Open Journal Systems Trinity College Dublin
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Estimating, and Interpreting, Retirement Income Replacement Rates
Get PDFLongitudinal data are used to estimate retirement income replacement rates (RRs) of employees in Ireland who transitioned into retirement between 2010 and 2016. The median RR is estimated at 47 per cent, meaning that the majority of the retirees replaced less than half of their pre-retirement earnings with pension income. The distribution of RRs is highly skewed, with a mean of 73 per cent. The mean value seems high relative to stated policy goals, but the estimate is driven partly by very high RRs at the lower end of the earnings distribution. When a more comprehensive measure of income – incorporating pre-retirement pension income, post-retirement labour earnings and social welfare payments – is used, the mean RR falls to 52 per cent. The findings highlight the need for understanding the distribution of replacement rates and leads to a question as to whether policy goals in the areas of pension adequacy should be set with respect to income or consumption levels as opposed to RRs
The Economic and Social Review at 50: A Review Article on Fiscal Policy Papers:
Get PDFThis article provides a broad overview of published research in The Economic and Social Review (ESR) in the broad area of fiscal policy. It examines the patterns of publications and citations over time, those sub-areas which have seen the highest rate of publication and the nature of the data and techniques employed. The broad pattern which has emerged is that micro policy articles have increased in importance over the years with the availability of better quality data. Macro policy analysis remains important and has often concentrated upon episodes of fiscal crisis. In terms of citations, those papers which have been most heavily cited are overview papers, sometimes delivered by international scholars as invited presentations. There also seems to be a slight bias towards more recent publications with much work from the 1970s and 1980s largely ignored in terms of citations
An Analysis of Antenatal Care Pathways to Mode of Birth in Ireland
Get PDFThis paper explores the role of antenatal care in determining mode of birth in the Irish healthcare system using data from the Growing Up in Ireland study. Results indicate that midwifery-led antenatal care is independently associated with significantly higher rates of normal delivery and significantly lower rates of elective caesarean section relative to consultant-led care in both the public and private sectors. Given concerns over increasing rates of caesarean section, our results are consistent with calls nationally and internationally for further investment in midwifery-led antenatal care services, and for stricter regulation of the actors, both providers and patients, engaged in the private antenatal care pathway
Exploring Cross-Border Cultural Policy in Practice, Special Issue Introduction
Get PDFThis article is an introduction to the Special Issue: Exploring Cross-Border Cultural Policy in Practice. It outlines the importance of considering cultural policy on the island of Ireland in a cross-border context and reflects on learning gained from an event on the subject co-organised by Cultural Policy Observatory Ireland, the Social Innovation Network and Dublin City University at The Garage Theatre in Monaghan in November 2018
A Populist Wave or Metamorphosis of a Chameleon? Populist Attitudes and the Vote in 2016 in the United States and Ireland
Get PDFIn the era of Brexit and President Trump, it is clear that we need to talk about populism. Populist political campaigns feature ever more widely, suggesting the phenomenon of a ‘populist wave’. But do populist sentiments shape vote choice? Using data from Ireland and the United States, incorporating CSES Module 5 questions that focused on populist sentiments and vote choice in 2016, we show that populist sentiments did motivate voters in both countries. We also demonstrate, however, that the old reliables – economic perceptions, partisanship, and left-right ideology – mattered more. Thus, an exclusive focus on populism for the success of Donald Trump in the US or Sinn Féin/AAA in Ireland is unwarranted. Further, populist sentiments motivating vote choice differed between the two countries, raising fresh questions about whether populism can be regarded as an ideology and whether even the “chameleon” metaphor overclaims coherence for the term
Aggressive Tax Planning Practices and Inward-FDI Implications for Ireland of the New US Corporate Tax Regime
Get PDFNational corporate tax systems interact with each other in complex ways. Interactions with the US tax system are particularly important for Ireland given the significance of the US MNC presence in the Irish economy. The US system changed dramatically with the passage of the Trump administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This paper outlines the history of corporate tax policy in the two jurisdictions and how the systems interacted up to the time of the recent changes. It also details the type of aggressive tax planning practices that grew up around the location of intellectual property assets. The likely implications of the new US tax regime for intellectual property location and inward FDI in Ireland are then assessed
Examining the Volatility of Ireland’s Tax Base in the Paradigm of Modern Portfolio Theory
Get PDFThis paper extends a theoretical and empirical framework commonly applied in international finance to present an alternative paradigm within which issues of tax revenue volatility in Ireland can be studied. We establish a trade-off between revenue growth and volatility, typically associated with financial asset returns. We observe strong but time-varying cointegration among tax revenue streams. Statistical tests of mean-variance spanning suggest diversification benefits from holding Income Tax and Excise Duty. We establish the minimum variance tax portfolio, and also find that, from a meanvariance optimality perspective, the portfolio consisting of 2017 tax shares is sub-optimal. Practical policy implications are discussed
“A Certain Motion”:: Automata and Mechanism in Early Modern Europe
Get PDFThis article explores early modern hopes and fears that texts about automata, machines that imitate organic life, could transform the reader from curious layman into a superhuman engineer. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston’s seminal work, Wonder and the Order of Nature (1150-1750) (1998), argues that displays of automata aim to stimulate emotion, but it does not explore the transformative possibilities for the reader encountering these machines. This article contends that written accounts of automata in early modern Europe reflect growing uncertainty about the relationship between body and mind, which would later be expressed in the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes. This uncertainty is illustrated by literary texts, particularly Thomas Nash’s innovative prose work The Unfortunate Traveller (1594); historical chronicles that recall the inventions of the Spanish clockmaker Juanelo Turriano; and the technical manuals of the automaton-makers themselves. This article argues that the early modern automaton’s potential to change the organic human body is both a threat to contemporary understanding of human nature, and a fantastical hope for humanity’s future evolution
