The opening address at the Irish Labour History Society Annual Conference delivered by Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton is available here.
Author: Seamus Coffey
The CSO have published the Statistical Yearbook of Ireland 2013. The 20 chapters provide a useful compilation of the broad range of measures produced by the CSO. The naming of Chapter Nine suggests we have a way to go before we “break the vicious cycle”!
The CSO have also issued the October update of the Live Register which continues to show a decline. In the SA series it can be seen that most of this drop has been among males.
Separately, Eurostat have published updates for unemployment and inflation. In September, Euroarea unemployment remained at 12.2%, while the flash estimate of October HICP inflation shows a drop to 0.7%.
The Staff Report on the Commission’s latest review of Ireland’s EU/IMF programme is now available. It does not contain much that is new. There is this on page 20.
Ireland’s fiscal stance has not been overtly pro-cyclical since the beginning of the crisis. Using conventional metrics, discretionary fiscal policy has been clearly leaning against the wind in 2008 and 2009, and did not move openly or blatantly into the wind in 2010 and after, in spite of the significant budgetary adjustment efforts put in place by the Irish government (Graph 2.1) (14). Fiscal policy remained, and is expected to remain broadly in line with the stabilisation function of discretionary fiscal policy, or at least not to run counter that function. In the early years (2008-2009) when fiscal policy was incontrovertibly counter-cyclical, the fiscal policy strategy mainly consisted of correcting previous policy commitments built on optimistic growth projections accompanied by the fact that in a deflationary environment, nominal expenditure freezes implied increases in real terms. Since 2011, the improvement of the structural deficit has taken place in an environment of slightly improving economic conditions.
This is Graph 2.1. Click here to enlarge.
Maybe footnote 14 is important:
(14) The structural changes of the economy during the economic crisis are beyond normal business cycle fluctuations. Therefore, potential growth and structural government balance estimates need to be treated with caution.
Representatives of the UK’s Revenue and Customs appeared yesterday before the Public Accounts Committee of the Houses of Parliament. The exchanges were interesting though the evidence from the HMRC officials was sometimes confusing. Following on from previous work done by the committee much of the focus was on corporation tax with issues relating to tax residency, tax compliance, the tax gap and permanent establishment among those referred to.
The questioning from the committee chair, Margaret Hodge, was forthright but at times slipped into grandstanding, primarily a suggestion that the Revenue show take “a few show cases”. Ms Hodge also wanted the Revenue to estimate how much the tax gap would be if it was calculated “between the money that you collect and the money if everyone paid their fair share”. Of course, “fair share” is an alien concept to tax collectors; their job is to collect what the tax code prescribes. Unless something illegal is being undertaken the answer to such a question in relation to MNCs will be close to zero. If the UK wishes to collect more corporation tax Parliament changing the tax laws would be more effective than the Revenue undertaking some show cases.
An investigation into Google’s activities was alluded to through an exploration of documents provided by a former employee but it is not clear that it will lead to a change in the judgement that Google does not have a permanent establishment in the UK.
I don’t know if the Houses of Parliament make transcripts of the committee sessions available. The transcript of a recent appearance by our Revenue Commissioners at a sub-committee of the Oireachtas Finance Committee is available here.
A Bloomberg feature on some elements of the Irish corporation tax regime was also published yesterday.
UPDATE: A transcript of yesterday’s Commons PAC hearing is here (H/T Gavin).