Why has income inequality fallen in Ireland?

Here’s a piece from RTE’s Brainstorm series that looks to explain some of the factors behind Ireland’s outlier position in this chart.

Wellbeing not GDP must be our measure of progress

A piece by Paul O’Hara in The Irish Times today. And a few days ago Cliff Taylor wrote on ‘Why Irish households are not, after all, among the best off in the EU’.

Thinking a little about indexation

The Minister for Social Protection wants to index many social protection payments to a cost of living index as an anti-poverty measure. This makes sense on the face of it, as long as that cost of living index is going up, and as long as the level of benefits fall when the cost of living falls. It’s also worth thinking about the virtues of indexation, as this was one of the main criticisms IFAC had of the fiscal space calculations during the last election.

Let’s say you index benefits to the consumer price measure of inflation.

Here’s what happened to that reading over the longer run.

Screen Shot 2016-07-22 at 11.29.28Just messing about with the idea a little more, imagine we ‘begin’ the Irish economy in year 1 with a CPI reading of 100, and grant benefits of €100. Then we can add in (say) the last 20 years of real CPI data from 1995 to 2015 to get a sense of what would have happened to benefits in a year-on-year basis as a result.

The line is the increase in benefits as a result of the indexation, and the bars are the changes in euros to the benefits as a result of the cost of living increase or decrease, measured on the right hand axis. The excel sheet I used to knock this up is here.

Picture1

Hopefully you can see two things. First, the measure is highly pro cyclical. Precisely when we want benefits to decrease a bit, because the economy is growing strongly, they go up, and when we want benefits to increase a bit to cover the cost of living during a crash, they go down. Second, in recent years inflation has either stagnated, or fallen, so you wouldn’t see a huge increase or decrease in benefits either way. Now you could smooth out some of these effects out with a moving average of, say, 3 years, but this little exercise shows, I think, that it’s worth looking carefully at indexation proposals.

(Updated with thanks to commenter Tony_Eire.)

Recent Reports

Oireachtas Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation
Report on Low Pay, Decent Work, and a Living Wage

Think Tank for Action on Social Change
The Distribution of Wealth in Ireland

OECD Economics Department Working Paper
Taxes, income and economic mobility in Ireland

Call for papers: annual conference of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland

The 2015 annual conference of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland will take place on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 November 2015 at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

Submissions can be on any areas of business, economic, financial and social history, but submissions addressing the conference theme ‘Exploring Everyday Lives’ are particularly encouraged.

Submission deadline is 15 October 2015.

Download the call for papers here.

 

The society’s web site is www.eshsi.org