Options
Durkan, Joe
Preferred name
Durkan, Joe
Official Name
Durkan, Joe
Research Output
Now showing 1 - 10 of 34
- PublicationThe financing of healthcare in IrelandIt is an interesting aspect of the current debate with regard to healthcare in developed countries that the discussion starts with the finance of healthcare. What makes it interesting is that, with the exception of the US, healthcare is predominantly financed by government through a combination of a social welfare contribution and general taxation. There is some private financing through private insurance, but tax benefits for insurance and the universality attaching to most public systems effectively means that the government is financing health expenditure. In almost no other area of Government expenditure would we be considering the question of financing as financing is simply a function of taxation. The question of financing healthcare is thus a deeper one than simply that of financing and owes its origin to the rapid growth of expenditure on healthcare over the past 30 years, and the realisation that as population ages, claims on resources will increase over the next 30 years. the finance of healthcare is in fact a topic which is not really about finance, but about the means that can be used to control expenditure to ensure that taxes do not have to be raised. This paper examines the causes of the growth in healthcare expenditure in Ireland and, with the framework developed there, discusses measures designed to control expenditure.
456 - PublicationStructural and cohesion funds : background and some issuesThe European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF), and the guidance element of the European Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF) associated with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) constitute the Structural Funds of the European Community. Each of these Funds was begun separately and was designed to meet particular needs. For example, the Regional Fund was originally designed to mitigate the effect on regions of the Community of existing inequalities by region, adverse effects resulting from the operation of the Rome Treaty, and a natural tendency to centralisation and the effects this has on the periphery, while the Guidance section of the European Guidance and Guarantee Fund was focused on structural improvement in farming. The Act establishing the Single Market (the Single European Act) required that these funds be reorganised to become more effective. The 1988 Community budget settlement agreed that the ERDF and the ESF should increase, with the level of spending in 1993 double that of 1987, and with a concentration of spending in poorer regions. This was taken further in 1989 when Heads of State and Government, taking not only the ERDF and ESF but the EAGGF (Guidance Section) and the European Investment Bank (EIB), established the Community Support Framework (CSF) - namely the set of reorganised Structural Funds, designed, as the name implies, to support development in areas whose own resources were inadequate to reduce inequalities between regions within the EC. The issue of inequalities between regions and countries within the EC has been the subject of much theoretical debate - Krugman's annexe in the Padoa-Schioppa report remains the clearest statement of the issues. There has been much less discussion of the numbers and what lies behind them.
138 - PublicationTEAM and Irish Steel : an application of the declining high-wage industries literatureSince wage stickiness generates unemployment or intersectoral labour transfer in excess of that associated with a flexible-wage adjustment process, it is frequently argued that declining industries should be subsidised to some extent to replicate the behaviour of undistorted economies. We discuss three arguments against this "traditional" viewpoint, and find that each applies in the cases of Irish Steel and Team Aer Lingus. Intervention, we find, far from alleviating the competitiveness problems that these sectors face, actually worsens them.
120