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Price inflation and income distribution

With the risk of being ridiculed for self-promotion, readers may want to have a look at some recent computations.

Earlier, Callan, Keane and Walsh had a look the impact of recent changes in taxes and benefits on nominal income. They found a sizeable redistribution from rich to poor.

An Bord Snip Nua argued that benefits should be indexed on the consumer price index, which would be tantamount to a 5% cut.

In the paper with Jennings and Lyons, we compute the consumer price index per income decile. The highest incomes have seen the fastest deflation, up to 5.1% for the period July 2008 to June 2009 for the top 10% earners. The three lowest income deciles have seen deflation in the range of 3.0 to 3.4%.

By the argument of An Bord Snip Nua, a 5% cut in benefits thus seems a bit harsh.

On the other hand, deflation has been slower for lower incomes because local authority rents have continued to go up even as the rest of the housing market collapsed. As local authority rents are indexed on renters’ incomes, a cuts in benefits would in fact induce deflation for this, particularly vulnerable group.

A 3% cut in nominal benefits would therefore mean that the poorest people in Ireland would see a rise in their real income.

An Bord Snip: Research

One of the recommendations of An Bord Snip Nua is to transfer all research money from the departments and agencies to a single research body.  Besides the cost savings, I see three advantages:

1. Competition for research allocation between fields (as opposed to the current earmarking of research money for someone’s pet projects)

2. Academic quality control (captive agencies occassionally grant funding to researchers of low repute but the right political colour)

3. Streamlining of applications and administration (at present, research bodies need to keep track of the rules of a range of bureaucracies)

I see two disadvantages, however:

1. Disruption: Transfer of tasks between public policy inevitably leads to chaos, and no research funding will flow for a certain period. This may lead to the destruction of human capital — that is, the good researchers may leave the country, leaving the dross behind. Continuity is therefore a high priority.

2. Applied research has a lower status, and funding will be under additional pressure from blue-skies research. The agencies and department that lose their research grants should have a substantial say in the type of research to be funded (but not, of course, select the researchers).

Baby Boomers

The number of births recorded in Ireland reached a twentieth century peak of 74.0 thousand in 1980 and fell to an all-time low of 48.2 thousand in 1994.

Births began to increase in the second half of the 1990s and the rate of increase has been rapid over the past five years. The latest figures released by the CSO (Vital Statistics Third Quarter 2008) raise the possibility that the 1980 peak may soon be surpassed, although of course this would still imply a significantly lower birth rate as the population is now some 30 per cent above its 1980 level. The TPFR (total period fertility rate – roughly the number of births per woman over her child-bearing life span) declined from 3.23 in 1980 to a low of 1.85 in 1994 but was back up to 2.03 in 2007.

These huge swings in the birth rate have serious implications for resource allocation, especially in the health and education sectors. The Dublin maternity hospitals are now bursting at the seams, while the educational system will continue to feel the impact of growing numbers of school-age children for years to come.

Will the number of births continue to grow? Population projections are notoriously uncertain, at best serving to illustrate the implications of alternative assumptions about key demographic variables.  The projections for 2011-2041 published by the CSO in April 2008 assumed that the TPFR would decline to 1.78 by 2011, which seems a high given the continuing buoyancy in the birth rate.

But there are reasons for believing that the birth rate could suddenly take a nosedive, as happened in the 1980s. The peak in the number of births recorded in 1980 was quite dramatic and the subsequent rate of decline steep. (The decline began shortly after Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ireland in September 1979, when he preached against contraception and abortion.)  More significant is that it coincided closely with the sharp rise in unemployment as Ireland entered the deep recession of the 1980s. The following graph shows the correlation between the number of births (four quarter moving average) and the seasonally adjusted numbers on the Live Register, lagged three quarters.  The coincidence between the peak in the number of births and the floor in the unemployment rate is striking.

The second graph is the comparable picture for the years 2005 to date (using the standardised unemployment rate in place of Live Register figures).

The unemployment rate began to increase dramatically in the second half of 2008, so it should begin to affect births registered from the second quarter of 2009 onwards.  The latest available data are for 2008Q3, but it is interesting to note that the graph shows the number of births plateauing over the period 2007Q4-2008Q3.  If the experience of the early 1980s is anything to go by, this graph will nosedive over the coming years. Watch this space!

Voting with their feet

Not literally, of course, as no one since Fionn mac Cumhail has left the island on foot. Most people fly. While reliable and timely data on migration are hard to get, we do know how many people fly out of country, and how many fly in. This data can be had from the CSO for every month since January 2006. Unfortunately, the data are released with a six-month delay (courtesy of Dublin Airport Authority). They are instructive nonetheless.

Between Jan 2006 and Oct 2008, 30,282 more people arrived at one of the seven airports than left. This trend has reversed however. While 35,453 entered the Republic of Ireland between Jan 06 and Oct 06, and 72,936 between Nov 06 and Oct 07, 78,106 people left between Nov 07 and Oct 08.

That is, eighty thousand people took a one-way flight, before the scale of the recession was clear.

Of those 78,106 people, 58,980 left for Great Britain, 11,018 for Germany, 6,750 for Poland, 6,409 for the Czech Republic, and 4,161 for the Baltic countries. Between Nov 07 and Oct 08, 4,164 people came from Italy, 3,966 from France, and 2,456 from Hungary.

Getting the asset purchase scheme right

As we wait for today’s budget announcements, it is worth reflecting on the challenges of getting the right design and pricing for the asset purchase scheme now being trailed.

Some bloggers have made up their minds that the government will overpay for the assets. How can such an outcome be avoided? I have a slightly novel suggestion for this.

As in the United States, there will be a huge gap between what the banks claim the assets are worth and the value that the rest of the market would place on them.

Finding a mechanism that places a generally accepted price on the assets is as difficult here as it is in the US. Any asset purchase scheme will require a further detailed scrutiny and evaluation of the assets to be purchased.

It is to be hoped that the initial announcement of an asset purchase scheme will not lock the government into prematurely firm commitments on pricing and financial restructuring of the banks. The worst possible thing would be to crystallize the taxpayers’ costs at too high a level.

Buying the assets at inflated prices would surely be politically unacceptable. Indeed, Government sources have clearly trailed that they will not pay current book value for the assets.

Each country’s situation is slightly different. If we were to subtract now the present value of all prospective loan losses (taking recent analysts’ estimates), the main Irish banks would be severely undercapitalized. Removing the problem loans at anything close to the prices implied in the analysts’ estimates will require the banks to take immediate write-downs that have the same effect.

Therefore implementation of the asset purchase scheme at realistic asset prices will create the need for a further recapitalization of the banks.

Injection of more preference shares by the Government will not do the trick. If the banks are to move forward in a sound manner, and be accepted as financially self-sufficent, they must have sufficient equity capital. In quieter times there would be enthusiastic private sector buyers for equity in such cleaned-up banks. Failing that, the residual equity investor is likely to be the government. When you do the sums using the analysts’ estimated, this has to imply huge dilution of the existing shareholders. No wonder many commentators have concluded that full, albeit temporary, government ownership is on the cards.

Given this background, it might be better to do something just a little more complicated: let the asset management company pay even less than fair price for the bad loans, and in return give the existing shareholders of the banks an equity stake in the AMC. This has the advantage of making sure that the surviving bank really is clean, and neatly defuses shareholder objections that they are being expropriated. Of course they are even less likely to own much or any of the surviving bank, unless they choose to contribute to its recapitalization. Other existing risk capital providers, such as the holders of unguaranteed subordinated debt, could also be compensated for write-down by acquiring a stake in the AMC.

Let’s hope this week’s statements do not shut off possibilities such as this which can protect the taxpayer without destabilizing market confidence by allowing well-adapted financial contracts to bridge the gap between taxpayer and shareholder.

Although my idea may seem novel, specialists will recognize it as only an adaptation into our current circumstances of the most conventional form of bank resolution mechanism. It can work.