Concern over budgetary costs has been the traditional driving force behind changes to the EU's Common Agricultural Policy. While the recent MacSharry reform of this policy was more related to external pressures arising from the need to reach an agreement on agriculture in the GATT Uruguay Round,...

Not only has development assistance overall been falling in volume terms, but the share of this ODA going to improving agriculture and nutrition in developing countries has also fallen. This paper investigates the reasons for the declining commitment of donors to these areas and whether this can...

This paper examines the implications of the GATT Uruguay Round agreement in December 1993 for the Irish Economy, focusing in particular on output and employment effects. The main channels by which the GATT agreement will make its influence felt are first identified. Broad estimates of the output...

Structural change in six Irish farming enterprise sectors is projected into the future using the Krenz (1964) modified version of the Markov Chain technique. In this paper, the application of the technique is based on the assumption that all those forces that influenced agricultural structural...

An examination of ERM parities demonstrates that several currencies were misaligned due to disparate performance regarding inflation. Overvalued currencies partly explain the existence of economic imbalances, such as large fiscal and current account defecits and high unemployment. These...

This paper uses micro-data to examine the relationship between R&D activity and employment growth. The R&D and employment data used are drawn from a survey of the Irish manufacturing sector undertaken by Forfás, the policy and advisory board for industrial development in Ireland. By...

From its inception in the late 1940s, Irish industrial policy has attempted to disperse industrial plants across regions, thereby avoiding the problem of rural-urban migration experienced by many developing countries. Analysing a large sample of companies which established in Ireland in the...

This paper looks at the arguments for and against admission charges to national museums and provides some new evidence relating to the effects of charges. This debate is set in the context of the policy objective of access: the vast majority of the population do not attend national museums and...

This paper attempts to apply some simple economic analysis to a single national cultural institution, namely the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The first point made is that the Abbey operates within an active and fairly large theatre market in Dublin. Second, it is seen that the Abbey accounts for...