Ireland’s Negotiation Game Strategy for Brexit

Ireland needs to play its hand deftly and aggressively during the EU-wide Brexit negotiations. Irish interests in the Brexit process, post-vote, differ from those of other EU states. For EU enthusiasts in states with limited UK trade, a tempting strategy for preventing a NEXT-IT (Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, etc.) is to punish the UK via a spiteful exit deal. That would be a disaster for Ireland due to spillovers. Ireland needs to fight hard to let the UK be allowed a smooth and minimally-disruptive exit, not face a mini trade war. Ireland would be hit very badly in the crossfire.

Irish government Brexit contingency plans

An interesting article in the Irish Times on the Irish government’s approach to dealing with potential issues arising from yesterday’s news from the UK. It includes a link to an 8-page pdf summarising the main actions by different areas of government policy.

Latest edition of the Economic and Social Review

It is available here:
http://www.esr.ie/issue/view/28

Contents:

Articles

Analysing Residential Energy Demand: An Error Correction Demand System
Approach for Ireland
John Curtis, Brian Stanley  185-211

Analysing the Drivers of Services Firm Performance: Evidence for Ireland
Olubunmi Ipinnaiye, Declan Dineen, Helena Lenihan  213-245

Quantifying the Importance of Nationality in Determining International
Protection Outcomes in Ireland
Gerard Keogh 247-270

Policy Section Articles

The Introduction of Macroprudential Measures for the Irish Mortgage Market
Mark Cassidy, Niamh Hallissey  271-297

An Analysis of Local Public Finances and the 2014 Local Government Reforms
Gerard Turley, Stephen McNena 299-326

Brexit Open thread

I broke the liveblog. Apologies for that, we’ll just get back to the regular thread structure.

Central Bank of Ireland Macro Financial Review 2016:1

The Bank’s most recent Macro Financial Review (MFR) was released recently. As well as providing an in-depth view of financial developments and risks in all key sectors of the economy, the MFR also contains a number of interesting analytical boxes on topics such as the components of NFC debt, SME actions after a credit rejection, household financial vulnerability estimates, residential property price expectations, new indicators of systemic stress and financial conditions, CoCo bonds and reciprocity in macroprudential policy.

The key messages from this most recent MFR can be summarised as follows:

  • Risks to the economic outlook are weighted to the downside and relate mostly to uncertainty in the external financial environment.
  • While economic conditions are improving, public and private sector indebtedness remain high.
  • Workout of impaired loans and disposal of non-performing loans in banking sector ongoing, domestic bank profitability remains weak.
  • Mortgage regulations: Call for evidence which will inform review opens from 15 June to 10 August.

The full report can be downloaded here.