Author: Richard Tol

Dublin in the Cycle Top 10

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.

Towards a private ESB

The government has announced that it will sell a minority share of the ESB. This is welcome news. Privatization of non-core activities is a matter of principle. The ESB has paid poor dividends. It has frequently been used to bankroll projects of dubious commercial (yet clear electoral) value. Selling a minority share is a low risk strategy for price discovery and much better than a fire sale.

So far so good. However, the government also announced that it would keep the ESB “as an integrated utility”. The ESB is a conglomerate. It generates power, it owns the transmission network, it sells electricity, and it provides consultancy services.

The network is a natural monopoly, and should probably not be sold. The rest of the ESB can be safely left to the market (if properly regulated).

As an integrated utility with a natural monopoly, The ESB enjoys considerably market power. The nominally independent transmission system operator, EirGrid, gets electrons from ESB, transmits them over lines owned by the ESB, and delivers them to the ESB (who then retails them). The ESB’s dominant position is the main reason why few companies have entered the Irish electricity market.

Today’s announcement suggests that the government plans to continue the current situation. It would make more sense to sell the network to EirGrid. The price of such a sale matters because the ESB is part-owned by an ESOP; and because the ESB is using the network as collateral for cheap loans.

The future ESB will therefore face three demands, compared to two now. The workers will want well-paid jobs, as they had in the past. The political masters will want their pet projects, as they had in the past. And the private owners will want dividends. The consumer will have to pay for all of this.

Higher education and research

Higher education and research was again in the news today.

The latest batch of bad news on the labour market in Waterford seems to have triggered a decision to establish Waterford University. I am not convinced that universities are necessarily good for regional development. Some universities sure have a positive impact, but I don’t think this holds for any university. With the newly build highways, Waterford is closer to Cork and Dublin, taking away some of the would-be benefits of a local centre of learning and research.

Furthermore, Ireland has plenty of universities already. The largest university has 18,000 students (UCD, 2009) — which puts it below average in the Netherlands,  60th in the UK,  38th in Germany, 35th and just above average in France. Ireland has the 8th highest number of universities per capita in the world already. (A new university would not change the latter rank, just push us closer to Norway.) This matters for two reasons. There is a fixed cost in running a university. International rankings are not normalized for size; small universities cannot do well.

The 2010 annual report of Science Foundation Ireland also made the news today. The press release emphasizes collaboration, which has increased with both researchers abroad and companies in Ireland. This is not a measure of success. It may just reflect the changing nature of SFI funding and its increase in size. The annual report itself has more indicators, but is annoyingly glossy for an academic organization. We learn that SFI-funded researchers have published 22% more papers in 2010 than in 2009, but we are not told the number of researchers. We learn that Ireland has gone up 16 places in the citations-per-paper ranking (36th in 2003, 20th in 2010), but for all we know that may be because of the social sciences and humanities (who are not supported by SFI).

The SFI 2010 Census has more numbers. Two things stand out: Few patents, few spin-outs. Emigration numbers are high: 47% for all, 66% for non-Irish (post-doc and below). SFI’s mission is to bolster innovation in Irish manufacturing.

Waste collection

The proposed reform of waste collection policy was again in the news today.

The Examiner has a funny story. The proposed reform would cut costs (5,000 people less on the payroll) and increase charges at the same time. The Times is more thoughtful, although it is still curious. In our textbooks, regulators fight against market power. Here, the regulator wants to establish private monopolies and the companies that would likely obtain those are dead against.

Mr Kells issues an implicit threat of court action. Presumably, the companies would argue that they have a customary right and reasonable expectation to compete in any waste collection market.

A lot of the fuss is due to poor communication. As far as I know, the department wants to sell waste collection concessions to the highest bidder, rather than take waste collection back into the public sector (as the private waste companies seem to think).

Here is one way to get around this. Instead of auctioning concessions, they could be grandfathered.

AFAIK, there are four private waste collection companies in DLR. Counting bins on my way to work, I guess that one company has 50% of the market, two have 20%, and one has 10%. DLR should thus be carved into 10 concessions, with 5 going to company A, 2 to companies B and C, and 1 to company D. In two years time, the first concession should be auctioned, the second one two months later, and so on.

Ireland’s economists in the world (part 2)

I’m getting better at scraping the web and I’ve now been able to calculate some things that IDEAS/RePEc does not.

This graph has the number of economists in Ireland registered at IDEAS/RePEc. It is not a natural number to account for joint appointments. The number has been rising steadily over time. I expect that trend to reverse in the coming months.

This graph shows Ireland’s position in the total population of economists. We’re a small country. I highlight Massachusetts because it is ranked highest by IDEAS/RePEc.

This graph shows the number of unique publications per person. In recent times, Ireland has done reasonably well in terms of productivity.

However, visibility cq interest is less impressive, as shown in this graph. It should be noted, though, that “abstract views” is the metric that can be most easily manipulated. That said, Ireland does not do so well either on the number of citations per publication, as shown in this graph, or on the number of citing authors per person, as shown in this graph.

As always, these results can be interpreted in a number of ways. In order to improve Ireland’s standing at IDEAS/RePEc, we’ll need to convince more people that our papers are worth citing.

The great thing about the Public Data Explorer is that you can make your own graphs. You need to go back two positions to return to this blog.

I used these Matlab scripts to scrape the web.