Category: Economic Performance

Women’s Economic Opportunities

The Economist Intelligence Unit has a report on women’s economic opportunities, indexing and ranking countries’ relative performance. Leo Abruzzese discusses the general issues over at VoxEU. Let us focus on Ireland.

Ireland ranks 16th out of 113 countries. Better than most, worse than some. We cannot afford to hold back part of the workforce. Increasing productivity is one way of getting Ireland back on its feet.

Here are the factors that are keeping Ireland’s women down:

* Provisions for maternity and paternity leave

* Legal restrictions on job types

* De facto discrimination at work

* Access to child care

* Access to credit

* Adolescent fertility rate

* Non-ratification of the convention against all forms of non-discrimination against women

None of these issues were raised in the latest report on the Smart Economy. Making better use of existing resources is, apparently, not smart.

September Live Register

The September Live Register figures show a decline of 5,400 on a seasonally adjusted basis. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate declined from 13.8 percent in August to 13.7 percent in September. The average unemployment rate for the third quarter was 13.73 percent compared with 13.2 percent in the second quarter.

QNHS for 2010:Q2

Results from the Quarterly National Household Survey for 2010:Q2 are now available (press release here, full release here.)

Employment is still falling, though at a slower pace than previously. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for the second quarter is 13.2 percent, which is the same as the average for these months that has been estimated by the Live Register figures over those months, so there will be no great revision to those figures (which last showed a standardised unemployment rate of 13.8% in August.) The decline in the participation rate seems to be easing, with the seasonally adjusted rate falling from 61.2 percent in 2010:Q1 to 61.1 percent in 2010:Q2.

What a difference a year makes

We need to cut costs and increase productivity to pay the mounting debt. It is disconcerting that Ireland dropped from being the 22nd most competitive economy in 2009 to the 29th in 2010, according to the World Economic Forum.

People pay attention to the overall indicator and rank, but the subindicators tell the real story. There are no surprises, really, but it is a sobering read.

Here are some the negative trends:

*Public trust of politicians: 37 to 65

— higher numbers are worse, as countries are ranked from 1 to 139

*Wastefulness of government spending: 45 to 93

*Burden of government regulation: 61 to 87

*Efficiency of legal framework: 22 to 27

*Government deficit: 55 to 130

*Savings rate: 75 to 119

*Government debt: 51 to 112

*Intensity of local competition: 39 to 51

*Time required to start a business: 24 to 45

*Brain drain: 10 to 19

*Financing through local equity market: 51 to 105

*Ease of access to loans: 19 to 117

*Soundness of banks: 9 to 139 (bottom of the pile)

*Regulation of security exchanges: 16 to 90

*Capacity for innovation: 26 to 31

*Government procurement of advanced tech: 43 to 75

There are positive trends too:

*Quality of infrastructure (6 indices, all up)

*Inflation: 48 to 3

*Interest rate: 63 to 11 (I guess the data are older than a few weeks)

*Pay and productivity: 76 to 56

Ireland is still the best place in the world if you worry about malaria. The judiciary is still strong. And foreign investors are still treated well.

No Really, We Did Have A Huge House Price Boom

There are lots of aspects of the performance of the Irish economy that people disagree about. However, I had been under the impression until this week that everyone agreed that Ireland experienced an exceptional increase in real housing prices in the during the period before the recession.

It turns out, however, that I was wrong. Not everyone agrees with this. Earlier this week, there was a discussion on this website of a paper by Carmen and Vince Reinhart, which reported some figures for real house price appreciation between 1997 and 2007.

Among the figures reported by the Reinharts on Table 4 of their paper were the following:

U. Kingdom +150.1pc
Spain +118.5pc
Sweden +114.9pc
Ireland +114.8pc
France +111.6

These figures have been debated elsewhere on this site but not in a way that would clarify the key fact. That Ireland really did have a larger increase in real house prices than these other countries is not that hard to check.

Here are the facts. The Department of the Environment reports that the average second hand house in the Republic of Ireland cost €102,711 in 1997 and cost €377,850 in 2007, an increase of 268%. The average value of the CPI increased by 42.4 percent between 1997 and 2007. So, from the DoE figures, we can calculate the real house price increase from 368 / 1.424 = 258. In other words, real Irish house prices rose by 158% from 1997 to 2007.  And, for what it’s worth, the real increase from 1995 to 2007 was 246%.

So, yes we really did have a huge house price boom. Certainly a boom that was bigger than occurred in Spain, Sweden or France. Morgan Kelly didn’t just make it up.

Cue comments from house price boom deniers, flat earthers and folks who believe Elvis is alive and living with Michael Jackson …