Green growth

Sean and I have an article on green growth at Vox. It builds on a paper recently published in the Energy Journal. Research funded by the EPA.

State Investment Bank

Michael O’Sullivan and I have an article in today’s Irish Times arguing for a state investment bank. Some links to supporting materials are below the fold.

Eurozone Prospects

Many will have heard Alan Ahearne on Morning Ireland explain why we should try to work our way out of the crisis by ‘sticking to the plan’.  He clearly believes that the Eurozone will survive in its present form and that the costs of Ireland defaulting and/or unilaterally leaving the currency union would far outweigh the benefits.

In their recent ESRI publication, John FitzGerald  and Ide Kearney set out in some detail why they believe the Irish debt problem is manageable and why we should should stick to the plan.  This was already posted by Philip Lane and has been discussed here.

Nouriel Roubini, on the other hand, believes that ‘sticking to the plan’ has no chance of working in Greece, so it should organize an orderly default and re-introduce the drachma. Some of the arguments he makes are compelling and many of them apply with some force to Ireland, especially the difficulty of restoring competitiveness and growth through a deflationary internal devaluation.

We need to evaluate the prospects for the Eurozone and our place in it.

Smart Economy Jobs in Irish Regions

Guest Post by Dr Chris van Egeraat of the Geography Department at NUI Maynooth and Chariman of the Regional Studies Association Irish Branch.

Enterprise Ireland announced that 445 jobs will be created in 24 new high potential start-up companies which have been supported by government through Enterprise Ireland in the second quarter of 2011. The announcement follows on the 310 new jobs announced earlier this year as part of the first quarter results of Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start Ups programme.

Many of the companies involved operate in the sectors that the Government has identified as part of the Smart Economy strategy, including biotechnology, life sciences, ICT and financial services. This is good news for Ireland but from a regional development perspective it is important to consider the extent to which different regions benefit from these developments.

Interestingly the press release includes a breakdown of number of projects and related jobs by location. Unfortunately, the information pertains to 16 of the 24 investments only, and the press office was not in a position to provide details of the other eight investments because of the commercially sensitive nature. The data allows us to between the Greater Dublin Area (including Kildare and Wicklow), the rest of the South and East (S&E) Region and the Border-Midlands-West (BMW) Region.

The results are striking. Three quarters of the new projects are located in the Greater Dublin Area and a further 12 per cent in the rest of the S&E region. Only 12% of the projects are located in the traditionally lagging BMW region. The results in terms of jobs are similar with merely 12% of the jobs located in the BMW region.

The data for the first quarter of 2011, suggests that this is not a once-off result. In the first quarter the GDA accounted for nearly 70 per cent of the new projects, while the rest of the S&E region accounted for a further 16%. With 15% of the new projects, the BMW region again performed poorly. The press release for the first quarter did not provide complete data for jobs.

To put these figures into perspective one can compare these with the geography of employment in all Irish-owned agency-assisted companies by regions in 2010 using figures from the Forfas annual employment survey. Currently the Dublin region only accounts for 31 per cent of jobs in indigenous assisted companies with the rest of the SE accounting for 41 per cent. The BMW region still accounted for 28% of the jobs in 2010.

Clearly, there are some limitations to the new data on the geography of recent project and job announcements, not at least the fact that we don’t have access to the complete dataset. However, if the results do represent a real trend, this will have important implications for the economic development potential of Irish regions and raises questions about the role that different regions can play in the Smart Economy as promoted by the Irish Government.

The regional trends outlined above highlight the timeliness and relevance of the upcoming Irish Regions in the Smart Economy Conference, organised by the Regional Studies Association at NUI Maynooth. For further details: http://www.regional-studies-assoc.ac.uk/events/2011/sept-ireland/programme.pdf

 

Some Cheerful Demographic Statistics

To take our minds off the heavier economic / financial topics for a while I thought I would share some thoughts provoked by the Annual Summary of Vital Statistics for 2010 published at the end of June. Taken in conjunction with the preliminary results of the 2011 Census, it reveals some surprisingly positive trends for a country in the throes of a very deep recession.

Our birth rate is holding up despite the surge in unemployment and the resumption of net emigration (even if at a more modest rate than previously feared).

Over 75,000 births were registered in 2008 – almost 60% more than in 1994 and the highest number recorded in modern times. However, this was probably the peak, as the annual total for 2010 was 2% lower than that for 2008, while the 2010Q4 figure was 4% lower than the corresponding figure for 2008.

The surge in births will have far-reaching implications for the economy’s medium-term prospects.  Most immediately it is placing pressure on the educational system, but over the longer run it could be argued that our relatively youthful population will bestow a competitve advantage relative to the rest of Europe, where the ageing of populations is becoming an acute problem.