SPEs have been much discussed in the context of the global financial crisis: the BIS has just released a comprehensive new report on this topic.
This new book by Stephen Kinsella of UL should be a good read.
Today Thomas Conefrey and myself publish a working paper entitled “Managing Housing Bubbles in Regional Economies under EMU: Ireland and Spain”. It is available here .
With the advent of EMU, monetary policy can no longer be used to prevent housing market bubbles in regional economies such as Ireland or Spain. However, fiscal policy can and should be used to achieve the same effect. This paper shows that the advent of EMU relaxed existing financial constraints in Ireland and Spain, allowing a more rapid expansion of the housing stock in those countries to meet their specific demographic circumstances. However, the failure to prevent these booms turning into bubbles did lasting damage to the two economies, damage that could have been avoided by more appropriate fiscal policy action.
The failure to tighten fiscal policy in Spain and Ireland in the early years of this decade laid the ground for the housing market bubbles in the two economies. The Stability and Growth Pact proved a distraction: government budgetary balance was not an appropriate fiscal target for those two economies. By contrast, Finland, having learned from its mistakes twenty years ago, ran substantial government surpluses to prevent domestic overheating. Specifically in relation to overheating in the housing market, we consider that a temporary tax on mortgage interest payments (first suggested in 2001) should have been used to target overinvestment in housing, investment which seriously crowded out the traded sector of both economies. This tax would have mimicked an increase in interest rates. Obviously it will be a very long time before such a tax might be needed in either Spain or Ireland to limit overinvestment in housing.
The paper shows that demographic circumstances in both Spain and Ireland meant that it was appropriate that investment in housing in those two economies should have been somewhat higher than in their neighbours. Even after the housing bubbles have burst, the relatively low endowment of housing infrastructure in the two economies (relative to adult population) means that there will be a need for additional investment in the next decade, when the current excess supply has been worked off.
In the paper we also include a graph taken from our paper “Recovery Scenarios for Ireland” published in May which, inter alia, considered likely housing demand over the coming decade. Our model included estimated 2009 population numbers which were quite close to the latest estimates published by the CSO. We assume that between 2009 and 2015 there will be cumulative net emigration of up to 120,000. Our analysis would suggest that the underlying population increase would lead to somewhat higher demand for housing than Brendan Walsh has estimated in a recent post for the period to 2015. In addition to the pure “demographic” effect we also factor in some increase in headship on the basis of the recent rise in the number of households, which possibly reflects falling rents.
Gerry Godley does not have the answer to the question “How much does James Joyce contribute to the growth rate of the Irish economy”, but he does raise some interesting points. (There is some self-serving pleading, but not too much.) See here.
Over the years there has been lots of discussion about the “fundamentals” of the housing market. Our “strong demographics” were often cited as contributing to the buoyant demand for housing. By this was meant that the rapid growth of the numbers in the household-forming age groups – relative to the number of units being vacated by deaths etc – translated into a firm demand for additions to the housing stock. On this site, Colm McCarthy looked at the impact of demographics on the demand for housing yesterday, referring to recent evidence on the resumption of net emigration. Some of the ensuing discussion tended to get bogged down in trying to interpret very short-term indicators. I thought it would be helpful to provide a medium-term perspective on this aspect of the housing market.
The point of departure is that over the past ten or fifteen years Ireland’s population has been growing faster than that of any other OECD country. For example, our population grew by 14 per cent between 2002 and 2008 when the population of EU15 managed only a 4 per cent increase.