Author: Kevin O’Rourke

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Rankings 2010

The 2010 rankings are available here, although the site is very busy.

As a semi-Dane, I am pleased to see two Danish universities in the top 100, along with a Norwegian university and a couple of Swedish ones.

TCD is in the 200-300 group, UCD in the 300-400 group.

OK, so all these rankings are to some extent silly, but at least in our field the ones repec put out are ‘order of magnitude sensible’. And given the government’s stress on the ‘knowledge economy’, and the amount of coverage the Times rankings get in Ireland, it seems worth pointing out that not all rankings show Irish universities in such a favourable light.

The Shanghai rankings have had a major influence in France, where policy makers were very shocked by how poorly French universities fared in the initial years of this index. The result was a major shake-up of the higher education sector there, with universities being given a lot more control of their budgets and hiring procedures.

New rules for Times university rankings

I think academics all know about this already, but I wonder do the policy makers?

I have no idea if Irish universities are going to do better or worse this autumn, but if they do worse, then people will need to remember that the ranking procedure has changed.

After catch-up

The Economist’s bloggers have a piece on China today which is relevant to Ireland. They ask what happens to an economy’s growth rate, in the long run, once it has caught up to the technological frontier. Their answer, correctly, is that “Historically speaking, the answer is clear—growth slows to 2-3% per year.”

This is a point which Cormac Ó Gráda and I made in a textbook chapter on long run Irish growth a decade ago. Very high growth rates characterise economies catching up to the frontier — Western Europe or Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, the Asian Tigers in the 1960s and 1970s, ourselves in the 1990s. Once you have caught up, 2-3% per annum is about as good as it gets. Allowing a bubble to inflate can obscure this reality over the short to medium run, but in the long run you won’t manage to grow more rapidly than the United States has done over the past century or so: to do so is a sign of an economy that is still in some sense backward.

These are relevant considerations when thinking about what sort of growth rates Ireland can reasonably be expected to achieve over the next decade or two.

Now that’s what I call a stress test

HT Calculated Risk

Eichengreen and Temin on systems failures

Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin have written classic accounts of the Great Depression. If you haven’t read Golden Fetters, and Lessons from the Great Depression, you should.

But if you don’t have time for that, they have a piece on Vox which reprises the main conclusion of their work:

an international monetary system is .. a system in which countries on both sides of the exchange rate contribute to its smooth operation. Actions by surplus countries, and not just their deficit counterparts, have systemic implications. They cannot realistically assign all responsibility for adjustment to their deficit counterparts.

This is as true for EMU and “Bretton Woods II” as it was for Bretton Woods, or the Gold Standard, but it is a lesson that at times seems to have been completely forgotten.