Corporation Tax motors along

Corporation Tax receipts continue to pour in for the Exchequer. 2023 seems set to extend the decade long run of each year exceeding the previous year – though the gap to last year has narrowed.

In July, CT receipts for 2023 were running about €1.5 billion ahead of those for 2022.  August and September weren’t as strong as last year reducing the gap to €600 million. 

August seems to have been affected by some firm-specific idiosyncrasies that will wash out, while there is little to be taken from the September figure.  September is month T+9 for firms with a December year-end and is when they file their tax return and make their final tax payment for the previous year.

On a 12-month basis, CT receipts seem to have plateaued around €24 billion which is an extraordinary amount.

Which means that the growth of the 12-month sum has also eased considerably.

Optimism for the remainder of 2023 is mainly due to the strength seen in June. Companies with December year ends pay the bulk of the CT in June and November (corresponding to month 6 and month 11 of their financial year).

The €4.2 billion collected in June of this year points to November receipts of around €6 billion, which would be €1 billion more than the same month last year.

And with the rate for large companies set to rise to 15 per cent and the exhaustion of capital allowances for onshored intangible assets the risks to forecasts would seem to be on the upside.

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Population Projections

Almost all of the work the CSO does is retrospective – collect data on what has already happened.  There is one area where part of the work undertaken is forward looking – demographics.

After every Census the CSO use a set of fertility, mortality and migration scenarios to project out the country’s population by several decades.  These are not forecasts; merely projections of what might happen under different scenarios.  The most set available are those undertaken following Census 2016 and they give projections out to 2051.

The projections were based on three scenarios of net inward migration:

• M1: net inward migration of 30,000 per annum
• M2: net inward migration of 20,000 per annum
• M3: net inward migration of 10,000 per annum

and two fertility scenarios:

• F1: fertility rate remains at 2016  level of 1.8
• F2: fertility rate declines from 1.8 to 1.6 by 2031 and stable thereafter

When combined, the scenarios give six projections with the two fertility scenarios used for each of the three migration scenarios.

We have now passed the subsequent census and can compare the projections to the actual outturn of recent years.  Obviously, there are things the projections, which were published in June 2018, could not be expected to account for such as COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Anyway, here are the six projections and the actual outturns seen.

Reality was outstripping the projections even before they were published.  Of course, this reality was not confirmed at the time and only fully revealed with the results of Census 2022.  The latest population figure for 2018 (4.885 million) is 20,000 more than the highest projection for that year (M1F1 4.865 million).

For 2020, (with the figures covering April of each year) the gap between the actual population (5.029 million) and the highest projection (4.988 million) was 42,000.  The gap to the lowest projection for 2020 (M3F2 4.904 million) was 126,000. And that is for a time before COVID or Ukraine could have any impact.

For 2023, just five years after the projections were published and the gaps now range from 117,000 to 274,000.  Now clearly, the impact of those fleeing the war has impacted that but there were already significant, and growing gaps, by 2018.  Under the lowest projection (M3F2), the actual population of 2023 was not due to be reached until 2034.

We can compare the migration scenarios set out in the projections to what has actually happened since 2016.

• 2017: +39,200
• 2018: +44,400
• 2019: +44,000
• 2020: +44,700
• 2021: +21,800
• 2022: +51,700
• 2023: +77,600

Hindsight is 20/20 vision and all that, but right off the bat it can be seen that even the highest scenario of +30,000 per annum was significantly exceeded.  More recent years have been impacted by COVID19 and Ukraine.

Are such population projections important?  They are to the extent that they impact policy.  Our current National Planning Framework was published in 2018.  The baseline projection on which this was based was for the population to reach 5.7 million in 2040, just 400,000 more than the 2023 population. The NPF stresses the need for plans to be flexible and the ability to adapt for higher population outturns.  We are already there.

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Wages and Salaries in the Labour Costs of the EU14

Eurostat produce a quarterly labour cost index. A number of sub-components are also produced. Here is the ‘wages and salaries’ component for the Business Economies (NACE B to N) of the EU14 (the previous EU15 now excluding the UK) with Q1 2013 set equal to 100.

All the selected countries have seen nominal hourly wage growth over the period ranging from 43 per cent in Austria to 13 per cent in Italy.  Ireland is second-ranked with an increase of 33 per cent over the period, along with Germany.

Next, we look at the annual growth rates with a four-quarter trailing moving average taken to smooth out some of the volatility in the series.

We seen that annual nominal hourly wage growth in Ireland is fairly stable over the past few years, averaging close to 4 per cent since 2018. This would enough to be Ireland, top of the group in 2019 and again briefly in 2020 but accelerations in many countries has seen Ireland’s relative position drop towards the bottom and is now close to Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Of course, nominal changes are just changes in numbers. We want to assess real changes, i,.e. changes in the purchasing power of wages. To do that we must adjust for changes in the price level. We will do that with Eurostat’s Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP).  Here it ins since 2014, with the start of that year set equal to 100.

We can see that the HICP for Ireland was remarkably stably through the most of the period shown. In the HICP for Q4 2020 was little changed from what it has been in Q1 2014, i.e. there was no inflation over the period.  This certainly changed in 2021.  In the last couple of years, prices have risen by around 20 per cent in most of the selected countries. However, the reasons for the inflation have largely been common the relative ranking is largely unchanged.

Compared to Q1 2014, Ireland’s HICP was 18 per cent higher in Q2 of this year. This was the third-lowest increase in the EU14 with Greece and Denmark seeing smaller increases.  The largest increase was in Austria where the HICP was over 30 per cent higher compared to its level in 2014.

Inflation rates are coming down. The use of a four-quarter moving average understates the extent of the recent falls in inflation rates.

Our purpose is to adjust the nominal wage growth rates for inflation. We see that Austria has both the highest nominal wage growth since 2014 (43 per cent) but also the highest price level increases over the same period (HICP +32% since 2014).  Here we combine both Eurostat datasets to get an index of real, i.e. inflation-adjusted, hourly wages.

Combining wage growth and HICP inflation sees the green line move to the top, but the last few years have seen a steep decline. From 2013 to the end of 2020, real wage growth is put at +20 per cent for Ireland, around five percentages points higher than any of the other selected countries. 

During 2021 and 2022, real wages declined as the rate of inflation outpaced the growth of nominal wages.  In recent quarters they have moved closer together and real wages have been stable in Ireland in 2023 though are now only +12 per cent compared to the start of 2013. Much of the gains made up to 2021 have been reversed.  Real hourly wages in Ireland are now back to where they were in 2019.

To conclude here are the latest real annual growth rates for hourly wages:

As shown by the levels, Ireland is back close to zero. Nominal hourly wages are up close to 4.5 per cent and the HICP is around five per cent higher than it was last year.

To better see the trends for individual countries we will use a four-quarter moving average to smooth out some of the volatility.

Ireland has ground to make up to get back to the top spot it held in the pre-COVID years.

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The past is a foreign country

We all like looking to the past for evidence and pointers to help understand the present.  A deterioration in the current of the balance of payments has been such a pointer for instances of economic mismanagement in Ireland. 

Following Honohan and Walsh (2002) we can see that in the last fifty years the Irish economy has gone through two loops of:

1. Imbalances building up via that deterioration of the current account,
2. Weaknesses being exposed and resulting in a shooting up of the unemployment rate,
3. A period of painful readjustment before,
4. Recoveries took hold.

These loops from 1975 to 1998 and from 2003 to 2018 are shown below using the unemployment rate (vertical axis) and the current account (horizontal axis).

The thing is though, these are not really useful for assessment the current position of the Irish economy.  2022 saw Ireland with an average unemployment rate of around 4.5 per cent while the surplus on the modified current account of the balance of payments (CA*) was equivalent to around 7.5 per cent of modified gross national income (GNI*). 

The economy had reached a near identical position in 2019 but then COVID19 reared its head.  Relative to the economic history of the State since its foundation, it is an unprecedented position: near full employment and large balance of payments surpluses. From a policy perspective, the unemployment rate could be a bigger constraint to achieving priorities. Sure, we should not forget the mistakes of the past, but they do things differently there.

Addendum: It is somewhat nonsensical but a further way of looking at it is to consider the sum of the unemployment rate and the current account deficit (thus a deficit is represented by a positive number).  This shows:

Again, we can see the imbalances building up after 1975 and 2003.  But the main thing is to highlight just how far 2022 is from even those starting points.  We know things can change quickly but we should also recognise where we are now is pretty much unprecedented.

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Still Waiting for US GDP to be Revised Up

We have been tracking the impact in Ireland’s national accounts of the structures of US MNCs for some time.  In recent years, many of those structures have changed leading to changes in several key metrics in Ireland such as the stock of intangible assets and the destination of outbound royalty payments. 

As a result of the changes in the destination of royalty payments we have been expecting revisions to US GDP.  See previous post here with an even earlier one here. 

The previous post goes through the impact of the changes introduced by Google and Facebook in 2020 when they ended their use of “double-irish” type structures.  We won’t repeat that detail here but will highlighted the updated position of the mismatch between the Balance of Payments figures for Ireland and the U.S.

One point we will reiterate is the changed nature of outbound royalty payments from Ireland.

Obviously the first thing to notice is the scale. These outbound payments are enormous. In the 12 months to the end of March they came to almost €140 billion.  What the chart also shows is the change in the destination of these royalties.

Up to 2020, most of the royalty payments from Ireland ended up in offshore financial centres such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, now the bulk of them are going to the US.  The non-US portion is still quite significant (€34 billion in the year to March) but due to suppressed data we don’t have direct insight into the destination of these. It looks like most of these payments are going to The Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore (which would also be among the potential locations for US MNCs to locate their IP). 

Anyway our interest here is in the royalty payments from Ireland to the U.S. and these now exceed €100 billion in annual terms.

To see the mismatch (and avoid any classification issues) here are the balance of payments figures for services trade between Ireland and the US. What is shows are Eurostat figures for services imports by Ireland from the US and BEA figures for service exports from the US to Ireland. In principle these should correspond. Is that what we see? Hmmmm, no.

There is a few chart crimes going on there, most notable that the series are in different currencies, but the conversion from dollars to euro has nothing to do with the gap that has emerged since 2020 (and would actually only increase it).

We can see that Balance of Payments data on this side of the Atlantic is showing that, in 2022,  Ireland had almost $200 billion of services exports from the US.  Over on the other side of the pond, their Balance of Payments data shows that the US $85 billion of service exports to Ireland.  And as noted above, in principle these should be the same.

The chart is for all services so it cannot be a classification issue – unless the payments are accounted for by the BEA as goods exports or primary income, both of which are unlikely.

We cannot immediately assume that there is a GDP effect.  The trade could be in IP assets which, initially at least, would be GDP neutral.  There would be disinvestment (-) and exports (+) on the US side with investment (+) and imports (-) on the Irish side. 

But as might be expected given the contents of the post it is mainly a story of royalties.  Here are the royalties components from Eurostat and the BEA of the above overall services trade figures.

Mind the gap! Ireland reporting €102 billion of royalty imports from the US in Eurostat’s data becomes the US reporting just $16 billion of royalty exports to Ireland in the BEA’s data.  And as we started by looking at total services this cannot be explained by classification issues.  We have a difference of something approaching €90 billion.

For what it is worth, it can be noting that the revision to Ireland’s national accounts for 2015 (the 26% growth rate and all that) was of the order of €40 billion.  Some US commentators should perhaps be wary of skeletons in their own closets.

However, as the previous post goes through the likely GDP impact would not be the full difference shown above as a share of the royalty payments that previously went from Ireland to the like of Bermuda did subsequently flow on to the US as payments for R&D services exports.

Statements from Google and Facebook have confirmed that they are now licensing their technology directly from the US rather than offshore locations.  This should have led to a reduction in US R&D service exports and an increase in US royalty exports. 

The rise in royalty exports would be larger (reflecting the fall in profit reported in Bermuda etc.). It is possible there could be a GDP impact of $40-50 billion for 2022 – equivalent to around 0.2% of US GDP.  Not exactly headline grabbing.

Why the gap?

In part, the answer to this apparent puzzle comes down to scale. In a small economy like Ireland, the activities of companies such as Google and Facebook are relatively enormous. The Large Cases Unit (LCU) in the CSO will be in regular contact with these companies for filing updates and notice of any significant changes.  For an economy of the scale of the US, such companies are simply are not as important in and of themselves when it comes to the BEA’s production of their National and International Accounts.

In the BEA’s case they undertake “benchmark surveys” every few years of a wide number of market participants to get a deep understanding of what is going on.  Between these comprehensive “benchmark surveys” the BEA do quarterly surveys of a much smaller sample and extrapolate the data they publish from those.

The most recent benchmark survey for Transactions in Selected Services and Intellectual Property with Foreign Persons was carried out for 2017.  The data was collected in 2018 with the results published in 2019.  As it so happens, the BEA are in the process of collecting data for the latest such survey.  In this instance the benchmark year is 2022 with the data collected in 2023 and results not due until sometime in 2024.

So it looks like the significant changes implemented by US MNCs operating in Ireland fell in the middle of the gap between the BEA’s benchmark surveys that would have picked them up.  They were too early for the survey for 2017 and while they should be picked up by the ongoing survey for 2022 the results won’t be pulled together and incorporated in the BEA’s International Accounts until 2024.  It seems our wait for US GDP to be revised up will be going on for a while yet.

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