The Sunday Business Post reports that the sentence in the programme for government referring to individual debt likely refers to the potential introduction of individual voluntary insolvency arrangements in Ireland. Worth some discussion of this in the context of the ongoing concern about negative equity in Ireland.
See the BBC Report here. As a non-economist it is intriguing to have the prize awarded to to two people whose work (separately and not jointly) has profoundly shaped the fields of regulation and law in which I work. I wondered what the impact of their research had been on the field of economics in Ireland.
The new agreed program for government (which, along with NAMA, will undoubtedly be passed by the party faithful this afternoon) is available.
Among the many things it is planning to achieve is a Smart Green economy, protecting of minks and the trans-gendered, promotion of a rural pubs food trail, prevention of the introduction of university fees, developing Ireland as an international centre for cloud computing, maintaining grants from the Irish Film Board, supporting the introduction of a Language Act in Northern Ireland, and looking into locating the Abbey to the GPO. And integrated ticketing of course—this time they mean it.
Sounds good, eh?
On the 15th of October 2009, UCD will award the Ulysses medal to Professor James Smith, former head of the Labour and Population Centre at RAND and two-time recipient of the National Institute of Aging Merit Award. Professor Smith’s lecture will take place in the Conway Lecture Theatre in the UCD Conway Institute at 4pm. The title of the lecture is “Effects of Childhood Mental and Physical Health on Adult Socioeconomic Status”. There will be coffee both before and after the lecture. Those wishing to attend, please rsvp to geary@ucd.ie
Further details of Professor’s Smiths work are available on the webpages below.
http://www.rand.org/about/people/s/smith_james_p.html
http://ideas.repec.org/e/psm28.html
Menzie Chinn argues that there has been a structural break here. In other words, the decline in world trade can’t simply be explained by falling income: something more is going on. Amiti and Weinstein provide very interesting Japanese evidence in favour of the view that the something more is trade finance.