Links. Meat, weights, Ireland, Spain. And a man needs a hobby.

1) Peak meat?

2) Time series economics and econometrics is the science of complicated moving averages. It matters a lot which weights are used. Don’t use present day (relative) prices to estimate past economic performance. Or the other way around, as Leandro Prados de las Escosura shows. But where does the past stop and the present begin?

3) It’s starting to dawn upon the Irish what really happened – they did not bail our their banks but foreign creditors.

4) This made the ECB very happy  

5) Crecimiento con equidad. ILO proposals to boost job growth in Spain (also in english). Were spanish wages increasing too fast, before 2008? According to the ILO (and remember that there was a massive influx of foreign workers into Spain in these years):

‘nominal wage growth above the EU-17 average in the precrisis period in Spain did not reflect labour market institutional inefficiencies or a disproportionate increase in workers’ bargaining power, but was actually a reflection of a general euro appreciation and country-specific macroeconomic imbalances. Real wage growth was, in fact, negative in Spain between 2000 and 2007 – equal to -0.9 per cent against an EU-17 average of -0.6 per cent.’

Considering the influence of construction boom and (low) wages in construction on the averages it might have been better to look at sectoral data. The ILO wants the labour market to work better by introducing more, not less, dialogue and collective bargaining, As wages levels always are a social construct and not any kind of individual price, this makes of course a lot of sense.

6. IN 2013, turnover of the Spanish Mondragon cooperatives declined with 2% but net investments increased with 24% while employment increased with 0,1%. Increasing investment is of course the right way to act, in a severe crisis, in a micro as well as a macro perspective. Most companies however invest less, at the moment. Might the difference be due to the ardent wish of the members of the cooperatives to maintain their livelihoods, instead of the capital of the company?

7. A man needs a hobby.