DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES Governing the Economy

This paper is an output of the Governance Research Programme at UCD Geary Institute, funded by PRTLI 3. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Geary Institute. All errors and omissions remain those of the author. 1Introduction Explanation for Ireland’s impressive economic performance in the 1990s, continuing though at a lower level into the 2000s, has often been presented as if it were mainly a matter of sorting out the technical economic issues. The outcomes of rebalancing the public finances, or freeing economic incentives through tax liberalization, or ensuring appropriate tax incentives to attract mobile inward capital investment, have attracted most attention; so also have ‘lucky ’ factors such as the availability of a ready supply of skilled labour at reasonable costs (Barry 1999; Nolan et al. 2000). Indeed, given these conditions, some observers have held that there is nothing particularly unusual in the Irish experience, and that getting the economic fundamentals right was bound to produce just the sort of ‘catch-up ’ growth we have actually seen (Honohan and Wals