Business Commons^™

Media Discourses On The Economy In Ireland: Framing The Policy Possibilities, Brendan K. O'Rourke

Books/Book Chapters

Ireland suffered a lot economically in the Great Recession, yet its policies continued on a neoliberal trajectory, making Irish neoliberalism less a non-dead Zombie and more like a reinvigorated Frankenstein’s monster, with ordoliberal transplants from Germany grafted into an Anglo-American neoliberal composite body. Yet along with these continuities come much change. There was political change in party strengths and personnel. There was change in the Irish state’s capacity for policy analysis (MacCarthaigh, 2017) an increase in the number of Ireland’s policy analysts and their specialisms, and an increased stress on evidence-based policy-making. How can we explain both these continuities and …

Visions Of The Future In Budgetary Discourse, Ewan Macdonald, Brendan O'Rourke, John Hogan

Conference papers

Whilst there is ample precedent to argue against the common-sense notion that the ideological leanings of political parties are congruent with their implementation of fiscal policy (Boix, 2000; Garrett & Lange, 1991; Hibbs, 1977; Liargovas & Manolas, 2007), there is a relative dearth of research on the role of discourse in shaping fiscal policy with one notable exception by Maatsch (2014). With this in mind, we approach the issue of examining fiscal policy through a fixed, contested and subverted within particular texts” (Howarth, 2005, p. 341). This paper examines how the future is constructed in Irish budget speeches delivered between …

Taxation For Whom?:A Diachronic Analysis Of Taxation In Ireland And The United Kingdom From 1970-2015., Ewan Macdonald, John Hogan, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This paper explores the discursive development of taxation within budget speeches in two countries, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, from 1970 to 2015 by means of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We ask the following questions; how have discourses of taxation developed diachronically in both countries, what are the similarities and differences in the observable discourses across both countries, and for whom and how are these discourses legitimised? In answering these questions, this paper makes use of Corpus linguistics, a methodological approach which utilises computational analysis of large bodies of text to draw statistically significant conclusions about the …

Institutionalizing Industrial Development: The Cases Of Ireland And Taiwan, Paul Donnelly

Conference papers

Both Ireland and Taiwan are considered to have experienced “economic miracles” that, ex ante, could not have been predicted when the two countries started along the road of industrial development in the late 1940s / early 1950s through to the end of the 1960s. Taking the view that industrial development does not appear as a ready formed institution, as an essence that always-already existed, what is of interest in this paper is the work of institutionalizing or institutionalization as an on-going process. Accordingly, and through the lens of actor-network theory (ANT), the paper follows how both countries structured/organized themselves to …

How Foreign Firms Transformed Ireland’S Domestic Economy, Paul Donnelly

Articles

Today, Ireland is host to 1,033 multinational corporations. They directly employ 152,785 and account for 70 per cent or €122.5bn of exports. It’s a story that has its roots in the 1940s.

Link Levy To Services- Not Urban Middle Class Assets, Tom Dunne

Articles

Paying any tax is an unwelcome burden, but in Ireland many have a particular aversion to taxes on their homes. We are not alone in this. Elsewhere, taxes on homes are also unpopular; witness the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation which forced the California state government to cut property taxes. Nevertheless, residential property taxes remain an almost universal feature of developed countries because of compelling economic arguments for them. Also, local property taxes are regarded as the best means of funding local government.

Rarely, it seems to me, is there such a distance between what the public wants and …

Tracing The Path To ‘Tiger Hood’: Ireland’S Move From Protectionism To Outward-Looking Economic Development, Paul Donnelly

Articles

Up to very recently, Ireland was spoken of in very adulatory terms, to the point of being dubbed the ‘Celtic Tiger.’ However, the tiger is no more, having been consumed by a property-led boom, the collapse of which was compounded by the global financial crisis. Taking path dependence as lens, this paper looks at an early sequence of events that shaped the country’s path to ‘tiger hood’, i.e., the policy shift from protectionism to outward-looking economic development. From relatively contingent and unpredictable beginnings evolved an institutional matrix, with a clear focus on the global, that, ex ante, could not have …

Avoiding The Mistakes Of The Past, Tom Dunne

Articles

Tom Dunne explores the long term drivers of dysfunction in Ireland's housing markets and what a more sustainable housing system would look like.

Tax Facts, Tom Dunne

Articles

Tom Dunne Clarifies the issues surrounding different forms of property tax

Geo-Politics, The ‘War On Terror’ And The Competitiveness Of The City Of London, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

"Offshore” Or “Shorn Off”: The Oecd’S Harmful Tax Competition Initiative And Development In Small Island Economies, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

The difficulties of developing and executing a sustainable development program in Small Island Economies (SIEs) are well documented. Comparatively small domestic markets, remote export markets, a dearth of natural and human resources, susceptibility to environmental change and natural disasters, plus limitations on the state’s capacity to govern economic activity have narrowed the range of feasible development strategies resulting in a reliance on sectors vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global economy.

Land Values As A Source Of Local Government Finance, Tom Dunne

Books/Book Chapters

Funding local government has been a permanent feature of debates about public policy in Ireland and Many feel that the balance of power between local and central government is weighted too much in

This paper suggests that the concept of economic rent, on which the justification for property taxes rests and its relevance to the property market in a modern, economically successful and urbanised Ireland, needs to be vented, discussed and debated.

The proposition is that if a greater understanding was created about the economic characteristics of landed property both value capture and local property taxes would achieve greater public …

The Organisation For Economic Cooperation And Development, Richard Woodward

Articles

This article reviews the role of the OECD, a much cited but little studied institution, in global governance.