The Irish Economy

The German Council of Economic Experts - an academic body which advises the German Government and the Parliament on economic policy issues has published last week its Annual Report 2009/2010. The related Press Release can be downloaded from here.

There is an ongoing discussion on this blog about attracting foreign investment in R&D in Ireland. In a recent research paper we analysed the location decisions of foreign affilates in the R&D sector incorported in the European Union over 1999-2006. Our research results suggest that, on average the location probability increases with market potential, agglomeration economies, R&D intensity and proximity to centres of  research excellence.  The determinants of the location choice of R&D foreign affiliates vary depending on the country of origin of the foreign investor. Thus, it appears that agglomeration externalities and business R&D intensity had a higher positive effect on the propensity to locate in an EU region in the case of multinationals from North America in comparison to European based multinationals. Proximity to centres of research excellence had a positive and significant effect on the location choice for North American R&D multinationals but no significant effect in the case of  European R&D multinationals.

Our research results suggest a number of policy implications. First, policy aiming at increasing the R&D intensity of regions are likely to foster the attractiveness of regions to R&D foreign investment. Second, positive externalities from clustering of R&D foreign affiliates outweigh competition effects. Third, given the heterogeneous behaviour of foreign investors, differentiated policy depending on target partner countries can increase the success of such policies.

Kevin’s comparison of the trajectory of trade in the Great Depression and the current depression (which I think was stimulated by a post on this blog) gets good coverage in the Financial Times today.

The communiqué for the latest G20 summit is available here. It contains lots of the usual waffle about co-operation on this that and the other, but I think the most important element of the discussions relates to the reform of banking regulation.

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Lots of explanations have been advanced as to why world trade fell so rapidly during 2008-9 — far more rapidly than at the start of the Great Depression. Problems associated with trade finance, and the vertical disintegration of modern manufacturing production, are the two that come up most frequently.

I’d like to offer another, more banal explanation: the composition of world trade is very different today than 80 years ago. In 1929, just 44 per cent of world merchandise trade involved manufactured goods. That proportion increased to 70 per cent in 2007. The reason this matters is that manufacturing is more volatile than the rest of the economy, and it was the output of and trade in manufactures, rather than primary products, which collapsed during the Great Depression.

Between 1929 and 1930, the volume of world trade in manufactures fell almost 15%, while trade in non-manufactures actually increased by 1% (I have to say I wonder about that, but this what what my source says). Weighting these two indices by the shares of manufactures and non-manufactures in total world trade, you get an implied fall in total world trade of 6 per cent in 1930 versus the 7.5 per cent actually experienced. Repeating the exercise, but this time using 2007 weights rather than 1929 weights, yields a counterfactual decline in world trade of 10 per cent in 1930 — equal to the decline the WTO is predicting for 2009. The changing composition of world trade can thus explain a lot, it seems.

An implication is that whenever the world economy recovers, world trade will recover with it, unless a surge of protectionism occurs in the meantime.

Colm McCarthy’s suggestion that an inquiry into what went wrong is gaining some level of support in political circles.  While there is plenty of material to digest in terms of what went wrong locally, there is also a lot of interest in understanding what went wrong in the international financial system.  Part of the debate concerns the role of economists, especially in terms of forecasting such crises.

A reader recommends this blog post which is critical of mainstream macroeconomic models.  Of course, Willem Buiter of the LSE issued a notorious critique a while back.

More recently,  a group associated with the British Academy wrote a letter to the Queen to answer her question to Luis Garicano of the LSE as to “if these things are so large, how come everyone missed it?”, while Robert Lucas defended mainstream macroeconomics in the Economist magazine in this article.

An important dimension of this debate is the relative roles of economists in policy organisations, the financial sector and academia in assessing the risks of a crisis and speaking out on these risks. While some of the debate has focused on the role of academic economists, it is maybe more difficult to evaluate from the outside the performance of economists in policy organisations in providing risk assessment, since their advice is often confidential.   In this regard,  the external evaluations of the performance of the IMF in previous international crises sets an interesting precedent, with the Independent Evaluation Office now playing this role on a regular basis.

In relation to Ireland,  the testimony of Kevin Cardiff of the Department of Finance at a recent Oireachtas Committee hearing is quite interesting in explaining the evolution of the thinking of the Department in the run up to the crisis.  You can read the transcript here.

In recent months, several analysts have argued that the unprecedented trade collapse the world is currently experiencing is linked to the vertical disintegration of production. Every time the US buys one fewer Barbie doll, trade declines not only by the value of the finished doll, but by the value of all the intermediate trade flows that went into creating it.

Not being a theorist, I have been puzzled by the argument for a while, but I now think I may understand.

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This speech given by Fed Governor Elizabeth Duke and its accompanying charts are the most useful summary I have seen yet of the various interventions taken by the Federal Reserve and their effects on financial markets.

This is exactly why people were arguing for coordinated stimulus programmes earlier this year.

The FT has a nice piece on Latvia this morning. To my mind the most interesting sentence in it was the following:

IMF officials have indicated that the organisation was divided over the wisdom of defending the lat’s peg but was finally persuaded by pressure from Riga’s EU partners as well as the Latvian government’s own refusal to contemplate devaluation.

If there is one thing we have learned about international currency markets in the past couple of decades, it is that fixed exchange rates and internationally mobile capital don’t sit well together. A European response to this general lesson has been to go for full monetary integration — EMU — rather than stick with unstable intermediate arrangements such as the EMS.

There are logical consequences for how we deal with Latvia. If the country’s EU partners don’t want it to devalue, they should offer it immediate EMU membership. If they don’t do this, then we can probably leave aside the normative point that Latvia ought in its own interests devalue, since as a positive matter it will almost certainly be forced to be. As this article points out, a forced devaluation would have repercussions far beyond Latvia. It would be nice to avert a crisis before the fact rather than after it, for once.

Trina Vargo of the US-Irish alliance offers some advice on how Ireland should respond to Obama’s proposed clampdown on tax havens here. Although this is more of a political approach to the issue than mine of a few weeks ago, she too cautions against over-reacting.

The numbers today from Germany are sobering. One would like to think that they would have an impact on the policy debate there.

Barry Eichengreen and I have posted an update to our column comparing the current global economic crisis with the Great Depression. The data are through the end of March (apart from the discount rate data, which are through the end of April). Further updates will be posted as the industrial output and trade data are processed by the international organisations which we are using as our source.

At the global level, March saw green shoots in the stock market, but not in the real economy — although world trade stabilised, and there was a clear deceleration in the rate of decline of world industrial output.

We are also, for the first time, posting data on individual countries. These emphasise the gravity of the current crisis. They also show green shoots in some countries, particularly in Eastern Europe and Japan. Hopefully subsequent numbers will confirm these encouraging signs.

Is this the end of the beginning, or a lull between storms? Hopefully the former, but how can one be certain, especially given the various unexploded landmines littering the economic landscape, and the steady increase in unemployment around the world with its potential to create new holes in the financial sector? The Great Depression also saw increases in output which turned out to be temporary, largely due to the policy mistakes of central bankers and politicians trapped by a gold standard mentality. As my column with Barry pointed out, the policy response has been much better this time around, and may be bearing fruit. Once the recovery is clearly under way, governments will need to start balancing the books. But a premature tightening of fiscal policy would be disastrous, which is why Europe needs to avoid artificial fiscal straitjackets.

Angela Merkel has just given us a compelling reason to be grateful for central bank independence.

Update: Wolfgang Münchau is pessimistic about future ECB independence here.

What is US foreign direct investment in Ireland up to? A lot of different things. Some firms are here to produce and ship to the EU, others are here for research purposes, and yes, some are here primarily for tax purposes. This latter group is the one that will be most sensitive to changes in tax policy, both in the US and elsewhere as they plan where to have their income accrue for tax purposes. In a previous post, I argued that the Obama administration’s recent proposals would not have a substantial impact on employment in Ireland. Some have taken this to mean that I am suggesting that there will be little impact on the value of FDI here. Not so. The combination of low Irish tax rates and US tax policy give firms a reason to declare their foreign earned income in Ireland and to reinvest those earnings in order to avoid costly repatriation taxes. Do firms take advantage of this? Anecdotal evidence surely indicates that they do. Data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis gives us a better insight into how this combination makes Ireland a bit unusual. Using 2006 data (the most recent for which data were available on the website), I was able to construct the following table that gives the top eleven countries by the sales/employee, FDI position/employee, and assets/employee (all numbers are in 1000s of US dollars).

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The recent proposal by the Obama administration to eliminate deferral, under which US multinationals do not pay US taxes on overseas earnings that are ploughed back into their subsidiaries, has sent our local press into a tizzy. The discussion follows the logic that such a move would increase the effective tax rate paid by subsidiaries in Ireland to that in the US. If these firms are here in large part due to our low tax, this would presumably lead to US-owned foreign direct investment (FDI) leaving Ireland en masse furthering our downward spiral.

While this dire scenario makes for good reading for people who like bad news, there are reasons to question the extent of the shift in economic activity this might cause.

The removal of deferral applies only to retained earnings – that is income used actively (US law already removes deferral for passively invested earnings under the subpart F regulations). Thus, this is only for a subset of the earnings attributed to Irish subsidiaries. Nevertheless, it could potentially lead to an increase in repatriations by US owned firms who no longer find it advantageous to “park” them in Irish investment. What does this imply for the Irish economy? As an indication, a tax change in 2004 created a temporary reduction in the US repatriation tax from roughly 35% to 5%. This led to a massive influx of funds (around $312 billion) returning to the US from abroad. However, economic activity by US owned subsidiaries in terms of location or level of investment does not appear to have changed markedly. In fact, in response to a recent call for such a move again, Senator John Kerry noted that “It did not increase domestic investment or employment. The fact is that many of the firms that benefited from this during that period of time laid off workers after they brought that money back. They passed on the benefits to their shareholders.” Thus there was no shift in jobs back to the US before, making it less than certain it would occur under the proposed change. (You can read more about this debate here).

Why might multinational activity not respond as expected? Eliminating deferral does not necessarily increase the tax burden on foreign income. The recent firm-level study of Barrios, Huizinga, Laevan, and Nicodeme finds that multinationals’ subsidiary locations depend negatively on both the parent and host tax. This is true even for countries that offer deferral. This indicates that deferral-offering parent country taxes are already a barrier. This most likely arises because parents and hosts limit tax breaks to locally-owned, locally-undertaken activities (such as accelerated depreciation or R&D tax credits). Thus, the gap the multinationals face isn’t simply the difference between the US statutory rate of 35% and the Irish one of 12.5%, implying that whatever increase in the effective tax may come isn’t going to be the 200% increase being suggested. In addition, the US operates an income basket method of calculating foreign owned tax. What this means is that it adds up worldwide profits to calculate the US tax liability and worldwide non-US taxes to calculate the US tax credit. Thus, the excess credits earned in a place like Germany (where the tax rate exceeds that in the US) can be used to offset the liability that would be owed in an excess limit place like Ireland. Furthermore, since most US firms are in an excess credit position, they already have a buffer to soften whatever increases may result from deferral elimination. As such, it is not in any way clear that this proposed change would necessarily push Irish subsidiaries into an excess limit position (where they would owe US taxes) leading to a reduction in investment.

But all of this presupposes that taxes are a major force in multinational decision making. Evidence indicates that although taxes are useful in attracting investment on the margin, they are generally of second order performance for most investment decisions. In surveys of multinationals, taxes usually rank around 9^th in importance, far behind factors such as labour costs, energy costs, infrastructure, and government stability. Turning to econometric evidence, (see Blonigen for a nice review of the literature) while taxes typically show up as statistically significant, the relatively small differences in effective tax rates across countries compared to, say, labour cost differentials, means that these latter differences are more economically significant when predicting FDI patterns. This then reinforces the survey evidence. Furthermore even the effects of taxes have deeper stories as the sensitivity of FDI to taxes varies along many firm, host country, and source country characteristics. For example, Barrios et. al find that multinationals’ tax sensitivity varies along many parameters including the number of subsidiaries it operates (peaking at 4 subsidiaries). For the US, this could be linked to the income basket described above. Therefore to predict the impact in Ireland, it is necessary to know more about the subsidiaries and their corporate networks than simply where they come from. However, even broad brush stroke predictions suggest that the decline in FDI, although present, will not be the massive outflow being predicted.

Finally, when making a decision, the choice facing a multinational is between Ireland and other location choices. This potential change hits Ireland more than a high tax location like Germany because Ireland has low taxes and benefits more from deferral. But who are we competing with for investment? High tax locations (where our relative advantage might be reduced) or low tax locations (where our relative position will roughly the same)? Given recent headlines, investment leaving Ireland seems bound for low tax Eastern European countries (who not coincidentally have far lower wages than we do). Therefore at first blush, it seems to me this change does little to affect Ireland’s attractiveness relative to our actual competition. The continual focus on taxes as THE central pillar of our foreign direct investment policy is missing the bigger point. To put it simply, taxes are not the only reason for investment in Ireland and they never have been. If they were, we would have zero investment since there are other countries with far lower taxes than we currently have. What needs to be recognized both in this instance and in our overall approach to FDI is that taxes are but one aspect of how firms make decisions. A more balanced approach will leave us far less vulnerable to changes in global conditions and less prone to needless hysteria.

So in the end, has Obama betrayed his Irish roots? To the extent that his proposals affect perceptions, maybe. A quick read of today’s papers leaves one with the impression that the one thing we had going for us is gone. However, this both overstates the change in the taxes firms actually pay and assumes that we are competing with high-tax states for US investment rather than other low-tax countries on the periphery of the European Union. But to the extent that Obama’s proposals will affect actual investment in Ireland, there is still a lot more consideration that needs to be given before Moneygall cancels its plans for an Obama heritage centre.

Economic historians and others interested in the Great Depression still turn to the economic publications of the League of Nations as a basic source for understanding the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. While I don’t want to give anyone in Washington DC stage fright, the publications of today’s international organisations, such as the IMF’s World Economic Outlook which was published in full last week, will also serve as a first port of call for the historians of decades hence. So: how are they shaping up?

Extremely well, is my reaction after having finally given the April WEO the attention it deserves. This is essential reading for people seeking a global overview of the crisis,  and advice as to how to get out of it.

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Those interested in keeping up with the latest thinking on the financial crisis may be interested in checking out Jim Corr’s interview with Matt Cooper on today’s Last Word radio show.

The Fed is using an impressive range of firepower to counter the greatest deflationary threat since the Great Depression.   With such massive injections of liquidity, however, it is not surprising that leading figures are already debating exit strategies and the extent of the longer-term inflationary threat.   It is a fascinating debate to watch. 

John Taylor worried in the FT last month that “extraordinary measures have the potential to change permanently the role of the Fed in harmful ways.”   He said, “The success of monetary policy during the great moderation period of long expansions and mild recessions was not due to discretionary interventions, but to following predictable policies and guidelines that worked.” 

Writing this week in the FT, Martin Feldstein is also anxiously looking ahead:  “[W]hen the economy begins to recover, the Fed will have to reduce the excessive stock of money and, more critically, prevent the large volume of excess reserves in the banks from causing an inflationary explosion of money and credit.  This will not be an easy task since the commercial banks may not want to exchange their reserves for the mountain of private debt that the Fed is holding and the Fed lacks enough Treasury bonds with which to conduct ordinary open market operations. It is surprising that the long-term interest rates do not yet reflect the resulting risk of future inflation.”

Robert Hall and Susan Woodward strike a more optimistic note in a piece on the VOX site:  “[T]he Fed can control inflation by varying the interest rate it pays (or charges) banks on their reserve holding. Consequently, the Fed’s exit strategy need not be constrained by concerns about inflation – reserve interest-rate policy can take care of inflation, but the Fed should publically announce this policy.”

Paul Krugman gives his views on the Irish Economy (the blog) and the Irish Economy (the real thing) here.

Update:  Paul has now written a longer article on the Irish situation - it is here.

Paul Gillespie writes on this topic in today’s Irish Times, covering Kevin’s recent work and some of the other work cited on this blog: here.

I linked last weekend to former Swedish Finance Minister’s Bo Lundgren’s appearance on the Marian Finucane show.

Lundgren also appeared recently before the TARP Congressional Oversight Committee, chaired by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren and his written testimony was the basis for the section on Sweden in the committee’s latest report. Here’s a webpage containing the written testimony of Lundgren and three other experts on other banking crises (Great Depression, 1980s S&L and 1990’s Japan) who all appeared before the committee at the same time.

The webpage also has full video of this meeting. The experts delivered short verbal testimony (Lundgren’s starts about 14 minutes in) and about 40 minutes in there is a question and answer session. Prof. Warren’s opening line of questioning about arguments against nationalisation was of particular interest to yours truly but the whole session is really useful.

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At a time when the world economy is contracting at Great Depression rates, you wouldn’t think that policy makers would be worried about inflation.

The financial crisis has been going on long enough now that we are starting to see a lot of serious research and policy papers addressing the various issues that the crisis has raised.

This material may be a bit more complicated than most of the reports this blog usually links to but I think some of our readers may appreciate getting a sense of the stuff that we’re reading in trying to understand what’s going on and where we should be heading.

So, here’s some stuff I’ve been reading in between my nationalisation blogging … (more…)

Barry Eichengreen and I have a short piece on Vox comparing the two global depressions that began in 1929 and 2008. Hopefully this one will not last as long as the one 80 years ago.

The prospects for the Irish economy are very sensitive to the resumption of global growth.  The VoxEU website provides some ‘instant’ analytical responses to the London Summit, including essays by some of the key UK civil servants involved in organising the summit:  the link is here.

I will be answering reader questions about the G20 summit on Monday at this website.

Here is an interesting profile of Nouriel Roubini.

The first week of April sees two big economic events:  the April 7th Irish budget is preceded by the G20 summit on April 2nd.  There is an interesting article by Simon Johnson on The Atlantic’s website: you can read it here.

Remember last spring? It seems an age ago now. The fear then was of resource scarcity: of rising oil prices, and of rising food prices, as biofuels crowded out food production and population continued to grow. Environmental worries also reflect resource scarcity, albeit of another type. Once this crisis is over, whenever that is, all these concerns will inevitably come back on the agenda, and could easily dominate it for the rest of the century.

In that context, one of the most alarming news stories, to me, of last year, was that involving Korea’s Daewoo Logistics leasing almost half of Madagascar’s arable land on a 99 year basis. Here is a pretty positive account of the deal in Time magazine. Why my alarm? Because the deal reflected the fact that

“[Food-importing countries] have lost trust in trade because of the price crisis this year,” says Joachim von Braun, director of the International Policy Food Research Institute in Washington.

Thus, from a Korean point of view,

“We want to plant corn there to ensure our food security. Food can be a weapon in this world,” said Hong Jong-wan, a manager at Daewoo. “We can either export the harvests to other countries or ship them back to Korea in case of a food crisis.”

The latter quote, taken from this FT piece, should send shivers down the spine of anyone with a sense of history. (The article also makes it clear that the agreement was far less positive for Madagascar than had at first been reported.) Markets are a political institution. The deal they represent is straightforward: if you are willing to pay the going price, then you can buy what you need. When countries start to doubt whether that deal will remain valid going forward, and in consequence act to carve out sources of supply for their own exclusive use, the geopolitical consequences can be catastrophic.

As I contemplated this story, I idly wondered what would happen if, in a decade or two, some African or Latin American country decided that it wanted to renege on such a deal which had been struck by a previous government with, say, China or India. And so it was with considerable interest that I read this from the BBC. I don’t suppose the Koreans will invade Madagascar! But one can predict that this will not be the only occasion on which such a domestic backlash occurs. Why on earth would anyone assume otherwise?

The moral is straightforward. In addition to tackling the underlying problems of resource scarcity, we need to credibly commit to keeping international markets open over the decades to come. And in order to be able to do that, governments need to get the macroeconomics right, now. Otherwise, as the example of the Great Depression shows, this will just be a taste of things to come. And that won’t just be bad news for the economy.

Official details here and here. It’s pretty much as I described yesterday and I’m no more impressed than before.  In particular, it hardly takes a corporate finance expert to figure out that “The equity co-investment component of these programs has been designed to well align public and private investor interests in order to maximize the long-run value for U.S. taxpayers” is a bit of a fib.   Funnily, toxic (or troubled) assets have now been renamed “legacy assets”!  This terminology might be appropriate if we were dealing with newly-cleansed banks with new ownership and management.  However, as I’m reminded every time I see this man’s happy smiling face, that just ain’t the case.