The Irish Economy

Bright undergraduates tend to enjoy courses in the history of economic thought — I know I did — but the field is in an even more parlous state than economic history when it comes to the hiring decisions of economics departments. After all, why spend time studying the mistaken theories of the past, when you can study the superior theories that have replaced them?

(OK, perhaps that argument doesn’t seem quite so compelling now as it did a few years ago.)

So I was interested to see David Warsh’s report from the AEA meetings which quoted James Heckman, no less, as making the argument for history of thought courses in Economics PhD programmes. It follows the launching of a blog which promises to “engage current financial news and policy debates from the standpoint of the classics of monetary theory.”

And Brad makes the pitch in characteristically understated fashion here.

Tony Leddin and I have included a version of this type of graph in successive editions of our textbook The Macroeconomy of Ireland.
Here are two slides showing the data for Ireland from 1970 to 2009.

(It proved easier to post a link to Flickr than to go through to rigmarole of uploading via this site!)

Happy Christmas!

Has anyone seen an Irish equivalent of this? A good way of framing macroeconomic debates…

I guess you have to speak Ukrainian to work for Kind Fairy, but this business model can be used in other languages too.

The Irish Times profiles Constantin Gurdgiev in this article.

The IMF’s annual research conference is on at the moment.  Quite a few of the papers are helpful in understanding the Irish situation:  the papers can be downloaded here.

There is no international standard for the reporting of property price indices.  However, it is still very welcome that the BIS has now made public its database on property prices for 37 countries. Details (and spreadsheet) available here.

As has been widely reported the Minister for Finance has established a Review Group on State Assets that is chaired by Colm McCarthy.

The terms of reference are:

While most comments in the media have interpreted the focus on asset disposals to refer only to privatisation, it is perfectly possible that the various state companies hold assets that might not be essential for the efficient running of these businesses and thus could be disposed of without privatisation.

In relation to privatisation it will be important not only to consider the short-run gain in funds through the sale of assets, but the longer-run impact on the competitiveness of the economy. Long-run considerations should include the loss of control of national strategic assets that would result from a sale. This might be addressed by keeping the key infrastructures such as networks in public ownership.

In some cases it might also be useful to consider a long-term lease as an alternative to an outright sale of assets, which will also yield revenue up-front but avoids the ’selling off of family silver’. Joint ownership is another option.

Looking through the list of assets to be reviewed it is hard to ignore the differences in ownership patterns with many other countries. Electricity generation, ports and airports are private in many countries.

For those who are interested, our article on the above topic is available here.

This NYT article provides an interesting account of the careers and research choices of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff.