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Cork University Business School and the Department of Economics

 are pleased to invite you to the

First Annual Longfield Lecture in Economics:

Philippe Legrain, Senior Research Fellow, London School of Economics

 “Immigrants: Your country needs them”

Wednesday 22nd March 2017 at 5pm

Venue: Boole 3, UCC

All are welcome

Author’s Bio: Philippe Legrain is Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics. He was formerly special adviser to the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, independent economic adviser to the President of the European Commission, and head of the team that provided him with strategic policy advice. He is the author of European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right, Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, and Open World: The Truth about Globalisation. He is a frequent media commentator and contributor. You can get more information about Philippe at http://www.philippelegrain.com/

 The Longfield Lectures: The purpose of the annual lecture series is to invite eminent speakers to address contemporary economic issues for a general audience, to contribute positively to public discourse. This is an important mission for us as an institution and as academics, and all the more with current global and local challenges. The lecture is open to all. It is organised in association with the Economics Society.

The lecture series is named after one of Cork’s foremost economist, Samuel Mountiford Longfield (1802 -1884), who was born in Desert Serges, near Enniskeane, in West Cork. He was appointed the first Whately Professor of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin in 1832. According to his entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica he “rivalled [David] Ricardo’s influence, especially Ricardo’s notion that value is determined by the labour required to provide a good or service”. Joseph Schumpeter claimed that Longfield provided “a reasonably complete and reasonably correct theory of distribution based upon the marginal productivity principle, not only the marginal cost principle”, which means Longfield was an early forerunner of marginalism. 

In addition, Longfield challenged the Malthusian idea that wages would remain stuck at a subsistence level and, optimistic about future economic growth, he presciently argued that innovation in agriculture would offset the effects of increased population. Longfield was actively engaged in policy advice and argued for the introduction of a Poor Law in Ireland that would be based along the lines of the 1834 English Poor Law. 

We are very happy to highlight the contribution of this Cork-born economist and celebrate his achievements in his native place. 

More information on Longfield is available at http://www.mruniversity.com/courses/great-economists-classical-economics-and-its-forerunners/mountifort-longfield,https://www.tcd.ie/Secretary/FellowsScholars/discourses/discourses/1982_A.A.%20Tait%20on%20M.%20Longfield.pdf,https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mountifort-Longfield, and https://www.jstor.org/stable/40607755?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

Writing about the shortcomings in the Gardaí’s treatment of whistleblowers, yesterday’s Irish edition of The Times commented:

The problem with the organisation as it is currently configured is that all senior posts are filled by members who have spent their entire careers in the force. Under that system, there is very little opportunity for critical self-examination. It is about time this changed.

In fact, this same ‘closedness’ is widespread throughout the Irish public sector – in the civil service, the semi-states, the regulatory agencies and so forth. While these bodies may not be quite as sealed as the Gardaí are, true outsiders are rarely found.

One result is what Dan O’Brien calls the ‘decent skin’ problem – excess sympathy for under-performers. A given manager/CEO is acknowledged to do their job poorly, but as they are a decent skin on a human level, there is reluctance to judge them too harshly.

A second result is ‘capture’, in its many manifestations. Concerning the regulatory aspect, recruiting a proportion of high-quality foreign staff is a substantial barrier to capture generally as well as, in my experience at least, adding to what The Times called a culture of ‘critical self-examination’ in an agency. Even if the persons concerned struggle to pronounce some phrases (e.g. Aer Rianta, An Bórd Pleanála).

A tiny society, where practically everyone is someone’s cousin, on a tiny island, where practically everyone is someone’s neighbour, is at risk of a culture where the indigenous flinch from holding failures to account.

One way to compensate for the costs of smallness, capable of reasonably rapid application, would be to aim to have a minimum proportion of senior managers in key organisations recruited from abroad. Outside the central bank it is hard to think of examples where this has happened.

Many aspects of air travel now taken for granted derive from the obscurely named ‘Third Aviation Package’ of air travel liberalisation measures that took effect on 1 January 1993, nearly 25 years ago.

The impact of these measures – areas of success and failure, and areas still needing resolute action – will be the broad theme of the European Aviation Conference to be held in Dublin (for the first time in Ireland) in November. The conference will be hosted by DCU, home of the Dublin Aviation Institute and of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in aviation management, on Monday and Tuesday November 13-14 November. Updates will be available as arrangements advance here.

On the following two days, DCU Business School will host a COST meeting on air transport and regional development (ATARD). The COST webpage here will provide additional information in due course.

The third package liberalised two main areas. Airlines were allowed to fully determine their own ticket prices and obtained an unrestricted right to offer air services to other EU states. The package replaced the arcane ‘bilateral air service agreements’ that preceded it – but that still dominate international air travel.

Academics and others with an interest in these events can contact me in DCU should you wish.

We now have summaries of the appeals to be made by Ireland (published in December) and Apple (published yesterday) in the state-aid case.  Ireland set forward 9 grounds while Apple include 14.

On the facts of the case Ireland argue:

The decision also mischaracterizes the activities and responsibilities of the Irish branches of ASI and AOE. These branches carried out routine functions, but all important decisions within ASI and AOE were made in the USA, and the profits deriving from these decisions were not properly attributable to the Irish branches of ASI and AOE.

With Apple’s position being:

The Commission made fundamental errors by failing to recognise that the applicants’ profit-driving activities, in particular the development and commercialisation of intellectual property (‘Apple IP’), were controlled and managed in the United States. The profits from those activities were attributable to the United States, not Ireland.

The readers can identify the difference.  The case continues to attract significant attention and there were two recent opinion pieces in The Irish Times from Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen and Paul Sweeney on the topic.

Finally, here is a piece worth reading from Martin O’Malloney in the Dublin Review of Books.

Some readers might be interested in this podcast with FT writer Martin Sandbu and Cardiff Garcia. They discuss economic ideas that would have been considered unthinkably radical a few years ago, but which are now generating serious discussion. Well worth a listen!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/09DY5Q3AwBtk9ZwKnBupmP