A reader has noticed this call from the nation’s astrologers for extra public funding.
The paper presented by John Fitzgerald at the Kenmare conference is available here.
One of the points made often in relation to improving science, technology and innovation policy is the need for more effective multidisciplinary research. The ESRI is organising a Training Workshop focused on understanding multidisciplinary research collaboration and learning how to make it more effective. The Workshop will take place on 3 November 2009, 9:00-13:00. More details can be found here. Places are limited to 30 participants including researchers and policy analysts. Registration before 25 October 2009 here.
Yesterday morning on the Sunday Business show on Today FM, Minister Lenihan commented on the anti-NAMA economists (podcast here). Among his comments were the following:
What I notice about them is that there’s about forty of them. There’s about two hundred economists in all in the state. Most of the rest of them have approached me privately and said that these gentlemen and ladies are wrong. But of course they are not prepared to say so publicly because in Irish academic class, people don’t criticise other people’s books. That’s part of our national mediocrity. If you take the Irish historians and someone publishes a bad history book, you won’t find any reviews in the paper pointing out how bad that book is. If you look at the press in the United Kingdom or the United States, you’ll see robust academic criticism of others works but we’re reluctant to do it. We’re a small country, we have to meet people again, we have to go to other people’s funerals and we know and we don’t want to put the cross on someone even when they’re saying something that’s fundamentally wrong.
So Minister Lenihan is now saying that at least 80 economists have approached him privately to disagree with those who have criticised NAMA. He is stating that there is a silent majority of economists who support his approach to the banking crisis but are not willing to say so publicly because they are scared of insulting the anti-NAMA economists.
I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. Is it likely that the Minister has been receiving huge amounts of anonymous support from intimidated economists? Is the Minister’s characterisation of the absence of disagreement or debate among Irish economists an accurate one? If we suffer from a national mediocrity, are the anti-NAMA economists part of it? Is the Minister attempting to encourage debate or to stifle it?
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.