Watch that Space: Progressive Economy Blogs the An Bord Snip Nua Report
Update: And we’re off — From PE:
Vol. I of the report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes (An Bord Snip Nua) is available for download here, and Vol. II is available here.
Slí Eile’s first post is here, and of course, check PE throughout the day and this evening for more.
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Over on Irish Election Mark Coughlan thinks that the ‘An Bord Snip Report will be the most important document delivered to Government in the last, and next, 20 years‘. I guess that idea is based on the fact that the last An Bord Snip report was published in the 80s and that the new one’s possible significance for the next 20 years can be estimated by the repercussions of the first report, which (its imagined) were felt for years.
Michael Taft cautions correctly though that in relation to the first An Bord Snip report ‘history is not so straight-forward and certainly not so reductionist’ and while looking at the outcome of it, asks:
“Was it really the case that the ‘cutbacks’ endured under Mac the Knife (Finance Minister Ray McSharry) were (a) successful and (b) set the preconditions for the growth explosion in the mid-1990s?”
As Michael’s post illustrates, the report itself was effectively ditched. Not such so significant or earth shattering then.
However, it is true that the publishing of the An Bord Snip Nua report is another significant milestone that the great deflationary juggernaut being propelled by this government needs to whiz past before the economy can finally be driven into the ground for the next decade.
In order to tease apart its significance then we are fortunate that Sli Eile, Michael Taft, Paul Sweeney, An Saoi and others over at Progressive Economy will be blogging on the report this afternoon and this evening.
Incidentally, as one of those cuts which have been speculated upon already is social welfare payments it is worth reading Sli Eile’s latest post which addresses the question about whether we can ‘afford’ our current level of Irish social welfare payments (the suggestion being that they are high when compared to other EU countries). This is not a continuation of the ‘most generous’ canard but a detailed lookat how Ireland’s rates compare. Sli Eile concludes that the analysis:
shows that expenditure on social protection is 18.2% of GDP in Ireland and 27.5% for EU15 and 26.9% for EU27. Interestingly, expenditure on social protection per capita at constant prices showed an annual growth of 8.7% over 2000-2006 compared to 1.5% for EU15. In other words, we had begun to start catching up with the rest of Europe – when times were good and social partnership had something good for everyone in the audience. When comparing on the % breakdown across all social benefits by function type (Table 3) Ireland’s ‘old-age and survivors’ category loses out both as % of total social benefits (reflecting in part age-structure) and as % of GDP.
Mark Coughlan has also called for readers of Irish Election to join the fray over there to break up and analyze.
Good luck to all. I hope that summaries of some of the responses will be posted here tomorrow.
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