Stimulating a Green Recovery

The new issue of Finance & Development carries several articles on this topical issue: you can find the articles here.

Honohan on Systemic Risk

His remarks at this week’s Vienna conference are available here

Review Body on Higher Remuneration

The Department of Finance has now released the report of the Review Body on Higher Remuneration. The report here and a summary is here.

AIB and BOI Oireachtas Submissions

Last week, I wrote a post about the appearance of AIB and Bank of Ireland executives before the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and the Public Service. A transcript of the appearance is available here. They refer to submissions that the banks gave to the committee but which are not on the Oireachtas website.

The Committee’s staff have kindly made these submissions available to me on request. Here is the AIB submission and here is the Bank of Ireland submission. The AIB submission is particularly interesting because of its focus on funding costs and margins. Somewhat depressingly it states that “Our pricing guidelines could lead to a customer being charged 4% to 5% over Euribor.”

CSO on Cross-Border Shopping

I hadn’t seen anyone else on the blog link to this CSO publication from last week on cross-border shopping (based on a special module of the QNHS for 2009:Q2) which was brought to my attention yesterday. The results are interesting and the microdata associated with the module could be used for a nice research project.

Based on a quick read, the survey results suggest that the cross-border shopping issue has been substantially over-hyped by the media. A couple of highlights:

  1. Based on the estimates in the survey, total household expenditure on shopping in Northern Ireland between 2008:Q2 and 2009:Q2 was €435 million. This figure seems low relative to others that have been reported—for example, here.
  2. Outside of the border region, there are only very modest levels of cross-border shopping with average numbers of shopping trips less than or equal to one per year for all other regions. There is almost no cross-border shopping in the Mid-West, South-West and South-East regions.
  3. The average amount spent on alcohol per shopping trip was €32.
  4. Only 9 percent of respondents reported that they had shopped more in the North during the year up to 2009:Q2, while 1 percent reported that they had shopped less.
  5. Seven percent of respondents reported that they intended to shop regularly in the North in the coming twelve months.