Openness, the Phillips Curve and the Cost of Relinquishing the Currency

For a given degree of wage stickiness, there is an inverse relationship between the price-level and employment effects of a nominal shock. Various contributors to the literature on optimal currency areas have extrapolated from this to argue that the real effects of exchange rate changes are smaller for more open economies, reducing the effectiveness of the exchange rate as a macroeconomic instrument. This would imply that more open economies face steeper Phillips curve trade-offs. This proposition has been challenged empirically however. This paper employs standard small-open-economy models to analyse these issues. The propositions are shown to be correct when the non-traded sector is monopolistically competitive. Whether they are true or false under competitive conditions depends on a simple condition that may or may not be satisfied in practice.Openness, Phillips curve, Optimal currency area

Social Partnership, Competitiveness and Exit from Fiscal Crisis

The contribution of social partnership to Ireland’s economic boom remains the subject of controversy. This paper analyses at a theoretical level how a multi-period deal on wages and taxation of the type struck in the late 1980s could enhance competitiveness and facilitate an economy in escaping from fiscal crisis. Such a deal would not be possible in a spot labour market. The high unemployment rates of the late 1980s suggest that the Irish labour market of the time cannot be characterised as a spot labour market, however, and such a deal could be struck under these circumstances. Short-term tax reductions would have worsened the short-term budgetary position and hence would have been politically unacceptable. An agreement entailing a commitment by government to future tax reductions in exchange for current wage moderation on the part of organised labour imparts a supply-side stimulus to the economy and improves the immediate fiscal position. The concluding comments provide a gloomy assessment of whether partnership could play an equivalent role in the current recessionary environment.

Foreign Investment and the Politics of Export Profits Tax Relief 1956

T. K. Whitaker and Seán Lemass are generally credited with effecting the policy shiftfrom protectionism to outward orientation. Ireland’s low corporation tax regime,however, has its origins in the export profits tax relief (EPTR) measures introduced bythe second inter-party government in 1956. EPTR was introduced at the urging of theDepartment of Industry and Commerce in the face of long-standing opposition from Revenue and the Department of Finance. Industry and Commerce at the same time successfully thwarted the desires of the Taoiseach, the Department of Finance and other state agencies to have restrictions on foreign ownership of industry repealed. These apparently contradictory positions were rooted in the historical legacy of protectionism. The inter-party Taoiseach, John A. Costello, downplayed the connection between EPTR and foreign investment in an apparent attempt to deprive Fianna Fáil of an opportunity for controversy. Its introduction hastened the end of Fianna Fáil prevarication on the issue of foreign ownership. The importance of the intense electoral competition of the period is also frequently ignored in accounts of the policy shift. Following sixteen years of unbroken Fianna Fáil rule, the next four general elections brought four changes of government. Along with the depth of the 1950s recession, this forced Fianna Fáil into a comprehensive reexamination of its industrial strategy. The economic thinking of the major political parties co-evolved, and many of the institutional innovations of the period were the result of inter-party government initiatives. The defeat inflicted on Finance by the Department of Industry and Commerce partly motivated Finance’s work on Economic Development, the 1958 publication of which provided political cover for Fianna Fáil’s U-turn on overall economic strategy.Ireland, FDI, Corporation Tax, Export Profits Tax Relief

Review of "Interrogating Irish Policies" by William Kingston.

Book Review.

Regional Characteristics, Monetary Union and Regional Income Volatility

Relatively little attention has been paid to the issue of how individual regions will fare as a consequence of the national decision on whether or not to adopt the single European currency. Regional welfare is influenced by both mean income and volatility. The present paper focuses on volatility. We develop a model of a regionally-integrated macroeconomy to explore how the income variance implied by the national decision on EMU is distributed across a country's regions. The model suggests that weaker regions are likely to do better than stronger regions with respect to volatility if the national economy participates in EMU.Monetary Union, Regional Income, Volatility

Third-Level Education, Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Boom in Ireland

Ireland’s dramatic economic boom of the 1990s has been referred to as “the era of the Celtic Tiger”. In a little over a decade, real national income per head jumped from 65 percent of the Western European average to above parity, unemployment tumbled from double to less than half the European Union average and numbers at work increased by over 50 percent. Much research has been carried out on the impact of each of the separate elements agreed to have been important in stimulating or sustaining the boom. The present paper focuses on one key under-researched synergy – the nexus between the country’s industrial strategy, which focused on attracting foreign direct investment in certain high-tech sectors, and the orientation of the third- level educational system that had been developed in Ireland over recent decades.Science and Technology Manpower Policy, Education, Foreign Direct Investment, Ireland, Celtic Tiger

A Note on Transfer Pricing and the R&D Intensity of Irish Manufacturing

Ireland’s low corporation tax regime has proved especially attractive to foreign multinational companies operating in high-tech sectors. Ireland’s increasing concentration in such sectors has facilitated the country’s rise in the international R&D rankings. On a sector by sector basis however, R&D expenditures in Ireland remain low by international standards. This has led to questions about whether the health of the country’s R&D environment matches the technological orientation of its industry, and about the commitment of the foreign sector to R&D activities in host economies such as Ireland. The present note focuses on the transfer pricing behaviour that tends to arise in a low corporation tax regime, and shows that a simple correction for transfer pricing reveals Ireland to be less of an outlier in terms of sectoral R&D expenditures than the conventional measures suggest.Transfer pricing, Multinational Corporations, R&D Intensity

Critical Lieb-Thirring bounds in gaps and the generalized Nevai conjecture for finite gap Jacobi matrices

We prove bounds of the form ∑_(e∈I⋂σ_d(H)) dist(e, σ_e(H)^(1/2) ≤ L^1 -norm of a perturbation, where I is a gap. Included are gaps in continuum one-dimensional periodic Schrödinger operators and finite gap Jacobi matrices, where we get a generalized Nevai conjecture about an L^(1)-condition implying a Szegő condition. One key is a general new form of the Birman-Schwinger bound in gaps