Preliminary Census Results

The CSO have published some preliminary findings from last April’s Census.

The population was measured to be 4.76 million up from 4.59 million in 2011 giving an increase of 170,000 (+3.7%).  The natural increase was just over 198,000 so the estimate of net migration over the five years since the last census is –28,500.  This is the second consecutive occasion where inter-censal population estimates were out by around 100,000.

The housing stock increased from 2,003,914 to 2,022,895, a rise of less than 20,000 over the five years.  On census night just over 1.7 million units were occupied with 45,000 units where the occupants were temporarily absent and there were 60,000 unoccupied holiday or second homes.  There were just under 200,000 “other vacant dwellings” a drop of 30,000 in this category since 2011.  There is a wide variation in vacancy rates by area.

There is plenty of interesting detail available by following the link.

Critical Quarterly columns

I’m writing an economics column in Critical Quarterly, a humanities journal, which is a bit of fun. They are supposedly free to view for 12 months after publication. I already posted a link to the first, on the European democratic deficit, but neglected to link to the second, on migration. The third, on secular stagnation, is available here.

Emigrants, tax rates, and debt

Paul Krugman has an interesting piece here, and I can’t resist posting a link to something similar I wrote back in 2010.

PK’s piece also gives me an excuse to post a link to this piece by Oxford Economic & Social History graduate Christopher Kissane on incentivising emigrants to come home, which makes several good points IMO.

WW1 and international migration

The latest contribution to the VoxEU series on the economics of World War I is available here.

To ungovern is to depopulate

There are costs and benefits to everything, even emigration at a time of economic crisis. We Irish have probably gotten so used to (silently) thanking our lucky stars that our young are not hanging around at home being unemployed (or at least, not to the same extent as the young in the Mediterranean), that we may have forgotten this. Indeed, I had forgotten that I wrote this back in 2010. But now Paul Krugman points us to this post (and see also this one) which brings up the issue, and it is worth thinking about it seriously.

Long run GDP and tax revenue may not suffer that much if people return home eventually, especially if they bring home new skills and contacts, but what if funding crises happen before then? And are we perhaps too optimistic about the prospects for return migration? My generation came home in droves because of the 1990s boom, but that sort of growth is obviously never going to be replicated: you can only catch up on the technological frontier once. And as I pointed out in that earlier post, there is scope for negative feedback loops here, related to the overhang of government debt.

All in all, another reason to think that debt restructuring is going to eventually have to take place around the Eurozone periphery.

(H/T Alan Taylor who suggested the title of the post. That is a clue as to what it refers to by the way.)