Author: Stephen Kinsella

Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Limerick.

Teaching macro after the crisis

Olivier Blanchard, pound for pound one of the best macroeconomists out there, is revising his famous textbook. His experience at the IMF has forced him to reconsider the basic short- to medium-term models we teach.

In particular Blanchard wants to keep the ‘IS’ curve, which relates savings to investment, and mostly dump the ‘LM’ curve, which supposedly connects the demand for real balances to the interest rate via the money supply. He also wants to ditch the aggregate supply and demand model, which relates changes in aggregate demand and supply to employment and expectations over the medium term.

Blanchard wants to scrap this and connect the IS curve to an older idea, the Philips Curve, which will be paired with a new curve, called the MP curve in many formulations. Karl Whelan, formerly of this parish, has a nice exposition of the whole IS-MP-PC system here (.pdf). This should replace the older IS-LM and AS-AD formulations over time, but for that to happen, lecturers will need to update their notes, and textbook authors will need to update their offerings. We know Blanchard is doing his bit. What about our Irish colleagues?

A while ago Brian Lucey and I looked at how much the teaching of economics had changed in Ireland since the crisis. Not much, was the short answer. The presentation of our initial results is here (.ppt).

The next thing to do is to change how economists are taught about finance. I have quite a few thoughts on this, perhaps best expressed in my own teaching about financial economics, but Blanchard’s suggestions around the introduction of more than one interest rate reminds me a lot of this classic paper by Jack Treynor, and maybe that can be worked in, in a sensible way.

Either way, Blanchard’s textbook will be top of my recommended reading list when it comes out.

Four thoughts on the reformed budgetary process

The new budgetary process announced last week includes an oversight committee within the Oireachtas and a series of stepping stone documents en route to the formal Budget Day announcement speech in October.

These processes are the Spring Statement, to set the tax and spend parameters for the coming 12 months, the National Economic Dialogue, to bring what used to be called the ‘social partners’ together to discuss spending priorities en bloc with Ministers, an expenditure report in early July and the tax strategy papers being circulated by late July.

First thought: A lot of this is happening already, and has been happening for years if not decades.

Think about the process. About half way through the year, a rough spending envelope is envisaged. Lobby groups try to convince Ministers to spend more on their thing, whatever that is, and within the walls of Merrion St., the boffins figure out various tax and spend combinations, which then gets presented to the Minister for her or his sign off on budget day. The same people performing the same processes will be working on the new budgetary processes.

The big difference in today’s formulation is how open and transparent it could be. It may not be. The simple way to make it less transparent is to under-fund the budget oversight committee’s secretariat, plunge them into a sea of unsearchable .pdfs, ignore any requests for raw data by saying something like ‘commercial sensitivity’ or something else, and go to the pub.

Second thought: Assuming everyone engages with an open heart, the big wins may still not be transparent. This is because really stupid ideas like Decentralisation won’t even make it to the floor of the Committee.

The process will have a hard time establishing its importance without additional reports on the distributional impacts or gender impacts of new policies, new models, or an open data framework. Unpopular but necessary fiscal elements (say increasing the local property tax at some point) may well get stymied by a committee afraid to make an voter-unfriendly decision.

Third thought: None of this will avoid last minute dot com political flyers. We may still see weird little subsidies for greyhounds or taxidermists or endangered snails or whatever still creeping in at the last minute, because that’s the way our politics works.

Fourth thought: This is the start of a longer conversation about fiscal oversight and control, vote by vote, within the Oireachtas and within the Government. It is going to be fascinating.

Reforming Ireland’s Budgetary Cycle

Via Commenter @DOCM:

The final report of the Oireachtas sub-committe on reform is now available here.

It represents a major, even historical, change, including the introduction by 2017 of an IPBO, which we discussed here.

There remain, however, a number of major ambiguities e.g. no definition of the “budgetary cycle”, lack of clarity in the role of the Budget Oversight Committee (BOC) and its relations ship with the the sectoral committee “shadowing” Finance, PER and the Taoiseach’s department and, in particular, the other sectoral committees (page 9) “Committee also to consider option where Departmental Estimates would be considered by sectoral committees which would make their views known to Budget Oversight Committee for its consideration of aggregate position.”

In short, plenty on the form but very little in the matter of the substance of the involvement of the Dáil in deciding the levels and allocation of expenditure and taxation. It seems. however, that the split between PER and Finance will be between these two issues cf. the remarks by the Minister of Finance:

“The Spring Economic Statement will become a summer statement and it should be ready by June. There will be a full debate in the House. I am providing all the text papers to the finance committee so that there will be a full debate on taxation at that point, in advance of the budget.”

What should an Irish Parliamentary Budget Office Do?

Parliamentary Budget Offices (PBOs) exist around the world and typically provide budget projections, budget risk analyses, estimates of policy changes, impact assessments, flow of funds analyses, macro-trend analysis, and financial analysis where, prospective policies can be independently costed. The PBO also has an outreach function to show the public the work parliament does in assessing the fit of new proposals.

PBOs are different from Fiscal Councils, in that fiscal councils occupy a watchdog function, evaluating the health of the economy generally and assessing compliance with constitutionally-mandated fiscal rules. Ireland has a fiscal council, it does not have a PBO. The new programme for government commits (on pages 14 and 15) to establishing one.

Continue reading “What should an Irish Parliamentary Budget Office Do?”

Effects of Brexit on the EU

The Centre for European Regulation has a good podcast on what Europe might look like after Brexit here: