If you cut off the head of a chicken, it can still run a good 20 paces around the farmyard before falling down dead. It is a sight only for those with strong stomachs. Feathers wave frenetically and legs accelerate, as if the chicken is making the most of its last seconds of life before the last of its blood flows from the neck. Aimless, lopsided and unsustainable, our economy needs remedial action now, writes Marc Coleman, Economics Editor
These days, the Irish economy is no sight for the faint-hearted. If the speed of its movement is fascinating, its direction is unsettling, its sustainability in question. On Tuesday the Government published Exchequer returns showing the Government's tax take for the first half of this year.
Compared with the same period of 2005, overall returns are up by 13 per cent. But for some revenue categories growth is not simply strong, it is absolutely crazy. Capital acquisition tax receipts rose by 31 per cent over the same period of comparison, stamp duties by 41 per cent and capital gains tax revenues by 59 per cent.
The gyrations have become more extreme towards the end of this half-year period. In June stamp duties were growing by 53 per cent year on year, while capital gains taxes were growing by an astronomical 133 per cent. But VAT and corporation tax receipts were down, by 9 and 27 per cent respectively.
Income taxes rose by 6 per cent but this is less than expected given record job creation in the economy.
The dark underside of tax revenue growth lies in house price inflation, which has risen from a modest 5 per cent last summer to around 14 per cent in May, truly frightening for young house buyers.
The economic consequence of house price growth is also frightening.
Inflation has also risen, from 2.5 per cent in December to 3.9 per cent in May. With every month that passes, the economy is resembling less a Celtic Tiger and more a headless chicken. Its forward motion may be fast. But it is also aimless, lopsided and unsustainable. Competitiveness, that precious lifeblood of our economy, is draining away. Galway firm APW this week confirmed 40 layoffs at its Galway plant, just one of several recent examples of firms finding Ireland's high cost environment impossible to work with.
The US Chamber of Commerce recently published a survey of its members operating here, in which 43 per cent of them warned about how Ireland's rising cost base - particularly the cost of housing - was undermining Ireland's attractiveness as a place to invest.
With private sector credit expanding at an extra €60 billion in liquidity - a third of a year's total economic output being pumped into the economy every year - it's no wonder that employment is expanding by 90,000 people a year, nor that the economy is growing at 5 per cent. However, the quality of growth should not be confused with its quantity. Strong rates of jobs growth in construction and the public sector are dependent on ever-rising debt and a rising tax burden.
This makes them unsustainable and undesirable as a source of jobs growth, when compared with the traded sectors of the economy. Those sectors, mainly manufacturing and tourism, are now negative contributors to growth.
Tellingly, foreign direct investment flows from foreign firms turned negative in 2005, according to recent statistics from the OECD. In more traditional and indigenously owned sectors of manufacturing, we are running a trade deficit. The same is true of the tourism sector, with Irish tourists now spending more abroad than foreign tourists spend in Ireland, despite the latter being more numerous.
Outside of the EMU these trends would self-correct. Our Central Bank would years ago have raised interest rates to levels far higher than now to cool off our property market and moderate inflation generally.
Instead our interest rates have been held around 3 per cent lower than would be normally considered appropriate. While positive in the short term, excessively low interest rates can lead to over-investment in property, creating a bubble in its turn.
Who can say whether Ireland's housing market is overvalued? The Central Bank has said it is, the IMF has said it is and the OECD has said it also.
Too polite to say so directly, the European Central Bank has hinted at it. Foreigners that they are, perhaps they simply lack our native genius for understanding property.
But what if - hard though it might be to contemplate - they are right and it is we who are wrong? Last summer the OECD calculated that our house prices were 15 per cent overvalued. Having grown a further 15 per cent since then, that calculation would imply that they are around 25 per cent overvalued now (at least a third of the subsequent growth in prices being justified by higher incomes).
This brings us back to the subject of this week's revenue figures. The role of the property market developments in driving revenue growth goes beyond the obvious. As well as stamp duties and capital gains taxes, income tax returns have depended on employment growth in the construction sector for what meagre strength they have mustered in the year (some 250,000 workers now work in the construction sector, far above long-term historical average levels).
Corporation tax receipts have benefited from healthy profits in a host of other businesses exposed to the construction sector. The extent to which the Government's financial position depends on construction could now be very great indeed. If what has gone up comes down, that position could deteriorate rapidly.
The Government was elected in 2002 on a tide of economic optimism, generated in no small part by the view that strong Exchequer revenues - published in the run-up to the next election - were proof of a strong economy.
After the election those Exchequer revenues deteriorated rapidly. The resultant hole in the Government's finances was only plugged by unpopular cutbacks in capital spending and inflationary increases in indirect taxation, measures for which the Government reaped a bitter harvest in the 2004 local elections.
Four years later, Exchequer revenue strength is even more illusory than before and, if the OECD is indeed right, any subsequent deterioration will be more severe than in 2002. So will the measures needed to balance the Government's books. And so will the political consequences of not having taken pre-emptive remedial action now.