The Irish Economy

Standard and Poor’s have moved their rating of Irish government bonds from BBB to A- with positive outlook.  The statement they issued is here.

The indicative yield curve (as of 18:00 06/06) for Irish government bonds can be seen in the following table.

The DEW Economic Policy conference is being held this year in Cork on Friday and Saturday October 17 and 18. Venue and hotel booking arrangements will be posted here in due course.

Proposals for papers are welcome. Send a brief outline, preferably before end-August, to s.coffey@ucc.ie.

Summary press release here.  More details to follow.

• Introductory statement by Mario Draghi
• Why has the ECB introduced a negative interest rate?
• TLTROs and ABS purchases

This Irish Times article effectively advocates that public sector pay should be frozen in real terms for the next 70 years, with wage growth no higher than inflation -  here.

Albert Saiz, a leading urban economist based at MIT, will be giving a special seminar next Monday (June 9th) at 3.30pm, hosted by the Department of Economics at TCD. The talk, which will take place in the IIIS Seminar Room, top floor of the Arts Building in Trinity College Dublin, is entitled: “Immigrant Locations and Native Residential Preferences in Spain: New Ghettos?” An abstract is given below.

Albert is also giving the keynote the following morning (Tuesday 10th) at a workshop hosted by the Policy Institute at TCD on the latest Irish housing market crisis, this time the lack of supply. The event is aimed at policy-makers and other decision-makers in the housing sector. As capacity is limited, if you’re interested in attending, please send me an email (firstname.surname@tcd.ie).

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Immigrant Locations and Native Residential Preferences in Spain: New Ghettos?

Abstract: In research we are studying the impact of immigration on native residential mobility in a European context. Before the economic crisis, Spain received an inflow of immigrants roughly equivalent to ten percent of the population in only ten years. We have obtained a massive data-set from the national registry, or Padron – everyone is required by law to register their address after moving to new dwellings. Importantly, all immigrants in Spain need to be inscribed in this municipal registry in order to be eligible for visas, and illegal immigrants can also register. We can identify the exact geo-location of the place of residence for each individual registered in the country – about 45 million- from 1999 to 2008. With this information, we study the residential responses of natives at the very micro level –including across buildings. We are finding fascinating patterns that suggest that immigration and the consequent white-flight that engendered in central cities greatly spurred suburbanization in the larger metropolises.

Here is an interesting, though perhaps unsurprising, statement from US Congressman Dave Camp (R) and US Senator Orrin Hatch (R) on the OECD’s BEPS project.

In addition to the aggressive actions by some foreign countries to levy more taxes on U.S. taxpayers before a consensus has been reached, the process established by the OECD raises serious questions about the ability of the United States to fully participate in the negotiations.

Ultimately, we believe that the best way for the United States to address the potential problem of BEPS is to enact comprehensive tax reforms that lower the corporate rate to a more internationally competitive level and modernize the badly outdated and uncompetitive U.S. international tax structure.

Last week, Feargal O’Rourke of pwc had a piece in The Irish Times on Ireland’s reputation and possible opportunities in the post-BEPS environment.

The ideal scenario for Ireland post the OECD BEPS process and US tax reform is that tax havens would be out of business, countries would not be able to give preferential rulings to taxpayers and there would be a focus on aligning profits with substance. In such circumstances, Ireland, with a low rate, a transparent tax system and comprehensive double-tax treaty network will provide a very competitive tax environment for companies who are willing to put activities in Ireland.

Nick Crafts, Alan Taylor and I are editing a series of articles on the economics of World War I, which will be appearing at Vox over the course of the next few months. Today’s column is by Mark Harrison.

There has been some comments in the media over the past week or so about changes to the way national accounts are compiled in the EU.

A good deal of this has focussed on changes relating to illegal/informal/underground economic activities.  It should be noted that there is no change to the treatment of these activities in ESA2010.  The definitions and conceptual approach to such activities remains exactly as it was in ESA95.  The major differences between ESA95 and ESA2010 are summarised here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Readers of the blog may be interested in my new book “The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger: Liberalism, Boom and Bust”. With ideal timing, John Bradley’s review is in the latest edition of the Dublin Review of Books.

Table of Contents:

1 Liberalism in crisis
2 Ireland: between development and crisis
3 Capital: the triumph of finance
4 Europe: between market and diversity
5 National politics: governing fragmentation, fragmented governance
6 Crisis: the difficult politics of development and liberalism

Wendy Lyon writes on the requirement under new national accounting rules to include the value added from illegal activities where transactions are “mutually agreed”:

The Irish Examiner reports today that Ireland is to begin figuring revenue from prostitution into its gross domestic product. According to the Examiner, the Central Statistics Office is liaising with Gardaí to determine “how best to quantify the levels of activity” in this and other underground economies, such as the drugs trade.

This step has been taken because of a new requirement under the European System of Accounts, effective from September of this year, that “Illegal economic actions shall be considered as transactions when all units involved enter the actions by mutual agreement”.

Strictly speaking, prostitution does not actually fall into this category. There is no law against trading sex for money in Ireland, although there are laws against some of the activities associated with it. One of these is living on the earnings of another person’s prostitution and so income from pimping is illegal; but those who sell sex independently – an unknown percentage of the Irish sex trade – do not, for that reason alone, commit any crime.

More relevant, and contrary to the assumptions of Davy chief economist Conall MacCoille as quoted in the Examiner, is that some of this revenue is already being reported. Sex workers are not necessarily tax evaders: they can report their income in the same way as any other non-PAYE worker, and many do. (In the UK, where selling sex is also legal but unregulated, there is even an unofficial website providing information on how to go about it.) It may not be explicitly identified as income from prostitution, however, because of the stigma involved.

It is unclear whether the CSO will make any attempt to distinguish between reported and unreported prostitution income. If not, the new rules could lead to double-counting.

Also unclear is how the CSO will implement the ESA criterion that “all units involved enter[ed] the actions by mutual agreement”. Logically, this would require that revenue from voluntary prostitution be counted, while revenue from forced prostitution would not. The latter would fit the category of illegal income but, again, there is very little hard evidence as to the extent of it in Ireland. Again, the question arises as to whether or how the two will be distinguished.

Finally, there is no indication as to how the amount of revenue will be calculated once the “levels of activity” are determined. How is the CSO to get information on the quantity and cost of commercial sex transactions? Gardaí may be able to monitor the number of men entering certain premises known as prostitution sites, but in the absence of a wholly unrealistic degree of surveillance, they’re unlikely to have a clear picture of the amount of money changing hands afterward.

These difficulties can be partially attributed to the dearth of real research into the Irish sex industry – particularly since the advent of the internet, the medium through which most of it is believed to be conducted. Apart from a few unpublished academic dissertations, there is no independent research at all. The most widely quoted study – the Immigrant Council of Ireland’s 2009 report Globalisation, Sex Trafficking and Prostitution – was funded by the Religious Sisters of Charity in furtherance of what would become the Turn Off the Red Light campaign; its methodology consisted of interviews with 12 women and estimates drawn from reading advertisements and client reviews on the Escort Ireland website. This research was never robust enough to serve as a basis for calculating revenue, and in any case is almost six years out of date.

Of course, the lack of concrete evidence has never been a bar to estimations before. Anti-prostitution campaigners have long cited €250 million as the annual value of the Irish sex trade, although the source of this figure is unknown. (It is usually attributed to the Criminal Assets Bureau, but appears nowhere in CAB’s annual reports and CAB did not respond to my request for confirmation of it.) Nonetheless, it has dutifully appeared in newspaper headlines and even the text of a Seanad motion simply on the basis of unsupported NGO assertions of its veracity. There is a danger that those involved in the calculation may feel under pressure to produce estimates in line with the received wisdom.

The interest in the subject generated by the Turn Off the Red Light campaign would have been an ideal opportunity for the government to institute genuine independent research. In fact, this is what has happened north of the border: faced with the conflict between anti-prostitution campaigners’ claims of widespread forced prostitution, and the PSNI’s assertion that most of the northern sex trade is independent in nature, Stormont Justice Minister David Ford has commissioned researchers from Queens University Belfast and NUI Galway to interview sex workers and clients operating in the Six Counties. No such move was deemed necessary by former Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, nor is there any indication that Frances Fitzgerald intends to follow Minister Ford’s lead.

It is unfortunate enough that legislative changes would proceed in the face of such a knowledge gap, but the ESA obligation makes the need for adequate research all the more necessary. Without it, the estimation of “prostitution revenue” will be nothing but an exercise in smoke and mirrors – serving only to further distort our GDP and provide fodder for more lurid, unsubstantiated newspaper headlines.

Here.

The seventh annual one day conference on Economics and Psychology, co-organised by researchers from UCD, ESRI and NUIM, will be held on October 31st in the UCD Geary Institute. The purpose of these sessions is to develop the link between Economics, Psychology and cognate disciplines in Ireland. A special theme of these events is the implications of behavioural economics for public policy though we welcome submissions across all areas of intersection of Economics and Psychology. We welcome submissions from PhD students as well as faculty and also welcome suggestions for sessions on policy and industry relevance of behavioural economics. Programmes from the previous six events are here. Abstracts (200-500 words) should be submitted before September 30th. Suggestions or questions please send to Liam.Delaney@stir.ac.uk

Here.   Some versions of QE depend on a well-functioning ABS market and this joint paper outlines the various reforms required for this market to operate at a sufficient scale.

Is here, questions on this blog, or at the hashtag #ausconf, may come up in the conference as well.

My colleague David Bell has a short paper on how opinion polls and gambling odds are predicting the outcome of the Scottish Referendum. He notes there are a number of potential limitations in using odds as unbiased predictors of outcomes particularly if markets are very thin. There is also obviously a good literature on prediction markets more generally and their relation to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (see, for example, Robin Hanson’s excellent blogposts on this). With all that in mind, it was tempting to see what odds are available for the next general election in Ireland. One prominent alliteratively named firm has odds for the next general election as being (as of 5pm 29th May): FF/FG coalition 5/6; FG/Lab coalition 7/2; FF/SF coalition 6/1 and so on. This seems pretty consistent with other firms. Would be interested in hearing what people make of this.

The country is all a-buzz with speculation that, having listened to the voters for the last few weeks, and having applied Sudocrem to all affected areas from the experience of the election itself, the political class will suddenly be able to reverse the process of austerity begun under the previous government.  (The process obviously continued, in lock step, by the current one).

The Taoiseach’s call for a review of European policies around bank debt, combined with talk of renewal by Labour following the start of their leadership race, is fuelling this speculation.

The latest ESRI quarterly commentary makes the point that the government’s finances are improving at a slightly faster than expected pace, meaning we may hit the Troika-mandated 3% deficit target without serious adjustments required in the forthcoming budget simply by relying on existing forward momentum and the action of automatic stabilisers. Of course they hedge their bets a bit, but given the importance of the issue I thought I’d quote a bit of the commentary:

The Irish Times this morning describes the increased vote for independents as an expression of anti-politics sentiment.

Anti-establishment-politician sentiment, certainly, but anti-politics? That depends on how you define politics.

My definition of “politics” is all about choice over policies: citizens in a democracy can choose to fundamentally change their country’s economic and social policies, if that is what they want to do. In 2011 Irish voters voted for change, and got none: the new government faithfully implemented the Troika programme, just as the previous government had done, and presumably would have continued to do had they been re-elected. (And now that they have been let off the leash they are coming up with bubble-era proposals to increase mortgage lending. Not much change there either. And consequently not much real choice.)

Democracy without choice is not democracy. Politics without choice is not politics.

A lot of people in this country, and right across Europe, want real change. Some in Ireland voted for Sinn Féin, the big winner in the election. Some voted Independent. This isn’t anti-politics. It’s anti-anti-politics.

More news from Queens – their Centre for Economic History (QUCEH) is hosting an interdisciplinary workshop on the economics and history of crime and conflict. The workshop will take place in Belfast on Friday 12 September 2014 and they are currently inviting submissions (with a deadline of Friday 18 July 2014). A key motivation of the workshop is to encourage economists and social science historians of crime and conflict to network and collaborate on future research.

Full details here.

In between grading exam papers I have been wading through the Piketty book.  Its a bit like walking through a muddy field.  The going is sometimes a bit stodgy, but you eventually get there.  There have been many reviews and commentaries on the book – one of the best I think is by Debraj Ray (http://debrajray.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/nit-piketty.html ), who also wrote what I believe to be the best textbook on Development Economics in 1998, which, alas, I don’t think was ever updated.

Ray is sceptical about Piketty’s “Fundamental Laws of Capitalism”, but believes that the book makes a major contribution in highlighting the concentration of top incomes, arising from both an increasing share of income accruing to capital and also the phenomenon of very high returns to human capital at the top of the wage distribution.

All of this I am sure is very familiar to readers of this blog – Piketty’s must be one of the most reviewed economics books of the last 30 years.  But what seems to get less coverage is what has been happening to the approximately 75% of the world population not covered by the Piketty book.  A recent World Bank study by Lakner and Milanovic (covered here in Vox http://www.voxeu.org/article/global-income-distribution-1988 ) shows that over the 1988-2008 period, growth for the bottom 75% of the world (with the exception of the very bottom 7% or so) has been well above average, thus contributing to an overall compression of the world income distribution.  There have basically been three broad changes in world income distribution over the last 30 years.  Yes, the top 1% have seen high growth, while those between about the 75^th and 99^th percentiles have done relatively poorly – these are the phenomena covered in Piketty.  But the vast majority of the bottom 75% have also done relatively well, particularly those just above the median – effectively the Chinese and Indian middle classes are catching up with lower income groups in the OECD countries.  The net effect of these three changes is a fall in overall world income inequality.  The data stops at 2008 but my guess is that developments since then have probably only accentuated these trends.  And further globalisation is likely to have the same effect.

The piece finishes off with some speculation about the political implications of all this, which I am not quite so convinced by.  But overall, given that inequality seems to be flavour of the moth these days, it is interesting to get a more global view.

In an otherwise unremarkable editorial about the upshot of the elections, the FT comes up with this quite remarkable statement:

The only viable path for France is to press ahead with tax cuts and spending reductions that can sustain growth.

Is the FT really saying that in a Keynesian short run, such as we find ourselves in just now, the balanced budget multiplier is negative? Really? Or that the spending multiplier is negative? Or is it perhaps denying that the Eurozone currently finds itself in such a Keynesian short run, in which a lack of demand is the key constraint on growth? (Let’s not even get into the debate about the long run relationship between growth and the size of the state in Europe, although I can’t help writing down one word: Scandinavia.)

And is the FT really claiming that continuing with this programme would make all those FN voters switch to the socialists and UMP?

Really?

The European election results are coming in, and in France they are catastrophic.

There are two obvious points to be made which work in opposite directions.

First, the vote for the FN and similar parties is an under-estimate of eurosceptic opinion, since these parties come with so much baggage that many voters who hate what Europe has become would never, ever dream of voting for them. And quite right too.

Second, it may well be that these parties would have done less well if there had been national elections last weekend: voting for the EP is one thing, voting for national governments another. (But who really knows.)

Expect many mainstream commentators to point out that the centre has held, that the EPP have won, that Juncker is the people’s choice for EC President, and all the rest of it. This strikes me as exactly the wrong response.

My big worry this Monday morning is that Hollande and others (but I am mainly thinking of Hollande) will continue with their current economic strategy, which as far as I can see consists of crossing their fingers and hoping that something will turn up. Yes, some day this recession will end, since all recessions do, but the timing of this will depend (probabilistically, since life is uncertain) on policies: monetary and fiscal policies, obviously, but also policies to fix the European banking sector. Right now, given Europe’s policy choices, there is no good reason for the French government, or any other government, to expect that the real Eurozone economic crisis (which has to do with growth and unemployment, not yields on government paper) is going to end any time soon. And certainly not by 2017.

M. Hollande and his like may believe that sticking to the programme is their only option, and that any other course of action would be far too risky. They should ask themselves what the political landscape will look like if the Eurozone crisis continues for another 3, 5 or 10 years. It’s not impossible. Perhaps something will turn up, and perhaps the status quo merchants will get away with it. But perhaps it won’t, and perhaps they won’t.

People who argue that there is no alternative presumably see themselves as prudent and responsible. But you could just as easily regard them as drunken gamblers on a losing streak, forever doubling up.

Fellow economic historian Chris Colvin has brought my attention to the fact that the Management School at Queen’s University Belfast has three fully-funded scholarships for full-time PhD students in Economics, starting October 2014. In terms of thesis topics, they will consider all areas of economics, finance or management but they are particularly keen to recruit  students in the following areas:

• game theory and mechanism design with some emphasis on the economics of networks and institutions;
• economic history, including business and financial history; anthropometrics and demography; health, wealth and inequality over the long run; politics, democracy and growth; the economic history of partition in Ireland;
• health economics, labour economics, and the economics of education;
• long-term development and the economics of crime;
• behavioural/experimental economics with some emphasis on social learning.

(As someone working on wealth and inequality over the long run and increasingly interested in the economics of partition, I’d particularly encourage applications in those two areas!)

The good news for successful applicants is that the studentships, which each last for 3 years, include both university fees and annual stipend of £13,863 per annum. The closing date for applications is Friday 20 June 2014 – full details are here.

Not irrelevant in Ireland. AEP, here.

Austerity is not simply an economic phenomenon—societies experience it in different ways, socially, politically, and geographically. The aim of this event is to bring leading thinkers to probe the complex effects of austerity on the European economies forced to experience it by the global economic crisis.

The event will be live-streamed through the INET and YSI network, shown at the Festival of Economics at the University of Trento, as well as various blogs and community sites like Irisheconomy.ie, and we encourage submissions to the panel, which can come in the form of email questions, tweets, and via facebook.

Austerity: Economic, Political, and Social Perspectives

Friday, May 30 Kemmy Business School, UL KBG-16 (map)

Livestream from YSI event in the Univeristy of Limerick, All times are CET

10.00 -10.30 Opening by Dean of the Kemmy Business School, Dr. Philip O’Regan

10.30-12.00 Panel 1: Beyond the theory: Austerity as an economic, and political, reality

Mary Regan, Political Editor of the Irish Examiner, Chair

Mark Blyth, Brown University

Johnathan Hopkin, London School of Economics

Niamh Hardiman, University College, Dublin

John McHale, NUI, Galway & Irish Fiscal Advisory Council

12.00-12.30 Break

12.30-2.00 Panel 2: The wider consequences of austerity on society

Stephen Kinsella, University of Limerick, Chair

Niamh Hourigan, University Collge, Cork

Carmel Hannon, University of Limerick

Seamus Coffey, University College, Cork

Julien Mercille, University College, Dublin

George Provopoulous writes here.

On Thurs., 29th of May, a special seminar on Social Investment in Europe will be hosted by the Department of Sociology/ NIRSA, Political Economy and Work Cluster and the New Deals in the New Economy project. The seminar will run from 9.30 to 1.30 and will be followed by the launch of a new MA in Sociology (Work, Labour Markets and Employment) by Minister Joan Burton.

‘Social Investment’ focuses on investing in people’s skills and capacities and supporting them to participate fully in employment and social life (EU Commission). Does ‘social investment’ lead to a renewal or an erosion of the welfare state? Will ‘social investment’ support economic and social recovery?

The event will start at 9.30 with registration and coffee followed by the seminar at 10.00 in the Phoenix building on the North Campus in NUIM keynoted by Prof Anton Hemerijck, VU University Amsterdam and Prof Brian Nolan, UCD, and chaired by Prof. Seán Ó Riain.

Following a break for coffee there will be a roundtable discussion with: Rossella Ciccia (NUIM), Tom Healy (NERI) and Rory O’Donnell (NESC), chaired by Mary Murphy (NUIM).

See more at: http://www.nuim.ie/sociology/news/can-social-investment-save-social-europe

Please register for seminar by emailing newdeals@nuim.ie before May 26th, 2014

Statement here.

This is exactly the kind of responsive research the Irish Central Bank should be doing. The Central Bank’s Fergal McCann takes a look at Irish SME indebtedness in the wake, presumably, of Morgan’s latest Irish Times op-ed on the subject. Fergal solves the data problem the ICB has for SME indebtedness levels using Red-C data.

There’s no doubt, I think, that there is a serious debt problem within Irish SMEs. But 34% lot of them have no debt at all, with others with very little debt relative to turnover.

McCann’s work is not of the ‘it’s grand lads, nothing to look at here’ variety, either, and it does put a shape on the problem for us.

The seriously indebted medium-sized enterprises are in trouble, though, and we now have a good measure of the likely extent of how many of these firms there are.

Third part of FT series here.

Here.

(H/T Eurointelligence.)