The IBEC submission for next weeks “jobs budget” is available at this link. Details include suggestions on extra data collection, changes to the FIS scheme, national internship programmes, sectoral-specific recommendations in areas like energy and farming, change to bankruptcy laws and a loan guarantee scheme.
Author: Liam Delaney
For those interested in behavioural economics, and its relevance to public policy, the recently released book by Congdon, Kling and Mullainathan, published by the Brookings Institute press, is essential reading. Entitled “Policy and Choice: Public Finance through the lens of behavioral economics”, the full book is free to download as a pdf file from the website. This is the best summary of the application of behavioral economics to public policy questions that I have read. There are chapters on asymmetric information, externalities, poverty and taxation, as well as summary and overview chapters. Ireland is in the process of fairly dramatically redesigning our health and pension systems and the insights from this book are extremely important to consider in this process. The first three chapters, in particular, are concise and clear descriptions of the main directions in this literature.
One of the most important economics books aimed at wider audiences to emerge in the last few years is Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Banerjee and Duflo are two of the leading economists of their generation and are particularly associated with the use of randomised controlled trials in development economics. However, this book is broader in its scope and tackles a wide range of issues in the economics of poverty, development economics and the economics of the family. The book has ten chapters and two major sections, one dealing with individual behaviour among the poor and the second dealing with the role of institutions. Like the best popular economics works, each chapter deals with very big issues backed with the recent literature but presented in a punchy and readable fashion. It is a cracking read. The first section deals with nutrition, public health interventions, education interventions and fertility. The second section looks at insurance for the poor, microcredit, savings and entrepeneurship. Chapter 10 sets their argument in the overall context of development debates raging between people like Sachs and Easterly.
The book pushes strongly for the continued development of experimental approaches to economic development that attempt to find workable solutions that large-scale philantrophic and government funding initiatives could be aimed toward. It is important reading for anyone working in microeconometrics and development economics broadly defined and also would be great reading for anyone in Ireland working around the area of foreign aid policy. I open up this thread for anyone who wants to debate aspects of the book or the surrounding issues. From an irisheconomy perspective, it is worth thinking about how the ideas in the book might influence how the Irish government directs the overseas aid budget.
I have posted a few times (here and here) before on developments in the micro-side of behavioural economics. I think that a lot of policy developments will come out of this area in the next ten years and I have been trying to keep as informed as possible, and have been giving lectures on this in both UCD (to economics students) and TCD (to psychology students). It should go without saying that this area is too broad to give anything approaching a comprehensive summary and my goal here is to point to some areas that might be of interest.
Am a bit late to this, but better late than never. Ronan Lyons, who has indirectly contributed a lot of material to this blog, and Ed Burke are co-editors of a new book called Next Generation Ireland. The book includes contributions from Ronan Lyons and Ed Burke themselves who give an introductory essay. Ronan also provides a chapter on improving the public sector and a co-authored chapter with Stephen Kinsella on improving fiscal policy in terms of both levels and composition. Eoin O’Malley takes on the issue of political and governmental reform. Michael Courtney has a chapter on identity, migration and citizenship. Michael King offers a chapter on improving competitiveness. Joseph Curtin has a chapter on environmental issues. Aoibhin de Burca has a chapter on North-South and Ireland-UK relations. Neil Sands and Nicola White provide an essay on the global extent of Irish identity and the importance of thinking along these dimensions. Co-editor Ed Burke’s final chapter is on Irish foreign policy.
Please feel free to use this post to debate aspects of the book if you have read it. Might also be worth debating what qualities the next generation of people who influence policy and business in Ireland should possess.