Here is the latest from Barry Eichengreen, who is a busy man since he will be giving his Presidential Address to the Economic History Association this evening. Congratulations Barry.
But do be careful Barry, go too far down this road and you’ll have the Irish Times accusing you of being on the far left or far right.
According to the Irish Times,
The pessimists argue the euro is going to collapse and that will make it all irrelevant, but these are the same people, from far right and far left, who urged burning bondholders, collapsing the banking system and refusing to accept the terms of the bailout.
So, if you are worried that the euro is facing an existential crisis and may be on the brink of collapse, if the right policy choices are not taken quickly, then you are on the far left or far right. Take that, Wolfgang Münchau! And you are also on the far left or the far right if you were not in favour of Irish taxpayers paying back unguaranteed bondholders. Take that, Morgan Kelly, Karl Whelan, and many others too numerous to mention! And of course, if you were in favour of not paying back unguaranteed bondholders, then this meant that you were either in favour of collapsing the banking system, or prepared to accept such a collapse as a consequence of the policies you were advocating (their wording is a little ambiguous here, but the last nine words of that quotation suggest that the former interpretation is what the IT had in mind).
(As an aside, who are these pessimists who argue that the collapse of the euro “will make it all (i.e. getting Ireland back to creditworthiness) irrelevant?” And should Irish policy makers not be thinking hard about what to do in such an event? Would it not be irresponsible for them to refuse to contemplate such an eventuality? And should we not be doing our bit to head off such an eventuality by pointing out to governments with more fiscal space than ourselves that the Irish experience clearly shows that even in a small, open economy the confidence fairy does not exist, and that a policy of generalised eurozone austerity will be disastrous?)
Nice to see such rigourous and nuanced thinking from the IT.
The statement is here.
Update: from Reuters, German Deputy Finance Minister Joerg Asmussen will replace Juergen Stark on the executive board of the European Central Bank, a source familiar with the plan said Friday.
(Asmussen was heavily featured in the recent VF article on Germany by Michael Lewis.)
The latest EU Commission Review of Ireland can be read here.
Higher education and research was again in the news today.
The latest batch of bad news on the labour market in Waterford seems to have triggered a decision to establish Waterford University. I am not convinced that universities are necessarily good for regional development. Some universities sure have a positive impact, but I don’t think this holds for any university. With the newly build highways, Waterford is closer to Cork and Dublin, taking away some of the would-be benefits of a local centre of learning and research.
Furthermore, Ireland has plenty of universities already. The largest university has 18,000 students (UCD, 2009) — which puts it below average in the Netherlands, 60th in the UK, 38th in Germany, 35th and just above average in France. Ireland has the 8th highest number of universities per capita in the world already. (A new university would not change the latter rank, just push us closer to Norway.) This matters for two reasons. There is a fixed cost in running a university. International rankings are not normalized for size; small universities cannot do well.
The 2010 annual report of Science Foundation Ireland also made the news today. The press release emphasizes collaboration, which has increased with both researchers abroad and companies in Ireland. This is not a measure of success. It may just reflect the changing nature of SFI funding and its increase in size. The annual report itself has more indicators, but is annoyingly glossy for an academic organization. We learn that SFI-funded researchers have published 22% more papers in 2010 than in 2009, but we are not told the number of researchers. We learn that Ireland has gone up 16 places in the citations-per-paper ranking (36th in 2003, 20th in 2010), but for all we know that may be because of the social sciences and humanities (who are not supported by SFI).
The SFI 2010 Census has more numbers. Two things stand out: Few patents, few spin-outs. Emigration numbers are high: 47% for all, 66% for non-Irish (post-doc and below). SFI’s mission is to bolster innovation in Irish manufacturing.