As I note in the companion post to this one, today sees the launch of the fiftieth Daft Report, with a commentary by yours truly. To mark the occasion, and to mark five years of Ireland’s property market crash, Daft.ie and the All-Island Research Observatory at NUI Maynooth, have launched a property value heatmap tool. In this post, I’ll give an outline of what the tool is and does, and what we can learn from it.
Author: Ronan Lyons
Kevin and Philip have been keeping readers of this site up-to-date with economic analysis of Grexit, problems with EMU and other big picture items over the last few days.
If I may, I’d like to bring things back down to the level of Ireland and the upcoming referendum on the Fiscal Compact. To my mind, a few important concepts have gone out the window as the debate in Ireland about the referendum on the Fiscal Compact has descended into political games. Perhaps the first victim was cause-and-effect, with the mere correlation of banking debts and government deficits being translated by many into iron-cast causation.
A close second in the casualty list was the concept of opportunity cost: in other words, there’s not really much point focusing on how bad or economically illiterate the Fiscal Compact is in and of itself. We need to ask how attractive it is relative to the other options. As of now, the most important attribute of the Fiscal Compact is its ability to get Ireland the funding that it otherwise would not be able to get, to allow the country to gradually close the deficit. By 2020, that may be completely unimportant and we may want to ditch the Compact. But we are voting in 2012, not 2020.
With that in mind, I’ve developed “Austerity Games”, as a basic guide to voters on deficits, debt, fiscal policy and the EU’s Fiscal Compact (below, click to enlarge). Hopefully it’s useful to some readers.
For a fuller exposition on why the IMF will not be a panacea, Karl Whelan has an excellent blog post here.
This is my first post on Irisheconomy.ie, having served my time as apprentice in the Keyboard Warrior army with my own blog, so hopefully it’s useful to set out how I envisage using this site. My research interests are urban economics (including property markets) and economic history. When it comes to the Irish economy, my interests are probably best categorised as follows (in no particular order):
- Irish government finances
- the property market
- Ireland’s international competitiveness
I had thought that maybe my best option to open my account on this site would be to do a post on each and start a conversation. Fortunately, the Irish policy debate is far too exciting and so this morning we have a story (see for example Charlie Weston’s article in the Independent) that covers all three areas: the property tax.