Geary Institute Working Papers
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Browsing Geary Institute Working Papers by Author "Brazys, Samuel"
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- PublicationFrom the Great Lakes to the Great Rift Valley: Does Strategic Economic Policy Explain the 2009 Malawi Election?(University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2014-02-28)
; ; Ethno-regional voting cleavages have featured in a number of sub-Saharan African states during the third wave of democratization following the end of the Cold War.While the causes and consequences of these cleavages are well studied, there have been surprisingly few attempts to understand how strategies of pan-ethnic or pan-regional coalition building based on distributive economic policies could be employed to secure national electoral coalitions. In this paper we examine if in the 2009 Malawian parliamentary elections the newly-formed national party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), led by the President Binguwa Mutharika used its incumbent position to promote an economic policy based on food security in order to overcome traditional ethno-regional voting patterns and win a nationwide electoral majority. After presenting a formal model of a optimal allocation of an economic resource to overcome ethnic bias and induce vote-switching, we use district-level data in a system of equations to analyze if strategic allocation within the national fertilizer subsidy program contributed to the nation-wide electoral victory of the DPP.598 - PublicationFrom Tiger to PIIGS: Ireland and the use of heuristics in comparative political economyAcronyms for groups of countries provide an often useful shorthand to capture emergent similarities, and terms such as PIIGS, BRICs and LDCs pervade the lexicon of international and comparative political economy. But they can also lead to misleading narratives, since the grounds for use of these terms as heuristic devices are usually not well elaborated. This can become problematic when the use of such heuristics drives market responses in areas such as risk perception and changes in interest rates. In this paper we look at the narrative construction of the group of countries that has been grouped as ‘PIIGS’ (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain). We examine the process whereby the group came into being, trace how Ireland became a member of this grouping, and assess the merits of classifying these countries together. Our contention is that the repetition of the acronym in public debate shaped the behaviour of market actors toward these countries. We find evidence of Granger causality, such that increased media usage of the term ‘PIIGS’ is followed by converging interest rate correlations between Ireland and the other PIIGS, compared to the interest rate correlations between Ireland and the ‘northern’ Eurozone economies. We argue that this is a pointer toward the independent effect of perceptions and discourse over economic fundamentals. We conclude with more general thoughts and cautions on the use of heuristics in comparative political economy.
522 - PublicationThese Little PIIGS Went to Market: Enterprise Policy and Divergent Recovery in European PeripheryThe 2008 financial crisis hit few places harder than the European periphery, where five states, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, came to be collectively known as the 'PIIGS'. Yet while the PIIGS experienced a similar adjustment to the crisis, the recoveries have shown significant divergence. Ireland, in particular, has stood out as a beacon of growth, not only in the PIIGS but in all of Europe. We challenge the prevailing narrative that Ireland’s exemplary performance is due to its early and ardent adaptation of fiscal 'austerity' measures. Instead we argue that Ireland’s path dependent, state-led, 'enterprise policy' situated Ireland to be a recipient of foreign direct investment driven by the low borrowing costs, brought on by the United States' Quantitative Easing (QE) programs. Using quantitative and qualitative investigation we find evidence that the latent enterprise policy mechanism – operationalized via the impact of QE on investment projects into Ireland (vis-à-vis the other PIIGS) - rather than increased wage competitiveness via austerity, accounts for Ireland’s recovery from the crisis.
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