ICTU’s employment document is an interesting addition to the debate. However, it is not fully clear where the one billion figure comes from and, in general, it would be worth thinking further about costing. The overall thrust of the document is important though, in particular their correct emphasis on the urgent need to address full unemployment.
Author: Liam Delaney
This years Bates Clarke medal was awarded to Emmanuel Saez. Details of the award are below. Below that is his IDEAS page. The work that Saez is doing across areas like tax, social interactions, information provision and so on provides many good ideas that have relevance to policy. The award committee cite his contributions to areas of public economics like optimal tax theory, measurement of income distributions, field experiments in financial behaviour among other areas.
Unemployment among the young is something that has been under-discussed in the debate so far. For example, in about a month from now, the first of this year’s college students will start finishing up in Ireland. Last year the numbers read approximately 20,000 undergraduates each from the Universities and IT’s, 13,000 postgraduates from the Universities and approximately 2,000 from the IT’s. Thus, with the assumption that this year is the same as last year, there will be about 40,000 undergraduates and 15,000 postgraduates coming out of college and its past time to start a debate about policy for this group. Given that there is currently a public sector embargo on hiring and private sector hiring is so weak, the options for a lot of this year’s graduates do not look good. My guess is that over half the undergraduate students will go on to postgraduate but the insustainability of this as an employment response should be obvious if the labour market is not set to recover for the next few years.
The recent budget packages are essentially a combination of back-to-work incentives, training schemes, incentives for training, extra third level places and so on. The total budget allocated for these measures is 128 million and they look like a very partial response at best, albeit a start.
Bell and Blanchflower released a paper earlier in the year that is a must-read for any policy-maker who reads this blog and is interested in developing policy to immediately rectify unemployment among young people. The article stresses the importance of not allowing young people to enter into early periods of unemployment and the potential long-run economic and psychological costs of not acting. It offers proposals such as job-sharing, mandatory training/schooling until age 18, development of “shovel-ready” labour intensive projects and so on. I think that we urgently need a policy document from a selection of government departments on how a package of such proposals could be rolled out, given the current budgetary constraints. I know many on this blog may argue that pricing ourselves back into international competitiveness is the only sustainable employment response, but in an environment with such low global demand it would be foolish not to think of urgent active responses for both graduates and non-graduates.
Behavioural Economics is one of the main drivers of modern economics but we have not spoken about how ideas from this field are relevant to current Irish economic conditions. This is not a blog just for specialists so I am going to try to give some jargon-free sentences on what behavioural economics is and why policy-makers should care. This is purely my own view having researched the area since 2001 and having lectured courses in TCD and UCD on the topic and they do not reflect any attempt at capturing the consensus opinion in this field. I feel very strongly of the view that the absence of an understanding of both psychology and of policy evaluation has damaged Irish policy and that a continued cynicism about the capacities of the Irish public sector to deliver innovative policy is leading many to stop trying to think of innovation. Behavioural Economics combined with rigorous policy design is a partial corrective to these tendencies.