20/06/2011: Two good news from Minister Bruton

It's not all doom and gloom, folks, so when good news do arrive, or at least there is a hint at such news..., time to share. (A major HT to the fellow twitterati: @BriMcS).

The first piece comes from Minister Richard Bruton (see full release here). Let me focus on few points of interest:

"The Minister held individual meetings with 22 companies across a number of targeted sectors, including five of the top ten technology companies in the USA. The companies he met include several top internet companies with household names. The 22 companies employ a total of over 350,000 people worldwide, with combined revenues of over $230billion."

This suggests that the Minister was meeting with large MNCs, which is good. But importantly, he also met with "several rapidly growing “new technology” companies which are characteristic of the new Silicon Valley boom". This suggests that the Minister has met with some younger and faster growing internet companies, especially companies past the first/second round of fundrasing and only starting their operations outside the US. The domain of such companies is a new territory for IDA and they represent hige untapped potential for Irish market.

Also encouraging is the fact that the Minister also met a number of "companies in international services, entertainment and aviation" - areas outside the traditional focus on ICT and life sciences.

Also crucially, the Minister explicitly recognized one of the core problems faced by Irish companies and MNCs in the ICT sector today - the problem of skills shortages. "... it is estimated that there are currently approximately 3,500 vacancies in the ICT sector in Ireland. The Minister for Education and Skills has recently announced over 2,000 one-year ICT training places as part of the Springboard programme from this September. However we must also go beyond immediate needs, and I together with Minister Quinn will shortly start an ambitious process of examining measures we can take to respond to the future requirements of the ICT sector."

I recently spoke at the Irish Internet Association annual conference where the issue of specialist skills shortages in ICT and the lack of incentives for entrepreneurs in the sector were raised repeatedly. It is clear from my sources that:

1. We are currently experiencing net outflow of high end skills in ICT due to absolutely regressive, skills- and entrepreneurship-penalizing changes in personal income taxation in the Budgets 2010 and 2011. In particular, high upper marginal tax rate and absurd USC rates and penalty for self-employed workers and entrepreneurs are having dramatic effect of pushing the younger and most skilled high-end ICT specialists out of the country.
2. Skills base of indigenous workforce in the area of high-end ICT specialists cannot be improved significantly within reasonable time frame (less than 4-5 years) as such skills require a combination of education (beyond 3rd level) plus on-the-job training.

Another excellent change comes also courtesy of Minister Bruton (details here). Minister Bruton will legislation facilitate formation of co-operative societies to further facilitate formation of new enterprises. The move is aligned with the publication of the new Companies Bill and is designed to reduce red tape (which, is welcome, but incidentally, is not as important to the entrepreneurs and companies operating in Ireland, despite FG's excessive focus on 'red tape'). But the value of the new changes to co-operative societies regulations is of great value in itself.

Co-operative ownership represents one of the oldest forms of alternative enterprises and having more streamlined, easier regulatory environment for co-ops can be a net positive for entrepreneurship. Co-operative ownership is also rather efficient in the conditions of constrained credit availability for SMEs because it allows for better anchoring of household savings into investment.

Here's some interesting literature on co-operatives:
Link 1: The study of co-operatives in modern economics: a methodological essay
Link 2: A study into co-operative enterprise for instrumenting and marketing auctions in agricultural produce and a related later study which is even broader here.
Link 3: An interesting study on co-operative's reforms in Italy (where co-operative ownership stretches from traditional agricultural and tourism sectors to banking and distribution)
Link 4: Another study from Italy focusing on the future of financial co-operatives in relation to post-crisis financial services recovery
Link 5: An excellent discourse on the issue of co-operative firms role in bridging the gap between social and market objectives, containing some best practice in regulatory frameworks to support co-operative efficiencies (which might be of help to Minister Bruton as well).

20/06/2011: Europe's Corporate Tax Rates

The Institute for International and European Affairs provided a comprehensive list of EU member states' effective corporate tax rates - here - with a handy graphic depicting various states as either highest or lowest in terms of their corporate tax rates in a continuous color coded scheme.

Statistically-speaking, the cool graphic is slightly the case of 'more design, than substance' as it does not provide analysis for what constitutes a 'high' or 'low' rate. Below, I provide a chart based on IIEA's data with specified boundaries for cut-offs for the tax rate categories. These bands are based on the +/- 1/2 of STDEV and +/- 1 STDEV from the mean. Please note that the parameters are:

• Mean (EU-wide less Malta) = 12.55%
• Mean (Euro area) = 13.88%
• Median (EU-wide) = 12.55%
• STDEV = 6.40

For the sake of an argument: Ireland is just below the EU average and is firmly in the 'Average' tax rates category. France and Denmark are firmly in the 'Low' tax rates category and Belgium and Lux are in 'Very Low' category. Ireland's 'neighborhood' in terms of plain statistics, includes: Austria, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus.

So, statistically, Irish effective corporate tax rate is indistinguishable from EU Average and from Euro Area Average. I'd say: "Bugger-off, Sarko!"

18/06/2011: Research & Teaching Nexus

These are my old slides from a presentation given back in 2006 on the issue of linkages between research and teaching in 3rd level education. Keep in mind - they refer to courses I taught before joining the School of Business at TCD, back in the days when I was in the Department of Economics.

You can magnify individual slides by double-clicking on the picture

18/06/2011: Two papers - Commodities Speculation and Flat Taxes

Some interesting studies worth reading released in recent weeks.

First: Lombardi, Marco J. and Van Robays, Ine, paper "Do Financial Investors Destabilize the Oil Price?" (May 20, 2011). ECB Working Paper No. 1346. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1847503

The study results "suggest that …financial activity in the futures market can signi…ficantly affect oil prices in the spot market, although only in the short run. The destabilizing …financial shock only explains about 10 percent of the total variability in oil prices, and shocks to fundamentals are clearly more important over our sample.

Indeed, looking at speci…fic in the second half of 2008 can be mainly explained by a substantial fallback in economic points in time, the gradual run-up in oil prices between 2002 and the summer of 2008 was mainly driven by a series of stronger-than-expected oil demand shocks on the back of booming economic activity, in combination with an increasingly tight oil supply from mid 2004 on. Strong demand-side growth together with stagnating supply were also the main driving factors behind the surge in oil prices in 2007-mid 2008, and the drop in oil prices activity following the …nancial crisis and the associated decline in global oil demand. Since the beginning of 2009, rising oil demand on the back of a recovering global economy also drove most of the recovery in oil prices.

However, we …find that …financial investors did cause oil prices to signifi…cantly diverge from the level justi…ed by oil supply and demand at speci…c points in time. In general, inefficient …financial activity in the futures market pushed oil prices about 15 percent above the level justi…fied by (current and expected) oil fundamentals over the period 2000-mid 2008, when the volume of crude oil derivatives traded on NYMEX quintupled. Particularly in 2007-2008, destabilizing fi…nancial shocks aggravated the volatility present in the oil market and caused oil prices to respectively over- and undershoot their fundamental values by signi…ficant amounts, although oil fundamentals clearly remain more important."

Note - emphasis above and below is my own.


Another interesting study I came across is the Blumkin, Tomer, Sadka, Efraim and Shem-Tov, Yotam, paper "Labor Migration and the Case for Flat Tax" (May 31, 2011). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 3471. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1855947

The study examines the case for a flat tax in the presence of migration threats - in other words, in the case of open labour markets. The study considers a tax competition game between two identical countries populated with individuals with two skill-levels.

"We compare between a non-linear tax regime and a flat tax system and demonstrate that in the backdrop of a high-skill migration threat (due to a reduction of the migration costs faced by high-skill individuals), the re-distributive advantage of a non-linear system over a linear (flat) one is significantly mitigated." In other words, when high skills workers are mobile across borders (as in the case of advanced economies, and especially small open economies like Ireland), progressive taxation's main benefit over flat taxes (its actual redistributive 'progressivity') is reduced significantly.

"In the presence of migration, and in sharp contrast to the autarky case, a coordinated shift to a flat system (with its entailed administrative advantages), still allowing for fiscal competition between countries (by maintaining the countries' sovereignty over the welfare state generosity), is not too welfare-reducing; and when administrative costs are taken into account, such a shift may prove to be mutually beneficial for both countries."

"... taking into account the administrative gains associated with a flat system (relative to a non-linear tax regime), even when both countries may choose a general non-linear tax regime, an equilibrium where both do set a flat system in place is likely to form." So for two systems starting from a non-flat progressive taxes base, open labour policies will lead to a flattening of the tax systems.

The authors "...also confirm the race-to the-bottom hypothesis that suggests that migration reduces the extent of redistribution." This point should be salient for Ireland. As we all know, Ireland is currently experiencing very substantial outflow of skills, especially at the higher (internationally marketable) segment of skills distribution. This means that this trend alone will tend to lead to a reduction in the redistributive effectiveness of the existent taxation system progressivity. Thus, there may be serious grounds to consider flatter (not more progressive) taxes as the means to actually mitigate the effects of lost progressivity. Some food for thought.

17/06/2011: Further proof that WE NEED a public sector reform

Occasionally, from time to time, ok... rarely, but... this blog does post some satirical images. The following are the screen grabs from the official e-tendering site for Iris Public Sector (the link is here) - hat tip to two twitterati: @Wexford_tweeter and @aidanclince.
To see what this is about - read the project title in the section magnified below:
Priceless!

17/06/2011: Irish Exchequer Expenditure - May

A late catching up on the recent Exchequer figures for May. In the earlier post (here) I covered receipts side of the figures. Now, time to update the expenditure side as well. I was reluctant to write much about expenditure and revenue sides of the fiscal crisis in previous months, since early months show very little in terms of comparatives. By the end of May, however, almost 1.2 a year has gone by and some trends can be established, albeit of course with caution.

Total net spending by the Government for January-May 2011 was €18.364bn up on €17.867bn for the same period in 2010. Overall, spending fell 3.67% on the same period for 2008 (€699.5mln saved) but is up 2.78% on 2010 (dis-savings of €497.3mln).

This is not encouraging.
As chart above shows, the expenditure is now running between 2010 and 2008 levels. Sounds ok? Not really. Ireland will have to cut another ca 6% (based on rather rosy plans set out by the Troika back in November) in years to come. So far, we only managed to cut 3.67% relative to 2008 after three ‘savage cuts’ budgets.

The reason is that our 'cuts' were not really that deep, per se, but that they were transfers of expenditure from the capital side and some departmental current spending to Social Protection and Education & Skills. Here are two charts:


Here are some relative slippages (bear in mind that departments responsibilities and names have changed since 2008):
Social Protection spending rose 47.33% over the same period.

These were offset by above average (simple average of -20.69% decline across all departments) declines in spending levels in:

• Tourism, Culture and Sport – down 49.58%;
• Community, Equality & Gaeltacht – down 48.77%;
• Enterprise, Trade & Innovation – down 45.58%
• Environment, Community & Local Government – down 52.24%
• Foreign Affairs – down 28.93%
• Transport, Tourism and Sport – down 56.56%
  

Below average declines took place in:

• Agriculture, Fisheries and Food department spending declined 7.49% in January-May 2011 compared to the same period of 2008;
• Comms, Energy and Nat Resources – down 13.34%;
• Defence – down 15.69%;
• Education & Skills – down just 2.52%;
• Finance – down 17.925;
• Health & Children – down 1.75;
  

• Justice & Equality – down 15.525;
• Taoiseach’s – down 1.75%

Large fraction of these reductions is explained by the capital cuts (a subject for my future post) and by the timing of expenditure (we do not know if payments lags are rising in the public sector or not, and we do not know if capital spending is being delayed to generate positive news momentum).

But it is worth noting that some of the departments show deterioration in performance on the expenditure side relative to 2009-2010 (as opposed to 2008) base. Again, some of these are due to re-arranging of the departmental responsibilities, but in the end, what matters is that to-date, through the first 5 months of the year, Irish Exchequer expenditure cuts and tax increases have yielded just €699.5mln in savings on the 2008 levels.

Furthermore, we should note that promissory notes paid out to the banks in March are not factored into the overall voted expenditure, so the comparatives on the spending side are clearly showing that fiscal consolidation is not working so far. Which brings us to the following ‘rumour’ I heard from a senior governing coalition member. Allegedly, all indications are, Budget 2012 will be, to quote my source, “so bad, it’ll push thousands currently at the margin of leaving the country into booking their tickets out of Ireland this side of June 2012”. And this was in relation to the tax burden measures.

So lastly, lets take a look at year-on-year savings generated by all the austerity measures. The chart below shows that:

1. Savings generated earlier in the year in 2010 were driven primarily by the delays in payments and other temporary measures. Having started at a robust saving of 12.95% in January 2010, the Ex chequer allowed slippage of cuts to net a miserably low rate of overall expenditure reductions of just 1.55% for the year.
2. Both, in 2009 and 2010, by May, Exchequer spending was either contracting of rising at a much slower pace year on year.
3. The pattern for expenditure this time around – in 2011 – is strikingly different from that in either 2010 or 2009.