Is here. We’ll be updating the content incrementally.
Author: Stephen Kinsella
Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Limerick.
UCD’s Dr Niamh Hardiman, funded by IRC, has organised a conference on The Political Economy of the European Periphery in Newman House, 85 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, on Tuesday 3 December 2013. Registration is free, but places are limited so please book by email to geary@ucd.ie, with the subject line ‘European Integration’, before Tuesday 26 November 2013.
The full programme is here (.pdf).
A final reminder that this year the DEW, kindly sponsored by Dublin’s Chamber of Commerce, will be held at the CastleTroy Park Hotel in Limerick from 18-20 of October. The final programme is here.
All bookings and reservations for the conference should be directed here.
The 36th DEW Annual conference will see more than 30 presenters, with Ministers Michael Noonan and Pat Rabbitte giving plenary talks, along with policy makers, academics, and members of the business community, it’s going to be a lively debate. See you there.
Many of us will be gearing up for the wonkfest that is the Budget, and as long time readers probably know, the Estimates of Receipts and Expenditure (.pdf) white paper is a key document in shaping any budget. Seamus has some thoughts on the latest one, and I’d really only add one point: several documents have now made much of the savings and passthrough coming from the full year’s property taxes, last year’s budgetary out turn, and the IBRC liquidation. Fiscal consolidation is on track.
All of this is, of course, predicated on growth coming back in strength, and as you’ll know if you stare at these things, growth is always magically 2-3 years away. The latest HERMES simulations estimate the cumulative effect of fiscal consolidation since 2010 is the reduction of annual growth rates by between 3/4–1%. So with more austerity, and a fragile international environment, growth may be hard to come by.
With two more years of relatively harsh budgets to look forward to, a good question might be what is the probability distribution around those growth estimates, and what downside risks–and resulting contingency plans–exist?
Karl Deeter, Marie Hunt and Brian Lucey have a new paper on this here, with some of the results of their survey abstracted here.