Author: Seamus Coffey

Last week’s release of the 2011 Institutional Sector Accounts has not attracted much attention.  The thread on it only generated one (seemingly misplaced) reply.  The addition this year of consolidated tabled for the financial accounts is useful and gives this table of debt liabilities for the household, government and NFC sectors.

The impact of netting out intra-sectoral balances is small on the household and government sectors.  The consolidation nets out about €45 billion of (domestic intra-company) liabilities in the NFC sector.  All liabilities of the NFC sector with the rest of the world are still included so there is still a significant impact of MNCs in the 168% of GDP figure given for the sector.

One notable feature of the loan liabilities of the household sector is the decline that has occurred in the past three years.

In 2011, the net financial wealth of the household sector increased by €3 billion to €120 billion, driven mainly by the reduction in liabilities.  The increases in the debts of the government sector go without saying. 

The non-financial accounts are equally useful.  The government accounts give a cash-based view of the general government sector which is more complete in scope than the Exchequer Accounts.  The general government accounts used for the EDP are accrual-based.

Below the fold are the current accounts of the general government sector since 2007.  The value of output figure used is based on the inputs used rather than prices as most government output is non-market.

John Bradley has an essay in the latest edition of the Dublin Review of Books.

Here are some details of an upcoming SSISI seminar.

Justin Doran, Declan Jordan and Eoin O’Leary of the UCC School of Economics are to present a paper to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland at the Royal Irish Academy on Dawson Street on Thursday November 1^st at 6pm. The paper is called Effects of R&D spending on Innovation by Irish and Foreign-owned Businesses. Details and a draft of the paper are here.

The paper finds that Irish owned businesses are significantly more likely than foreign-owned to introduce new products as a result of creative R&D work undertaken. Foreign-owned businesses, which spend nearly six times more per worker on R&D than Irish-owned, enjoy very high returns mostly from the purchase or licence of patents. According to the authors this points to a dichotomous Irish innovation system.

Writing in today’s Irish Times Vincent Browne has an opinion piece that purports to look at the impact of austerity in Ireland.  Much of the argument is based on this graph from a presentation by Thora Kristin Thorsdottir at a NWCI/TASC conference on Monday.

I don’t know anything about the Icelandic data used in the graph but it may be worth noting a couple of points on the Irish element of the graph:

The report of the stress test of 14 Spanish banks has been published.  The reports shows a capital requirement for seven of the banks of just under €60 billion.  The report can be read here.