How Governments Retrench In Crisis: The Case of Ireland

Niamh Hardiman and Muiris MacCarthaigh
Additional contact information
Muiris MacCarthaigh: School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, Queens University Belfast

No 201315, Working Papers from Geary Institute, University College Dublin

Abstract: The Irish experience of fiscal retrenchment under crisis conditions poses new questions of governance, the evolving answers to which are likely to involve importance changes in the state’s organizational profile and in its policy competences. The government is required to formulate and implement extremely tough choices, particularly since Ireland entered an EU-IMF loan programme in November 2010. Yet government does retain some policy discretion in the priorities it adopts in the composition of budget adjustment and in the distributive impact of cuts. This paper sets out to explore where the adjustments have been made through examination both of the composition of budgets and of the organizational configuration of state institutions, and it analyses how these outcomes can be accounted for. The paper draws upon a new official database setting out a detailed compositional analysis of Irish public spending between 2008 and 2012, and upon the Irish State Administration Database (http://isad.ie) through which the organizational aspects of the state's policy capacity can be analysed.

Keywords: Ireland; Retrenchment; Public Administration; fiscal politics; economic crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H40 H61 H83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2013-09-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp201315.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucd:wpaper:201315

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Geary Institute, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Geary Tech ().