The Irish Economy

On PrimeTime last week, Sean Barrett and Edgar Morgenroth cast severe doubt on the wisdom of Metro North. They are now joined by Frank McDonald.

Cairan Cuffe’s response starts with “[n]ow is the time to invest”. That says it all really. You can read the rest for yourself.

The Green Party is apparently still oblivious to the situation with the economy and the public finances. Cuffe wants to invest billions of euros in a project with a doubtful return. Gormley wants to spend unnecessary hundreds of millions of euros on waste disposal, despite warnings of his own EPA.  Ryan invests ESB’s money in electric cars and continues a subsidy scheme that does not deliver according to his own SEAI.

It is never wise to waste money, but now is a particularly bad time.

Dublin is badly served by public transport at present. Liberation of the bus market is the way forward.

UPDATE: Metro North got planning.

I decided to give an interim update of the assessment of business schools and scholars on the island of Ireland, because things have changed. Latest results are here.

The records of 18 people have been double-checked and corrected where appropriate. More significantly, I had overlooked a department in Maynooth which has been added. Another department employs two high performers without listing them on their front page.

As a result, the preliminary ranking has changed: TCD, (UCD, QUB), (NUIG, UU, NUIM), (DCU, UL), DIT, NCI. Brackets indicate institutions whose performance is similar.

Note that Cork is still missing.

I’ve added sex and rank where known. The sex results are not good. The rank results are roughly as they should be: professor > reader > senior lecturer > lecturer > junior lecturer.

There are two exceptions, however: Associate professors perform on par with full professors, and post-docs perform on par with lecturers. I would expect there to be progression from the former to the latter.

While looking at the ranks, I came across all sorts of weird stuff. Full professors without a doctorate. Teaching assistants with a doctorate. Lecturers of French (in a business school!). Senior teaching assistants. And one of the department runs a restaurant — ostensibly for experimental purposes.

Recently, Benoit and Marsh assessed the research performance of political scientists in Ireland and Ruane and Tol did the same for economists. It is business’ turn now.

There are 8 business schools in the Republic of Ireland that claim to do academic research (and another 11 that only teach). Early September, the 8 research-oriented business schools employed 543 teaching and research staff. For comparison, Queen’s U Belfast and Ulster U are also included. This makes a total of 761 business scholars.

For that reason, a simple method is used. Data were collected from Scopus only. Four statistics were gathered: year of first publication, number of publications, number of citations, and h-index. People’s name, affiliation, specialization, degree, rank, and sex were also recorded. The results are here (5 people updated).

The data have been cross-checked with CVs when online. Other than that, the data are not validated. If you are a business scholar in Ireland, please check your entries and send me an email when something is amiss.

There are preliminary results that are likely to stand up to vetting of the data.

Some 60% of business scholars in the Republic and 50%  in the North have never published in a journal included in the Scopus database. This is the most comprehensive database available, covering all the main journals and many minor ones (e.g., Economic and Social Review, Knitting International) — but not all (e.g., Irish Journal of Management, Irish Marketing Journal, Irish Marketing Review). University lecturers are partly paid to do academic research and a large number appear not to fulfill this duty — including some who are full professors. The fraction of research-active people varies dramatically between institutions, from 10% to 80%. It also varies between specializations, from 30% (accounting) to 75% (management information systems).

The life-time achievement varies substantially between business scholars. The highest number of publications is 91, the greatest number of citation is 499, and the largest h-index is 13. This indicates that the top business scholars of Ireland perform on par with the top economists and political scientists. Productivity varies too. The largest number of published papers per year is 6, the greatest number of citations is 37 per year, and the highest h-rate is 1 per year.

The top 10 (life-time achievement) consists of Paul Humphreys (UU), Rodney McAdam (UU) , Tony Brabazon (UCD), John Addison (QUB), Ronan McIvor (UU), Tom Begley (UCD), Brian Lucey (TCD), Rob Gilles (QUB), Brian Fynes (UCD) and Frank Barry (TCD). For productivity, the top 10 contains Rodney McAdam (UU), Karan Sonpar (UCD), Paul Humphreys (UU), Tony Brabazon (UCD), Maria Annunziata Liguori (QUB), Ronan McIvor (UU), Frank Figge (QUB), Brian Lucey (TCD), David Collings (UCG) and Regina Connolly (DCU). Recall that individual data still have to be vetted.

The institutions are very different too. The smallest has just 10 faculty, and the largest over 150. If we rank the institutions based on the average number of publications (per head and per active researcher), citation and h-index, and the average number of publication, citations and h-index per year, the following order emerges: TCD, UCD, QUB, UU, UCG, DCU, UL, NUIM, DIT, and NCI.

QUB ranks 19th in the 2008 RAE; UU ranks 49th out of 90 business schools. Although the RAE uses a very different methodology, this suggests that TCD and UCD are on par with the best 20 business schools in the UK, while the other business schools in the Republic are more like the worst 40.

In terms of research, most of the institutions specialize in 2-3 (out of 6) areas; UCD and UL cover 4. If these were businesses rather than business schools, one would recommend that the institutions limit their activities to their core competences. As there are horizontal economies of scale in teaching the various aspects of business, mergers would follow.

Another day, another committee. Forfas has established a high-level group to identify research priorities for Ireland. The group’s composition suggests that its recommendations will be demand-driven. Research is no good, however, unless it is top class. Ireland should research those things at which it can beat the world — and import all other knowledge.

Batt O’Keeffe reminds us that economic growth and job creation are driven by technological progress but forgets that this is true in the medium- to long-term. In the short-term, other factors are more important, as reported earlier by John McManus. Ronnie O’Toole adds that it is all good and well to focus on the export sector, but that the domestic sector urgently needs to be smartened up too — through regulatory reform rather than by spending money we don’t have.

This is a touch on the navel-gazing side but, at the same time, since everyone seems to agree that having high-quality universities is an important element in future economic growth, it seems worthwhile explaining how academics actually work.

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The Government has just announced its plan to increase the number of non-Irish students in higher education by 50% between now and 2015, and to increase the “value” of the university sector by one third to 1.2 bln euro. The news bulletin and press release emphasize the targets, but are hazy on the implementation. After some digging, the underlying report can be found too. In this regard at least, education has something to teach to the other departments.

The report has a snappy title and great graphics, but is a bit hazy on the actual plan. It would of course be great if tens of thousands of non-EEA students would flock to Irish universities and pay a hefty fee that would cross-subsidize Irish students. But why would they? Ireland has the advantage that it teaches in English — but so do Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States and, indeed, the Netherlands. Parents who wonder where to send little Yuan or precious Sujata may look at one of the university rankings and decide that there are more prestigious universities elsewhere. Ireland could compete on price, but that defies the purpose. Why would the Irish taxpayer subsidize the education of foreigners?

These considerations are not part of the report. In fact, little thought is given to the students or their parents. Two concrete measures are proposed. First, it will be easier to obtain a student visa. Second, there will be a major branding campaign. While branding is largely in your own hands if you sell butter, lager or dance, education is a harder sell. Substance should back up the image. Sending your kid abroad for 3-4 years is a major decision. The potential client is well-informed.

The report has an interesting factlet: Ireland has the highest proportion of students in the EU who study abroad. If our own students have so little confidence in the Irish universities, why would foreign students want to pay for the same?

The Comptroller and Auditor General released a special report on the resource management and performance of Irish universities.

The report is 161 pages long. One part attracted a lot of attention: pay (here, here, here and here). The solution is rather simple: Introduce a special tax, rated at 100%, for unauthorized payments.

The report is not just about pay, though. The title has “performance” and Appendix C is supposedly all about that, but it is not. It is a qualitative assessment of the procedures in place and planned. All is fine if there is a committee to discuss it and a report going forward. Measuring academic performance is not the core task of the C&AG, but they could have hired a consultant. The report does lament that the universities are so bad at collecting data (about themselves) that any quantitative assessment of value for money would be impossible.

The report also describes resource allocation, which is by and large driven by the number of students. Quantity over quality.

The scale of the system is telling too. There are 27 institutes of higher education in the Republic. Seven universities have a total of 100,000 students. When I joined Hamburg U, we had 40,000 students (and one university president), but we merged with a neighbouring IT to gain economies of scale.

THE and QS are now divorced, so more rankings for all.

The Times Higher Education ranking is out too (the number in brackets is QS):

TCD: 72 (52)

UCD: 94 (114)

Cork: >199 (184)

Numbers 200-399 can only be had with an iPhone.

The THE ranking is of course far superior than the QS ranking because the Vrije U Amsterdam does much better according to THE (139 v 171) and ranks higher than U Amsterdam.

See Indo and Times.

The latest QS university rankings are out. The rules have changed, so comparisons to last year are nonsense.

Ireland has three universities in the Top 200: TCD (52), UCD (114) and UCC (184). The others require a bit of searching: UCG (232), DCU (330), DIT (395), Maynooth (401-450), UL (451-500).

It this good or bad? I counted the number of universities in the top 200. Ireland (4.4 mln people) does better than Austria (8.3 mln), Finland (5.4 mln), Greece (11.3 mln), Portugal (11.3 mln),  Norway (4.9 mln), Singapore (5.0 mln) and Spain (46.0 mln); about as good as Denmark (5.5 mln) and New Zealand (4.4 mln); but worse than Belgium (10.8 mln), Hong Kong (7.0 mln) and Sweden (9.3 mln).

Cardoso and co have another interesting paper. Here’s the abstract:

Given the recent efforts in several countries to reorganize the research institutional setting to improve research productivity, our analysis addresses the following questions: To which extent has the recent awareness over international quality standards in economics around the world been reflected in research performance? How have individual countries fared? Do research quantity and quality indicators tell us the same story? We concentrate on trends taking place since the beginning of the 1990s and rely on a very comprehensive database of scientific journals, to provide a cross-country comparison of the evolution of research in economics. Our findings indicate that Europe is catching up with the US but, in terms of
influential research, the US maintains a dominant position. The main continental European countries, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, experienced some of the largest growth rates in economic scientific output. Other European countries, namely the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, have shown remarkable progress in per capita output. Collaborative research seems to be a key factor explaining the relative success of some European countries, in particular when it comes to publishing in top journals, attained predominantly through international collaborations.

Unfortunately, they did not include Ireland.

Cardoso and colleagues have a new paper in Scientometrics, comparing the performance of PhDs in labour economics graduating from Europe and the USA. They find that European PhDs publish more, but US PhDs publish more in high-quality journals (according to Kalaitzidakis).

UPDATE: Freely accessible working paper version.

Lucey and Larkin offer some thoughts on higher education reform. I either agree (evaluation, performance-related pay, fees) or do not know enough to have an opinion (curriculum*).

UPDATE: The Irish Times (2) has seen the report of the National Strategy Group for Higher Education. Strikes me as less radical than Lucey and Larkin.

* Clarification: I know a few anecdotes about a few courses at a few Irish universities.

The 2010 rankings are available here, although the site is very busy.

As a semi-Dane, I am pleased to see two Danish universities in the top 100, along with a Norwegian university and a couple of Swedish ones.

TCD is in the 200-300 group, UCD in the 300-400 group.

OK, so all these rankings are to some extent silly, but at least in our field the ones repec put out are ‘order of magnitude sensible’. And given the government’s stress on the ‘knowledge economy’, and the amount of coverage the Times rankings get in Ireland, it seems worth pointing out that not all rankings show Irish universities in such a favourable light.

The Shanghai rankings have had a major influence in France, where policy makers were very shocked by how poorly French universities fared in the initial years of this index. The result was a major shake-up of the higher education sector there, with universities being given a lot more control of their budgets and hiring procedures.

Scholarometer is a new tool to rank academics. It uses crowdsourcing to disentangle people with common names, and to attribute people to disciplines and subdisciplines. It has a widget to display your results on your homepage. And it uses the h_f index, which allows for the comparison of people across disciplines. Paul Krugman beats Stephen Jay Gould.

I think academics all know about this already, but I wonder do the policy makers?

I have no idea if Irish universities are going to do better or worse this autumn, but if they do worse, then people will need to remember that the ranking procedure has changed.

The CPB has come a long way since it was founded, as the Central Planning Bureau, by Jan Tinbergen shortly after WW2. Besides giving solicited and unsolicited advice to the Netherlands Government — polite but frank — it is acquiring a similar role in Europe. Their latest publication is bafflingly in Dutch, but relevant to anyone in Europe. It is an assessment of the Lisbon Agenda.

At the beginning of the decade, European politicians promised all sorts of wonderful stuff for 2010. The CPB report wonders what came of that, comparing progress in the period 1990-2000 to the period 2000-2010.

Here’s a summary:

-Income per capita (Geary-Khamis): Economic growth in EU15 was slower after 2000 than before; ditto for Ireland; US and Australia show same pattern, but economic growth accelerated after 2000 in China, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand

-Labour participation (share population 15-65): Increase in EU15 was slower post 2000; ditto for Ireland

-R&D expenditures (share GDP): Increase in EU15 was slower post 2000; ditto for Ireland; US increase before 2000 but decline after 2000; China decline before 2000 but sharp increase after 2000; Japan and South Korea small increase before 2000 and sharp increase after 2000

+Education expenditure (share GDP): Fell in EU15 before 2000, rose after 2000; ditto for Ireland; US and China increase before and after 2000; Japan increase before 2000 but decrease after 2000

+Domestic waste (kg/cap): Rose in EU15 before 2000, fell after 2000; rose in Ireland before 2000, rose very rapidly after 2000

+Particulate matter (load): Rose in EU15 before 2000, fell after 2000; fell in Ireland before and after 2000

-Carbon dioxide (kg/cap): Fell in EU15 before 2000, stationary after 2000; rose in Ireland before 2000, fell after 2000; US, Canada, New Zealand increase before 2000 and decrease after 2000; China decrease before 2000, virtually no change since 2000; Japan increase before and after 2000

-Trust in peope: Fell in EU15 before 2000, stationary after 2000; ditto for Ireland; US, Canada, South Korea fell before 2000, rose afterwards; Japan rose before 2000, fell after 2000

+Corruption: Increased in EU15 before 2000, stationary after 2000; increased in Ireland before and after 2000; increased in US before and after 2000; increased in China before 2000 but fell after 2000; decreased in Japan before 2000 but rose after 2000

-Poverty (share of population under poverty line, before transfers): Fell in EU15 before 2000, rose after 2000; ditto for Ireland

-Poverty (share of population under poverty line, after transfers): Fell in EU15 before 2000, rose after 2000; rose in Ireland before 2000, fell after 2000

-Children in jobless families (share of population 0-17): Fell in EU15 before 2000, fell slightly after 2000; fell in Ireland before 2000, rose after 2000

That’s 8 negatives and 4 positives for EU15, and 8 negatives and 4 positives for Ireland (albeit different positives and negatives).

Kevin Denny’s working paper on the effect of abolishing university fees in Ireland is available on this link

Abstract

University tuition fees for undergraduates were abolished in Ireland in 1996. This paper examines the effect of this reform on the socioeconomic gradient (SES) to determine whether the reform was successful in achieving its objective of promoting educational equality. It finds that the reform clearly did not have that effect. It is also shown that the university/SES gradient can be explained by differential performance at second level which also explains the gap between the sexes. Students from white collar backgrounds do significantly better in their final second level exams than the children of blue-collar workers. The results are very similar to recent findings for the UK. I also find that certain demographic characteristics have large negative effects on school performance i.e. having a disabled or deceased parent. The results show that the effect of SES on school performance is generally stronger for those at the lower end of the conditional distribution of academic attainment.

Marc Coleman continues to fight the good fight against the evil that is economists with PhDs. Coleman seems to be taking his campaign to a new level with his latest claim:

Academia must also change. The obsession with producing only PhDs is the main reason the crisis happened.

I read the last sentence and then started thinking of the number of ways in which it seemed to be wrong. I lost count at about five and then decided to go back to plotting the downfall of the Irish economy along with my other PhD-qualified co-conspirators.

This is a truly dreadful story which should concern all academics (HT 9th Level Ireland).

Thanks to George Lee for passing on this material: A set of parliamentary answers to enquiries about the economics qualifications of civil servants in various Irish government departments.

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In light of recent discussions on this blog about Irish universities and their role in the wider economy, this article in the Sunday Business Post by Trinity’s Charles Larkin and Brian Lucey raises a lot of important issues.

Peter Sutherland may have been quoted out of context, or inaccurately, in today’s Irish Times, where it is reported that

Yesterday, Mr Sutherland was also critical of Government moves to reduce the pay of university presidents and other senior academics. Mr O’Keeffe has written to university presidents seeking a voluntary pay cut, while the Higher Education Authority has reviewed procedures which allow universities make special payments to its top academics.

Mr Sutherland called for a new flexible approach, “necessary to retain talented but highly mobile staff”.

But presumably the academics here can all agree that in the entire history of higher education, there has never been a recorded case of a talented student saying “I must get my PhD at Harvard, they have a really exciting President”, or “Oxford is the place for me, their Head of Human Resources rocks”, or “what about that VP for Research at Stanford, there’s no other option as far as I’m concerned.”

Academics — even, or perhaps especially, the opinionated ones — make universities what they are. The best students go to places like Harvard because of faculty rosters like this. VPs, Presidents and all the rest are not ’senior academics’. They are university bureaucrats, or administrators if you prefer. In the Irish context they sometimes come up through the ranks, while sometimes they are hired in from places like the HEA.  I doubt that they are particularly mobile internationally. Paying them enormous salaries strikes me as a waste of money.

If Ireland wants to become a ’smart economy’ it would be helpful if basic distinctions like this were kept in mind.

Look at http://www.rae.ac.uk/results/qualityProfile.aspx?id=34&type=uoa

These are the economics results for the most recent Research Assessment Exercise for the UK.

The first numeric column reports the number of staff returned in the subject for each institution: UK departments are comparable in size to many Irish ones.  On the same website, one can browse to a narrative for each department: each institution is specifically required to comment on early career researchers.  Like some Irish deparments, many UK departments are also developing new talent.

Now compare their position in the Tilburg ranking https://econtop.uvt.nl/   to Irish departments. 

Everyone still happy?

Tilburg has produced a ranking of economics departments for the whole world.  See https://econtop.uvt.nl/ .  It is based on journal publications since 2004.  The nice aspect of this website is that you can change the ranking yourself by including the journals that you like and excluding the ones that you despise.  No matter how the cookie is cut, our economics departments are abysmal.

This case is an embarrassment for DCU. But I was particularly taken by the following:

He [Mr Justice Geoghegan] said he was not entering into discussion of the other two grounds, as this would have required analysis of section 25(6) of the Universities Act 1997, dealing with the dismissal of employees by universities.

Given the unusual circumstances of this case, it was not advisable that the court should give a precise meaning to that subsection, Mr Justice Geoghegan said.

“Furthermore, any such analysis would lead to a judgment as to the meaning of the word ‘tenure’,” he added. “I am satisfied that the word ‘tenure’ has different meanings and connotations partly depending on its context and partly depending on the particular understanding as usually given to it within the country in which it is used.”

He added that it did not necessarily have the same meaning in this jurisdiction as it did in the US, where it meant permanency in a university post.

If this is not what tenure means in Ireland, then perhaps someone might want to inform the academics?

I’ve been patiently waiting for a response to, or even a report in Ireland of, the  publication of the 2009 Shanghai  Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities.  See http://www.arwu.org/indexs.jsp.  Could this possibly be a case of socioanalytic denial? 

This is by far the most widely used ranking in the world for three reasons.  It is almost impossible to ‘game’. It is used as an information tool by internationally mobile students.   It is designed to honestly assess the evolution of the relative position of Chinese Universities: we know it’s honest because they don’t score well.  

There have been enthusiastic references in the Irish media and in this blog to other university rankings.  This is because some Irish universities appear to be important in these.  But you should be suspicious: they also rank many British universities well above obviously superior US institutions.  The apparent success of some Irish Universities is a by-product of this ludicrous outcome.

Go on:  check it out.  Has the Portarlington Institute for Science and Society got the recognition it deserves?

Greg Mankiw links to an interesting article by Chicago Economist Steven J Davis on policies to foster job creation in the US. The article is short and to the point, and is for the most part relevant to the Irish debate. It is mostly sceptical of employer subsidies and puts forward, among other things, reduction in the minimum wage and vigorous experiments with back-to-work programmes.

Quantitative analysis of science and technology is  a growing research area.  There are two university rankings based on bibilometric indicators which are worth watching:

Cybermetrics Lab has this university ranking for Top 100 universities in Europe, published in July 2009. TCD is the only Irish university in this list, ranked 49th in Europe and 169th in the world ranking. In the world ranking UC Cork is 393rd and UCD is 457th. The world rank of Irish universities can be found here.

The Centre for Science and Technology Studies of the Leiden University has constructed several university rankings based on scientific output. While based on the same data and methodological background, rankings differ depending on the focus of the impact - indicators. The Leiden ranking results 2008 can be found here.

The new rankings are out. All Irish universities are up. TCD at 43, UCD at 89.

To pre-empt some critique: No ranking is perfect, but each imperfect ranking correlates with each other imperfect ranking. Two universities in the top 100 is not at all bad for a country that has far less than 2/100 people in the OECD, let alone the world.

In a paper just published in the ESR, Benoit and Marsh confirm that research excellence is measurable — even for political scientists, some of whom argue that reality is constructed. They show that research quality varies considerably. Should research budgets be cut, there is now a basis for cuts that minimise damage to quality.

Some of you will want to bitch that Benoit and Marsh feature as the numbers 1 and 3 on their own ranking. This is nonsense. The correlation between the various indices is high. The same people are top regardless of the quality measure used, and people-in-the-know already roughly knew who would do well. This exercise primarily serves the community — and the authors invested time that they could have used to publish in a more prestigious journal.