The Irish Economy

The Department of Foreign Affairs recently released a report on the progress toward meeting some of the goals set out in last year’s Farmleigh summit. I have to confess to a degree of unease about a process that doesn’t permit people to debate and scrutinise ideas in full open view. I am pretty sure that the vast majority of the people who attended and spoke are big enough and bold enough to have withstood an IrishEconomy type treatment for their ideas and I don’t see why it wasn’t simply podcast. As it was, the event was mostly held in private for a group of selected invitees. The progress report for what was discussed is linked below. Some of the ideas include a National Diaspora bond and an overseas graduate programme. Other paragraphs suggest that Farmleigh may have been influential in shaping budgetary policy, which is something that doesn’t sound very plausible. In general, I can’t disguise a degree of scepticism about such approaches but, having said that, some very influential and succesful people attended and gave their views so debating this document seems a good use of a thread.

link here

The current issue of The Economist has a leader on the growing imbalance between males and females in birth cohorts in China and India and some other countries. The sex ratio at birth, or “masculinity ratio”, is normally about 1.05. Amartya Sen and Ansley Coale drew attention to the high ratios emerging in China and India some twenty years ago. The ratio has continued to rise in these countries and has now reached 1.30 in some Chinese provinces.

The Irish sex ratio at birth was 1.058 in 2008. This is exactly the median for western European countries. Moreover, there has been virtually no change in the Irish ratio over the past fifty years – it was 1.0523 in 1960 and 1.0589 in 2000. This suggests that changes such as the increased availability of pre-natal scans and the rise in pregnancy terminations by Irish women since 1960 have not had any differential gender impact.

As The Economist points out, the sex ratio is an important indicator of the place and status of women in society and the economy. The normality and stability of the Irish ratio is therefore not without its significance.

It is obvious that the Irish banks will need very large amounts of new equity capital in the near future, given their NAMA-related loss crystallisation, along with prospective losses on their retained loan portfolios. This confirms the year-ago forecasts of Brian Lucey, Karl Whelen and others, and contradicts the contemporaneous claims of bank and government spokespersons that there would be no need for additional equity capital. It seems clear that the amount of new equity capital needed is equivalent to majority ownership (Lucey was quoted on Frontline stating that the newly issued equity might constitute 95% of total equity after issuance).

There are three ways to inject new equity capital into the two surviving[1] banks: 1) the government directly purchases more equity shares from the banks, 2) the banks try to raise the equity from existing shareholders using a rights offering, or 3) the banks accept a big block acquisition of equity capital from a large foreign institution probably a foreign bank. The Central Bank and Department of Finance should be pushing hard on the banks to use method 3, since this method is in the best interest of the Irish taxpayer and Irish economy.

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The new National Pensions Framework is available here (press release here). 

Details are surprisingly sparse in places for a document so long in the making.   But the proposed reforms are generally sensible.   It is also good to see recent behavioural economics research having an impact on policy.   Some highlights:

·         The retirement age is to rise in stages, reaching 68 by 2028.   While this is unlikely to be the end of the increases, it provides a good start in terms of reducing long-term fiscal imbalances.   Getting better control over long-term finances will also help boost near-term creditworthiness, especially as the NTMA attempts to issue 30-year bonds

·         The new auto-enrolment scheme (to be launched in 2014) is well informed by work in behavioural economics.   The design details generally make sense: automatic enrolment (with automatic re-enrolment after two years for those who opt out); matching government and employer contributions; low administrative costs through utilising the PRSI system, and low-cost investment defaults

·         Tax relief standardised at 33 percent rather than at the marginal rate.   This is high enough to provide an incentive for pension provision, while getting rid of a regressive feature of the old system

There is a strand in what passes for policy discussion which goes like this:

(i) There is an acknowledged problem in some sector or policy area;

(ii) the Government could  do something to ameliorate this problem;

(iii) QED the Government should do something, not always specified.

The result of this line of attack is policies like the Car Scrappage Scheme, of which more anon.

Examples in this morning’s media concern the excess supply of hotels, and the threat of global warming. The Government is being urged to take measures

- to reduce the hotel stock, and

- to support the hydro storage/windpower project called Spirit of Ireland.

Hotel Stock: Hotels are a pure private good. Due to policy-induced capacity expansion, there are now too many. Some are bust, and face receivership/liquidation/NAMA.  Room prices are falling. This is the natural market response. Where is the market failure?

It is true that some long-established hotels have seen their business undermined by State-subsidised competition, but this is a routine business risk in an interventionist political culture. Many of these long-established hotels enjoyed State grants for conference/leisure centres when the going was good. The industry is lobbying for some State-run scheme to take out capacity. Doing nothing will cost less and the industry will adjust. Intervening, yet again, will distort adjustment.

Spirit of Ireland: The externality of carbon emissions is addressed by putting a price on carbon, at which point the State can safely adopt a position of technology neutrality. Power generation, once externalities are dealt with, is a pure private good too. Whether these schemes make sense is a matter for the capital market, not for the Government.

Car Scrappage: Car sales have collapsed and some car dealers have gone out of business. The same has happened with €1,000 handbags, and some handbag retailers are struggling. Ireland manufactures neither cars nor handbags. The Car Scrappage Scheme will spend taxpayer money to sustain, temporarily, the retail distribution network for an imported consumer durable. Why not a Handbag Scrappage Scheme? This scheme is plain daft for Ireland. It is not even clear that it makes any sense for car-producing countries - the German scheme appears to have sucked in imports of smaller cars, which Germany does not produce. 

These ‘Something Must be Done’ schemes provide harmless entertainment for economists, fodder for the 24-hour news cycle and a playpen for lobbyists. But they contribute nothing to sustainable employment, cost the Exchequer money and hinder the necessary post-Bubble adjustment.  

In contrast, the Economics of Doing Nothing is that this is often the best policy, and the cheapest.

Frank McDonald keeps the dream alive in today’s Irish Times.

I have had no new insights since May 2009, but SEI & UCD organized an event where most speakers agreed with my assessment: Pumped hydro is just too expensive.

Congratulations to Philip for being the joint winner of the 2010 Bhagwati Award, together with his co-author Gian Maria Milesi-Ferreti. Their work has been extremely influential, and this recognition is richly deserved.

Normal people are hard-wired to dislike inequality, it appears.

It reminded me of the famous quote from Keynes, in this beautiful essay:

The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the purpose of blogs is to provide free advertising for a blogger’s own books. Let me buck the trend then, by giving a plug to Cormac’s latest offering, a great example of the power of economics (and history) to illuminate the human condition. I discussed it on last Saturday’s Off the Shelf, which you can download here.

Today’s IT carries an article by Brian Lucey on recent banking developments. You can read it here.

Not wanting to be outdone by Martin Feldstein, Laurence Kotlikoff (recently based known for his Limited Purpose Banking proposals) is the latest US-based economist to bring his analytical skills to bear on the Greece’s problems to diagnose an instant solution:

Is there some way that Greece can devalue without devaluing?

There is, indeed. The government can implement wage and price controls for, say, the next three months, with these controls covering not just the growth in wages and prices over the next three months, but also their initial levels. Specifically, the Greek government would decree that all firms must lower their nominal wages and prices by 30 per cent, effective immediately, and not change them for three months. After three months, everyone would be free to put prices and wages back up.

This is an interesting proposal. Indeed, if this decree-based approach proves to be successful, it could then be applied to other areas. For instance, in the sphere of justice, the Greek government could decree that people should obey the ten commandments. And, if it works in Greece, we should try the decree approach here. After all, we’re all in favour of evidence-based policy formulation.

In today’s FT, Feldstein has spotted the obvious easy way out. Briefly, Greece should be allowed to leave the Eurozone temporarily, devalue, and rejoin. The drachma would start at one-for-one to the €, then fall (quickly!) to 1.3, at which point it would re-adopt the €. Greece would be competitive again. The only snag is that, as he puts it, ‘…other Eurozone members might object to giving Greece this improved competitiveness.’

In fairness therefore, everyone else would have to be given the same option.

Perhaps there could be an appointed day, once a year, when everybody could step out, as in Lanigan’s Ball, and then step in again, as soon as the competitiveness gain seemed adequate.

In the dollar zone, the lack of competitiveness in eg Michigan could be dealt with in the same way.

And thus the whole world could participate, with confidence, in sub-optimal currency areas, without fiscal discipline. I so wish I had thought of this.  

With one brave bound…..

I’ve been following the news stories on the proposed potential Greek bailout. However, reading articles like this, I’m struggling to find a good rationale for the agreement that’s been reached. The following questions come to mind:

1. Greece needs to address its huge fiscal problems. To do this will require putting through highly unpopular measures. How does the EU’s offer of a potential bailout help get this achieved? How does the Greek government convince its people that harsh measures are required to reduce its deficit and keep open its access to sovereign debt markets when they now know that the EU tooth fairy is waiting by to help?
2. Even if the senior figures in the leading EU countries have ultimately decided to intervene to prevent the disruptions associated with a Greek failure to roll over its debt, why not wait until that failure has happened?
3. Why would the EU wish to be associated in the Greek public’s minds with the harsh expenditure cuts and tax increases that would still have to follow even after a bailout deal?
4. Do those who advocate this policy really believe that the current Greek crisis is sui generis or are they planning to put in place a safety net for the whole Euro zone? If the latter, can such a policy really be credible?
5. Is the long-run macroeconomic stability of the Euro area better served by avoiding the dislocations associated with one its constituent members going through a sovereign debt default or should we be more concerned about the problems created by the new bailout mechanism that lets governments know that the EU will intervene if they choose not to tackle their fiscal crises?

I feel that in asking these questions, I’ve clearly been missing something. Hopefully those who thrashed out this deal have thought these issues through. My concern is that in the somewhat fevered quasi-crisis atmosphere of this week, precedents may be getting set that we will live to regret.

Update: To be honest, I probably should have linked to this hand-wringing Times editorial as a better illustration of what I’m confused about. The editorial worries about “depressing the value of the euro” (which would in fact be a good thing for the Euro area economy) and discusses how this “raises major doubts about the future of the single currency” without explaining why this is the case.  The piece ends with the dramatic note of “The European Union remains on alert and on financial standby.”  It does make one wonder a little whether this issue is being hijacked somewhat by those who see “Europe” as the solution to most ills.

Mark Crosby of University of Melbourne Business School writes on the the evolving Eurozone issues in the Australian media (The Age) and on CoreEconomics (http://economics.com.au/?p=5094).   Sees Ireland’s actions as proof that you (a) can tackle problems and (b) maybe Greece leaving might not be such a bad thing!

Today’s Irish Times reports that the IMF had warned that NAMA would not significantly increase lending (separate thread). Increased lending is something businesses are looking for, but with public budgets being squeezed one area of investment that will also need to attract significant non-public funds is infrastructure.

A story by Louise McBride in the Sunday Independent argues that “Greece and Spain’s financial woes are making it tougher than ever for Governments to raise cash for vital state projects”. She argues that the €70 bn held by Irish pension funds is being targeted by Brian Lenihan.

While the key issue here is the level of government debt rather than the ability to raise cash, the article makes an important point that is being discussed in many countries – how do we fund our infrastructure in the current fiscally constrained environment?

Given that infrastructure is typically a fairly safe investment that can yield a certain inflation indexed return, pension funds should find it useful to invest in infrastructure. A range of possible projects is presented in an accompanying article, including Metro-North, Western Rail Corridor, Landsdowne Road and National Parks.

What the article does not properly consider is that of the €70bn only a fraction should be invested in infrastructure given the need to hold a balanced portfolio. The other point is that it is not obvious why Irish pension funds should necessarily invest in Irish infrastructure or indeed why we should not expect foreign pension funds to invest here.

The key issue in attracting private funding into projects is a revenue stream. Without a relatively certain income private funding will not materialise. That would seem to rule out national parks unless anyone is proposing to charge an entrance fee and the construction of very long fences. A certain and sufficiently large income or rather the likely absence of one would rule out private finance for the Western Rail Corridor. In other words the projects need to stack up as a business proposition, and those that are driven more by political or redistributive goals will have to be ditched (in the absence of other funding). Thus, private funding should have a significant positive impact in that there will be less ‘gold-plating’ and only likely winners will be get funded.

The issue of private finance for public infrastructure and services should also ignite a debate about what services should be provided publicly in the first place. Should public transport and water be provided publicly or could they be privatised? As was highlighted recently our water supply infrastructure (primarily the pipes) is in serious need of investment, which may not be forthcoming from public funds, yet to get private sector involvement the sector will need to consolidate significantly.  

I just spotted this - had to check I got the date right as this seems to much like a first of April story, but sure enough his former (???) colleagues at RTE, and the Irish Times have reports on this.  At the time George got elected a number of comments on this blog made the point that this would increase the economics know-how in the Dail.

This story is the best explanation we’ve got so far as to how the higher civil servant pay U-turn occurred and the justification used.

THE GOVERNMENT’S controversial U-turn on pay cuts for top public servants followed strong lobbying by their staff association that any cuts should take account of money lost as a result of the abolition of a bonus scheme which averaged 10 per cent of salary.

Official Department of Finance files show the Association of Assistant Secretaries and Higher Grades said it had legal opinion that the performance-related bonus scheme, which the Government initially suspended for 2008 and later scrapped permanently, formed an integral part of members’ remuneration packages.

The key argument put forward:

The association had earlier argued in correspondence with the Department of Finance that “while receipt of the performance-related element of pay is obviously not guaranteed to any individual, the scheme is part of our members’ basic remuneration package and amounts to an arrangement whereby part of that remuneration is simply deferred pending an independent assessment of performance”.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. The fact that the bonuses did not count as pensionable pay and were not eligible for PRSI suggests that they were not part of basic pay. If the legal opinion was an implicit threat that the civil servants could have sued to reverse their pay cuts, I find it pretty hard to imagine such a case being successful.

In any case, it’s still not clear why the U-turn occurred. Minister Lenihan announced the ending of bonuses in February, so he was well aware of what he was doing when he announced the pay cuts in the budget concluding with “These are permanent reductions which will be reflected in future pension entitlements.”

It would be interesting to have heard the speech that Brian Lenihan gave on this issue at the Fianna Fail parliamentary party on Tuesday night for which he reportedly received a round of applause from the faithful.

In relation to this, I appeared on the radio on Tuesday night just after this meeting (link here) and heard Fianna Fail TD Michael Mulcahy suggest that the U-turn came from following the recommendations of the Review Body report and that the U-turn occurred because the report wasn’t released until after the budget. In truth, the U-turn runs counter to the report’s recommendations and the Minister had access to the report before the budget (he mentioned it in his speech.) These didn’t seem to be very satisfactory talking points on this issue from someone who had just received a full explanation from the Minister.

If the government thinks that misleading spin is the way to make this issue go away, I suspect they’re wrong. The fact that the usually-supportive Stephen Collins has taken up the issue also suggests that the government isn’t winning people over on this one.

The news that Italian bank Unicredit is insisting that Ireland rather than Italy is the ‘I’ in PIGS should hardly come as a surprise. All the PIIGS are at it these days: thus Emilio Botin of Santander is quoted in the FT as saying that “Comparing Spain to Greece is like comparing Real Madrid to Alcoyano”. (Alcoyano is apparently a club in the Spanish second division.) And we have been busily distancing ourselves from everyone else as well.

All this is understandable. As Ken Rogoff puts it,

There is an old joke about two men who are trapped by a lion in the jungle after a plane crash. When the first of them starts putting on his sneakers, the other asks why. The first answers: “I am getting ready to make a run for it.” But you cannot outrun a lion, says the other man, to which the first replies: “I don’t have to outrun the lion. I just have to outrun you.”

However, one of the big lessons of history is that lions rarely make do with just one snack: when defaults come, they come in waves. The 1930s is a good case in point.

Europe needs solidarity, not finger pointing.

A few weeks ago I informed readers of the passing away of Terry baker, formerly of the ESRI.  Joe Durkan has asked me to post this personal tribute to Terry.

It was a great shock for me when I heard of Terry Baker’s death.  He was someone I had known for over 40 years, had worked with as his research assistant on the Quarterly Economic Commentary, and had also enjoyed a good friendship.  I met him first when I was interviewed for the job of Research Assistant in the ESRI in January 1969.  We had more points of contact than is probably usual in these circumstances, as we had a shared, but not overlapping  history, in Tanzania - Terry as a civil servant and me as a teacher.  For both of us the experience convinced us that we wanted to stay in economics, and that economics could make a difference.  We differed in approach, as Terry believed in calm persuasion offered over time, while I was ready to do battle.  In the end we were both disappointed to see the mess the country is in now.

 

Terry and the then ESRI Director (Michael Fogarty) encouraged me to go to Nigeria. His judgement about the merits of the move was, as with so much of what he did, inspired.  It was a tough physical environment, but the work was fantastic. When I returned he threw me into the Quarterly straight away.  When I took over the Quarterly finally, Terry could always be relied upon to talk about the forecasts, to offer a different perspective and simply to bounce ideas with.  Writing came easy to him and he would simply rewrite cumbersome sentences without comment.  When I, very reluctantly, decided to leave the Institute in 1983, I persuaded him to go back doing the Quarterly and I think this was a good move for him. 

 

Within the Institute Terry did an extraordinary amount of internal referring.  His comments were incisive, but always took a positive bent.  He also ran a team in the management game, which the ESRI won on many occasions.  Terry well knew the value of the game, as it forced people to put numbers on the usual waffle about company strategy.  This benefited generations of research assistants.  He was also very generous.  When I ran a team separately he kept a place for me on his when I finally bit the dust as he had well anticipated.  I suspect he enjoyed the experience, but he made me feel welcome.

 

We met about twice a year after I left the Institute, most recently last autumn, when we agreed to get together after Christmas.  His later years were sad, following the death of his wife, Pirjo, in 2007.  Sadly, when I returned from a short break after Christmas, I learned of his death.  His death, the more recent death of Mrs. Dempsey (the first ESRI Secretary), and now the death a colleague, Todor Gradev, just knocks the heart out of one.  Terry was a very nice person, and will be missed by those who knew him.  (Joe Durkan).

Jeff Frankel has a piece on what Chile can teach the rest of the world here. The Irish fiscal debate could usefully move in this direction. The piece is also relevant to the thread below on economic expertise, and to broader debates about whether technical expertise in general is useful to policy making, and is sufficiently appreciated and availed of in Ireland.

A report on Irish electricity and gas prices in the first half of 2009 was prepared by Martin Howley, Dr Brian Ó Gallachóir & Emer Dennehy for Sustainable Energy Ireland. For those readers interested in the topic they will find the report here.

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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The ESRI’s Quarterly Economic Commentary (QEC) by Alan Barrett, Ide Kearney, Jean Goggin and Thomas Conefrey, published in December, is now available to download free of charge from the ESRI’s web site here. This QEC contained a number of pieces of research which may be of general interest.

1. Measuring Fiscal Stance

In box 1, entitled “Measuring Fiscal Stance”, the stance of fiscal policy in every year since 1976 is analysed within a consistent modelling framework. This research shows that the 2010 budget, while definitely contractionary, was actually not one of the toughest budgets of the last half century. That “accolade” goes to the 1976 budget, with fiscal policy in 1983 and 1984 and in 1988 and 1989 coming in next in line. After that comes the series of budgets implemented for 2009 and 2010. However as is noted in the box, a futher contractionary budget is planned for 2011 so the cumulative contraction in these years may well ultimately exceed the cumulative contraction in the late 1980s.

This measure is obtained by running the HERMES model with taxation and welfare rates indexed and certain rules on public expenditure. This “budget” is taken to be neutral – generally under this rule the relative size of the public sector in the economy would change little in the long term. This result is compared with the actual outturn with the difference being attributable to discretionary fiscal policy.

This measure of fiscal stance tells us whether a particular budget is deflationary or inflationary. It does not tell us whether it is appropriate. However, as discussed in the box, more often than not the stance has been inappropriate – i.e. procyclical.

While not discussed in the QEC, I think that it is interesting that the day of the budget the Department of Finance published an alternative measure for 2010 using the EU standard methodology. This actually suggested that the budget for this year was stimulatory. This strange outcome arises from the inappropriate nature of the EU methodology. The Department of Finance understandably did not draw attention to this result as they clearly saw that it was not a sensible approach. This problem with the EU methodology is not unique to Ireland but affects its application to other EU member economies under current circumstances. I think that the EU approach was not designed to deal with a crisis of the kind experienced in Europe over the last two years. This issue merits further research to find a more robust approach which can be applied in a consistent way to different Euro area economies.

2. The Balance of Payments and the Flow of Funds

In box 4, entitled “Balance of  Payments”, the implications of the economic forecasts for the capital side of the balance of payments is considered. With the government sector likely to borrow over 11% of GDP this year and with a prospective small balance of payments surplus, in 2010 the private sector will have a major net acquisition of financial assets abroad (more properly a repayment of net liabilities). Some of this repayment will not flow through the banking system. However, a significant part of it will affect the domestic banking system as households and companies increase savings or reduce borrowings from domestic banks. In turn, the banks are likely to reduce the size of their balance sheets and, hence, their net foreign liabilities. As shown in the box, there was a substantial reduction in these liabilities (largely to the ECB) in the second half of 2009. If this trend were to continue, with the prospective continuing large net repayment of foreign liabilities implied by the 2010 forecast, there should be a continuing substantial reduction in the banking system’s foreign exposure, especially in its exposure to the ECB. This will be important as the ECB begins to wind down its support for the Euro area financial system. Obviously this must be seen against the background of the government sector’s increasing foreign liabilities, a significant part of which will be needed to recapitalise the banking system this year.

3. Distributional Effects of Budgets

In Box 2 the distributional impact of tax and welfare policy changes in 2009 and 2010 was considered by Tim Callan, Claire Keane and John Walsh. They found that while Budget 2010 was clearly regressive, the combination of Budgets 2009 and 2010 placed most of the burden of fiscal adjustment on higher earners. 

Frank Convery has a thoughful piece on the reasons for Haiti’s backwardness here.

Trevor Butterworth writes on the Forbes.com website about blogging in Ireland and highlights the role of this blog in the domestic political and financial discourse: you can read it here.

Update: this article is also picked up by The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic magazine site.

Gideon Rachman has an article on this topic in today’s FT, available here.

Following on from last week’s post on Barclay’s and their comments on TBTF European banks, it’s interesting to see that President Obama today announced that he will be proposing legislation that will limit proprietary trading activities of large banks as well as impose limits on their growth in liabilities. Pretty clearly, whatever gets proposed isn’t going to please former IMF chief economist, Simon Johnson, but it’s still good to see these issues being addressed.

I’d guess it’s highly unlikely that any such bill would get passed through the US Congress—and I would have said this even before yesterday’s Senate election in Massachusetts. Indeed, I suspect Obama probably also figures it’s a long shot and that this annoucement and the proposed bank tax are primarily smart political moves from the President: “So if these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have” is just the kind of language to get the currently disappointed Democratic base charged up and it’s probably not a bad fight to have lost and thus have as a live issue going into the midterm elections.

From a European perspective, I suspect this may be an area where there would be more political agreement in Europe than in the US.  An optimist might hope that the calls for limits on bank size from Lord Turner and other senior figures in the UK could lead to agreement at European level. Even more optimistically, one might hope that this could be an issue on which the new European Systemic Risk Board could also make some running to show it’s not just going to be a talk shop. A pessimist might reckon that both the EU and ESRB are far too unwieldy to make progress on such a complex issue.

(guest post by Michael Burke)

Today’s Financial Times carries an interesting piece from Martin Wolf on the severe difficulties being faced by Greece as it attempts to come to terms with its current economic crisis. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eeef5996-0532-11df-a85e-00144feabdc0.html

The FT’s veteran commentator places Greece’s plight in the overall context of developments within the EU, and so has something to say about Ireland. Without minimising the problems of any country, he clearly shows that it is Greece which is an extreme case, not, as is often claimed here, Ireland.

“The problems of Greece are extreme, because it alone of the vulnerable eurozone member countries has both high fiscal deficits and high debt. Other countries with large fiscal deficits are Ireland (12.2 per cent of GDP in 2009) and Spain (9.6 per cent). But, while net public borrowing was 86 per cent of GDP at the end of 2009 in Greece, according to the OECD, in Ireland and Spain it was only 25 and 33 per cent, respectively. Meanwhile, Italy, with a net debt ratio of 97 per cent, had a deficit of “only” 5.5 per cent. Portugal is in the middle, with net debt of 56 per cent of GDP and a deficit of 6.7 per cent of GDP. Thus, the challenge for Greece is larger and more urgent than for the others.”

He also warns that those pinning their hopes on export-led growth are in perliously crowded boat in choppy waters, as they now comprise (at least) 70% of the world’s economy.

Finally, he has a very illuminating chart of unitl labour costs based on OECD data. Although the chart is small, the trend for Ireland is clear and unmistakeable. Ireland has already experienced a sharp reduction in unit labour costs relative to Greece, Italy and Spain. Of course, Germany is an outlier, with unit labour costs way below that group. But, although it isn’t stated by Martin Wolf, that’s based on the much stronger growth of German investment.

Minister Batt O’Keeffe announced this afternoon that the Government has decided to scrap the National University of Ireland. UC Dublin, UC Cork, NUI Maynooth and NUI Galway were the constituent colleges. The total number of universities in Ireland has thus been increased, at a stroke, from four to seven. Ireland should now soar up the universities-per-capita league tables.

Sadly, it will no longer be possible for the NUI to play the role envisioned for it in the 1950s by Flann O’Brien (Myles na Gopaleen). He ended an Irish Times controversy about academic snobbery and the excessive use of academic titles by proposing that NUI should simply confer doctorates on all Irish citizens at birth. Although the government appears to have embarked on a slower progress toward the same destination.

There will now be a difficulty in arranging the next Seanad election, for which the graduates of NUI form a constituency. Unless of course….

Here is an interesting attempt to quantify the effect of recessions on mortality in EU countries. (To access the full article you will have to go to a subscribing library.) The authors claim that rising unemployment is associated with more deaths from violence (suicide and homicide) and alcohol abuse, but fewer deaths from road accidents. No significant effects were identified on other causes of mortality. The net effect on overall mortality is very small.
Two countries - Finland and Sweden - are identified as having social support policies in place that are particularly effective in mitigating the adverse health effects of rising unemployment.