Category: Knowledge economy

Higher education and research

Higher education and research was again in the news today.

The latest batch of bad news on the labour market in Waterford seems to have triggered a decision to establish Waterford University. I am not convinced that universities are necessarily good for regional development. Some universities sure have a positive impact, but I don’t think this holds for any university. With the newly build highways, Waterford is closer to Cork and Dublin, taking away some of the would-be benefits of a local centre of learning and research.

Furthermore, Ireland has plenty of universities already. The largest university has 18,000 students (UCD, 2009) — which puts it below average in the Netherlands,  60th in the UK,  38th in Germany, 35th and just above average in France. Ireland has the 8th highest number of universities per capita in the world already. (A new university would not change the latter rank, just push us closer to Norway.) This matters for two reasons. There is a fixed cost in running a university. International rankings are not normalized for size; small universities cannot do well.

The 2010 annual report of Science Foundation Ireland also made the news today. The press release emphasizes collaboration, which has increased with both researchers abroad and companies in Ireland. This is not a measure of success. It may just reflect the changing nature of SFI funding and its increase in size. The annual report itself has more indicators, but is annoyingly glossy for an academic organization. We learn that SFI-funded researchers have published 22% more papers in 2010 than in 2009, but we are not told the number of researchers. We learn that Ireland has gone up 16 places in the citations-per-paper ranking (36th in 2003, 20th in 2010), but for all we know that may be because of the social sciences and humanities (who are not supported by SFI).

The SFI 2010 Census has more numbers. Two things stand out: Few patents, few spin-outs. Emigration numbers are high: 47% for all, 66% for non-Irish (post-doc and below). SFI’s mission is to bolster innovation in Irish manufacturing.

Ireland’s economists in the world (part 2)

I’m getting better at scraping the web and I’ve now been able to calculate some things that IDEAS/RePEc does not.

This graph has the number of economists in Ireland registered at IDEAS/RePEc. It is not a natural number to account for joint appointments. The number has been rising steadily over time. I expect that trend to reverse in the coming months.

This graph shows Ireland’s position in the total population of economists. We’re a small country. I highlight Massachusetts because it is ranked highest by IDEAS/RePEc.

This graph shows the number of unique publications per person. In recent times, Ireland has done reasonably well in terms of productivity.

However, visibility cq interest is less impressive, as shown in this graph. It should be noted, though, that “abstract views” is the metric that can be most easily manipulated. That said, Ireland does not do so well either on the number of citations per publication, as shown in this graph, or on the number of citing authors per person, as shown in this graph.

As always, these results can be interpreted in a number of ways. In order to improve Ireland’s standing at IDEAS/RePEc, we’ll need to convince more people that our papers are worth citing.

The great thing about the Public Data Explorer is that you can make your own graphs. You need to go back two positions to return to this blog.

I used these Matlab scripts to scrape the web.

The best university in all the land

The new QS rankings are out: TCD tops the Irish poll at 65, followed by UCD at 134, UCC at 181, and NUIG at 298. Ireland’s other universities are not ranked in the top 300.

The Examiner (and RTE radio) made much of the fact that UCC got 5 stars. QS now has two rankings. The new one requires more data from the universities. To date, only U Limerick (4 stars) and UCC have provided that information. UCC is thus best of two.

There are disciplinary rankings too. In economics, TCD and UCD are both 51-100. Other universities do not make it into the top 200.

The Independent and Times note that Ireland’s universities have been sliding down the QS rankings. If I’m not mistaken, QS ranks can be compared over time whereas THE ranks cannot. The reasons offered by the various people interviewed are, of course, just speculation. The QS data do not allow for an in-depth analysis of the reasons behind the success, and Ireland’s universities are not particularly good in keeping records.

20% of the QS ranking is citations per faculty. QS does not define this, but the practicable way is to allocate papers to the university at which the research was done (rather than where the researcher is now). Faculty numbers have fallen, so Ireland’s position should have improved on this score, partly offsetting the decline in the faculty-student ratio (another 20%). 50% of the QS ranking is based on “reputation”, and that’s a stock variable that should survive a downturn if properly measured. However, I would think that the drop in ranking is at least partly explained by the brand Ireland turning sour in general.

UPDATE: Brian Lucey offers further thoughts and data.

UPDATE2: Kevin Denny is not impressed.

Results of the smart meter trial

There’s a peculiar piece in today’s Independent. The reports of the CER’s 18 month smart meter trial were published in May.

The trial found statistically and economically significant changes in consumer behaviour due to the introduction of time-of-day pricing, with cost savings for both producers and consumers that together more than offset the costs of metering (unless the wrong communication network is chosen).

The trial also found that in-house displays further modify electricity use, but insufficiently so to justify the additional cost.

Real-time pricing was not trialed, nor were smart devices, micro-generation, electric vehicles, and micro-storage.

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