One of the government’s main arguments in relation to the medical card changes in the last budget was that there could no longer be automatic entitlements to medical cards for over-70s. Tanaiste Mary Coughlan asked the opposition how it could support maintaining the automatic entitlement of “well-off pensioners, senior civil servants, High Court judges, property [...]
The Irish Society of New Economists (ISNE) will host its sixth annual conference at the University of Limerick on Friday 2nd October 2009. The conference website is here. The conference is intended to provide a forum for new economists (in post-graduate research programs or the private and public sectors) to present papers from [...]
Amid the doom and gloom that has enveloped us, a ray of very apt “yellow” light shone through yesterday when Simpson’s creator Matt Groening announced the first, long-awaiting Simpson invasion of Ireland. The episode, named “In the Name of the Grandfather” (thanks go to Jim Sheridan) is the first of its kind to be screened [...]
Ireland was dubbed an “Innovation Follower” in the annual European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) report published last month. The Irish Times newspaper on the 22nd of January summarised the EIS description of Ireland’s innovation capacity as follows: The results show that Ireland’s greatest relative strength is in human resources, marked by its strong growth in [...]
Either we aren’t in a recession at all or we are in one that’s so bad it defies economic logic. The strangest economic indicator of them all, the lipstick indicator, suggests that times are tougher than we imagined- Estée Lauder reported sharply lower sales and a 30% plunge in profit for the latest quarter. Leonard [...]
Beware of those offering a solution to our current woes while invoking the authority of John Maynard Keynes for their proposals. It is questionable if Keynes would have supported proposals involving the accumulation of large levels of public debt. Keynesian the proposals may be but the evidence suggests they would not be supported by Keynes. [...]
On the 1st of December last Dublin City Council increased city centre parking rates from €2.70 to €2.90 per hour. The council’s justification for this was to limit the congestion caused by people cruising around looking for a parking space. The increased cost aims to do this by discouraging commuter parking and encouraging short term parking. [...]
Putting “all your eggs in one basket” as Seamus outlines in an earlier blog entry is a major contributing cause of the present economic crisis. In this period of the past two decades referred to by Blanchard and Simon (2001) as the “the great moderation”, Governments, Banks and individuals have also suffered from the problem [...]
Interesting comments on bloomberg from the German Finance Minister. Talks about the potential for bailing out Ireland should we experience debt funding problems… Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) — German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said euro-region countries may be forced to bail out other members of the 16-nation bloc that face problems refinancing their debt. “Some countries [...]