“Policy Scepticism†and the Impact of Northern Irish Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) on their Host Region: Accounting for Regional Budget Constraints

Kristinn Hermannsson, Katerina Lisenkova, Peter McGregor and John Swales ()

No 1025, Working Papers from University of Strathclyde Business School, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper replicates the analysis of Scottish HEIs in Hermannsson et al (2010b) for the case of Northern Ireland. The motivation is to provide a self-contained analysis that is readily accessible by those whose primary concern is with the regional impacts of Northern Irish HEIs. A comparative analysis will follow in due course. A “policy scepticism†has emerged that challenges the results of conventional regional HEI impact analyses. This denial of the importance of the expenditure impacts of HEIs appears to be based on a belief in either a binding regional resource constraint or a regional public sector budget constraint. In this paper we provide a systematic critique of this policy scepticism. However, while rejecting the extreme form of policy scepticism, we argue that it is crucial to recognise the importance of the publicsector expenditure constraints that are binding under devolution. We show how conventional impact analyses can be augmented to accommodate regional public sector budget constaints. While our results suggest that conventional impact studies overestimate the expenditure impacts of HEIs, they also demonstrate that the policy scepticism that treats these expenditure effects as irrelevant neglects some key aspects of HEIs, in particular their export intensity.

Keywords: Higher Education Institutions; Input-Output; Northern-Ireland; Impact study; Multipliers; Devolution; public budget constraint. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I23 R15 R51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2010-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-geo and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:str:wpaper:1025

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