Taxation and welfare policies are among the most potent instruments available to any state to influence the living standards of a country and its people. In 2021, the Irish government established a Commission on Taxation and Welfare to conduct an overall appraisal of the suitability and...

In this paper we describe a range of methods for preparing forecasts of the educational profile of employment in the Irish economy. We use these forecasts to derive a profile of the possible evolution-specific unemployment rates in the next decade. Our results indicate the following: -Changes in...

Funding in Irish hospitals is partially based on case mix, whereby resources are redistributed annually to hospitals with greater efficiency. Accurate measurement of efficiency is essential, so in this paper, we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis to measure technical...

Over a quarter of households receive fuel allowances, amounting to some £56 million, annually. The state distributes these allowances because fuel is regarded as a ?merit? good. We must question whether the allowances as they stand are the most efficient way alleviating fuel difficulties among...

This paper investigates the simulation of common policy reforms across different countries. Changes to the equivalence scales of social assistance systems in favour of pensions and children in Germany, Ireland and the UK were modelled. Unlike a number of previous studies of this kind such as...

The role of expectations in influencing long-term interest rates in Ireland is examined. In the case of long-term securities, interest rate risk is added to exchange rate risk as a barrier to arbitrage between yields at home and abroad. Nevertheless, we find that fluctuations in world interest...

offered significant incentives in order to attract foreign direct investments (FDI), being motivated to do so by expectations of possible spillover benefits. Using an unbalanced panel of firm level data in Bulgaria, Poland and Romania over the 1995-2003 period, we examine the impact of foreign...