Social policy and macroeconomics : the Irish experience

The remarkable performance of the Irish economy in recent years has attracted much attention. Within a 10-year period the economy went from an 18 percent unemployment rate to nearly full employment, while the ratio of debt to GDP fell from 120 percent to less than 50 percent. Inevitably, this success was also accompanied by problems, as infrastructure came under increasing stress, environmental difficulties became more evident, and a changing social structure resulted in some groups becoming increasingly marginalized. What worked and what did not? In particular, are there lessons that may be relevant for other countries facing similar difficulties, especially in Asia and Latin America? McCarthy focuses on three features of Ireland's economic achievements. Two of these features are external: the opening to Europe and the role of foreign direct investment. The third and perhaps most"exportable"feature is domestic: the role of a social pact. This pact was initially between employers, trade unions, and the government. Subsequent pacts were extended to include a variety of other groups. McCarthy discusses the far-reaching impact of this series of pacts on health, poverty, employment, education, and social welfare. Ireland now faces a number of challenges, including the slowdown in the global economy, a fall in resource transfers from the European Union, and the potential effects of the entry into the EU of Hungary and Poland.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Poverty Assessment,National Governance

Playing the percentages: New Zealand, Scotland and a global solution to the consequences of non-marital relationships?

This article offers a comparative analysis of the property consequences of non-marital relationships in New Zealand and Scotland. The article summarises and critiques the New Zealand system, where de factos are dealt with alongside married couples through the Property (Relationships) Act 1976, before analysing the provisions of the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 which establish a scheme for regulation of non-marital couples entirely separate from existing divorce law. An alternative regime, based on assessment of a percentage entitlement to the claim a spouse would have received in equivalent circumstances, is then proposed as a solution to the difficulties in both jurisdictions

Engineering in the 21st century

Reasonable evolutionary trends in federal outlays for aerospace research and development predict a continuing decline in real resources (1970 dollars) until the mid eighties, and a growth thereafter to the 1970 level by 2000, still well below the 1966 peak. Employment levels will parallel this trend with no shortage of available personnel foreseen. These trends characterize a maturing industry. Shifts in outlook toward the economic use of resources, rather than minimum risk at any cost, and toward missions aligned with societal needs and broad national goals will accompany these trends. These shifts in outlook will arise in part in academia, and will, in turn, influence engineering education. By 2000, space technology will have achieved major advances in the management of information, in space transportation, in space structures, and in energy. The economics of space systems must be the primary consideration if the space program foreseen for the 21st century is to become an actuality

Matrix management for aerospace 2000

The martix management approach to program management is an organized effort for attaining program objectives by defining and structuring all elements so as to form a single system whose parts are united by interaction. The objective of the systems approach is uncompromisingly complete coverage of the program management endeavor. Starting with an analysis of the functions necessary to carry out a given program, a model must be defined; a matrix of responsibility assignment must be prepared; and each operational process must be examined to establish how it is to be carried out and how it relates to all other processes

Using Decision Trees for Coreference Resolution

This paper describes RESOLVE, a system that uses decision trees to learn how to classify coreferent phrases in the domain of business joint ventures. An experiment is presented in which the performance of RESOLVE is compared to the performance of a manually engineered set of rules for the same task. The results show that decision trees achieve higher performance than the rules in two of three evaluation metrics developed for the coreference task. In addition to achieving better performance than the rules, RESOLVE provides a framework that facilitates the exploration of the types of knowledge that are useful for solving the coreference problem.Comment: 6 pages; LaTeX source; 1 uuencoded compressed EPS file (separate); uses ijcai95.sty, named.bst, epsf.tex; to appear in Proc. IJCAI '9

A review of bank performance in the Fifth district, 1983

Many observers expected 1983 to be a bad year for bank profits because of deposit deregulation, but F. Ward McCarthy Jr. shows in “A Review of Bank Performance in the Fifth District, 1983” that last year proved to be the most profitable of the last five. In this article, McCarthy examines the revenues and expenses of Fifth District banks in order to explain the significant improvement in performance. McCarthy finds the most successful banks last year were the ones that had cost structures that were relatively sensitive to the level of interest rates. He forecasts that in the current year the strength of the economy, the growth in loan demand, and increases in interest rates will increase banks’ gross return on assets. McCarthy also points out that if banks are to increase profitability in an environment of deregulation and rising interest rates, they must be able to contain interest expense and increase revenues from noninterest services.Banks and banking

Economic shocks and the global environment

Policy formulation in most countries is complicated by the role of the external economic environment, especially during periods of great external shocks. The authors examine how individual countries were affected by, and responded to, external shocks. They apply an enhanced version of an earlier methodology for estimating the effect of three kinds of shock: terms of trade, variations in global demand, and changes in the interest rate. They discuss the magnitude of these shocks and country responses to them in Brazil, Ireland, and Korea and present numerical results for some other countries. The authors find that the magnitude of external shocks may be greater than previously recognized. The size and components of the shock depend on such factors as the country's openness to trade, the composition of its imports and exports, and its level of external debt. The authors also found that countries differ greatly in their responses to external shocks. Some rely on additional external financing, some place more emphasis on export promotion, and others favor import substitution. The authors conclude that the magnitude and composition of external shocks should be part of any explanation of why growth rates differ among countries.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Trade Policy,Achieving Shared Growth

Economic performance in small open economies : the Caribbean experience, 1980-1992

The authors study the economic performance of ten Caribbean islands in two groups: six small islands from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and four larger islands: Barbados, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. They compute external shocks together with each island's performance response to them. Some islands resorted inordinately to external financing to cope with adverse shocks. Others tried to compensate by stimulating exports and tourism. The buildup of debt created problems for some of the governments later in the decade, resulting in the need for strong contractionary measures. But the difference in performance between islands cannot be explained by external shocks alone. The OECS group achieved superior performance even though they faced roughly the same shocks as the larger islands. It helped that they had a monetary board that encouraged high investment levels. But this was complemented by concessionary flows used productively and by foreign direct investment. Now the question is how well these economies will fare when they face the inevitable reduction in concessionary flows in coming years.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Inequality,Financial Intermediation