The conference programme for the Irish Society of New Economists conference, taking place in Galway on 4th and 5th of September, is available here. Well done to the organisers Michelle Queally, Aine Roddy, Patricia Carney and Aoife Callan for putting together an extensive programme of 74 speakers.
On 18th September, Scottish residents will vote on the question “Should Scotland be an independent country?“.
There has obviously been a vociferous debate in Scotland on the pros and cons of both options. As well as national identity arguments, the Yes campaign has pointed to such advantages as being able to set an independent defence policy, more competitive business taxation policies, fairer social welfare policies, retaining universality of policies such as personal care and student fees and many others (see details of the case for Independence here). The No campaign, in particular, has highlighted the benefits of being part of a larger union of countries and the risks involved in transition including potential for a lengthy readmission process to the EU and NATO, prolonged currency uncertainty, loss of shared institutions and so on (See the Better Together website).
Prof John Curtice has been keeping track of all opinion polls on the issue on this website
At present, the favoured outcome from pollsters and bookies is a No vote. I have co-authored a couple of reports on the potential for risk aversion to be playing one key role in the decision (here here and here).
I am opening this thread for people who want to comment on the referendum perhaps in particular the relevance of the last 100 years or so of Irish experience for Scotland.
Irish Educational Studies recently published a special issue to commemorate the landmark report Investment in Education (which was commissioned in 1962 and released in 1965). The report’s finding that half of all children were leaving school by the age of 13 generated newspaper headlines and created the environment for Donogh O’Malley’s ‘free education’ initiative of 1966. An appendix to the report provided information on the educational attainment of the population in 14 European countries (including seven in Eastern Europe) as well as in the US, Japan and Israel. No equivalent statistics could be produced for Ireland. Questions relating to educational attainment were included in the Irish Population Census from the following year. This issue of Irish Educational Studies includes two witness accounts by key players, Áine Hyland, an RA to the report team, and Seán O’Connor, first head of the Development Branch of the Department of Education. The issue, entitled Investment in Education and the Intractability of Inequality, also contains four academic papers. Mine is available here. The abstract reads as follows:
Most studies of the relationship between education and economic development focus on the line of causation running from the former to the latter. The present paper studies how the pattern of Irish development has influenced the structure of the Irish education system. The first section sets out the economic context of late industrialisation within which Investment in Education was commissioned and which determined the reception that the report received. The report’s release would be followed shortly thereafter by a series of policy measures that would expand secondary-school enrolment and graduation rates and massively increase the demand for third-level places. Later sections analyse the subsequent evolution of Ireland’s binary system of tertiary education and the recent attention devoted to science, technology and innovation policy and the ‘fourth level’ (postgraduate) sector. Concluding comments focus on the continuing relevance of the perspective embodied in Investment in Education for the surprisingly high numbers who continue to leave the Irish education system without a Leaving Certificate qualification.
The IMF WP version of my paper on this topic (joint with Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti) is available here.
Summary: This paper has two objectives. First, it reviews the recent dynamics of global imbalances (both “flow” and “stock” imbalances), with a special focus on the shifting position of Latin America in the global distribution. Second, it examines the cross-country variation in external adjustment over 2008-2012. In particular, it shows how pre-crisis external imbalances have strong predictive power for post-crisis macroeconomic outcomes, allowing for variation across different exchange rate regimes. We emphasize that the bulk of external adjustment has taken the form of “expenditure reduction”, with “expenditure switching” only playing a limited role.