half of 2011. Nonetheless, the forthcoming communication sets out the choices facing Member States as they prepare for these negotiations in a clear fashion.
I discussed some of these choices in my paper to the recent ESRI/FFS Annual Budget Perspectives conference. On the expenditure side, the make-up of EU budget expenditure in 2013 will be roughly one-third for CAP income and market support measures, one third for cohesion policy, and one-third for everything else – rural development, research and external actions being the most important.
There is broad support for shifting the composition of budget expenditure towards meeting some of the global challenges facing the EU, including addressing issues of energy security, climate change, competitiveness, migration and projecting a more ambitious global European presence. The key principle is that budget spending should only be undertaken where it can be shown that there is a clear European value added over national spending.
Professor Robert Holton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin will give a lecture at 7 pm in Trinity College tonight which may be of interest to readers of this blog entitled “Is globalisation reversible?” as part of the Institute for International Integration Studies Public Lecture series. Details can be found here.