Economy of the Republic of Ireland

CycleØ opens new Irish branch to further expand biomethane platform

Retrieved on: 
Monday, February 6, 2023

LONDON and DUBLIN, Feb. 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- CycleØ, whose technologies capture, process and upgrade naturally occurring methane gas produced principally by the agri-food and livestock industries, today announced the opening of a new branch in Ireland. The Company has appointed James Manley as Country Manager of Ireland and will begin making significant investments across the country to support the Irish government's objective to exponentially increase the country's biomethane production from its current nascent levels.

Key Points: 
  • "I'm very excited to announce the opening of our Irish branch, headed up by James who has more than 20 years of comprehensive experience operating across the agricultural sector," said CycleØ CEO, Laurence Molke.
  • "We're on a mission to reduce GHG emissions now and help meet the revised RePowerEU target of producing 35 bcm of biomethane by 2030.
  • Investing in Ireland's new biomethane sector is another step towards reaching those goals."
  • As of 2021, there were just a handful of biomethane plants operating in Ireland, —compared to 365 in France and 238 in Germany.

CycleØ opens new Irish branch to further expand biomethane platform

Retrieved on: 
Monday, February 6, 2023

LONDON and DUBLIN, Feb. 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- CycleØ, whose technologies capture, process and upgrade naturally occurring methane gas produced principally by the agri-food and livestock industries, today announced the opening of a new branch in Ireland. The Company has appointed James Manley as Country Manager of Ireland and will begin making significant investments across the country to support the Irish government's objective to exponentially increase the country's biomethane production from its current nascent levels.

Key Points: 
  • "I'm very excited to announce the opening of our Irish branch, headed up by James who has more than 20 years of comprehensive experience operating across the agricultural sector," said CycleØ CEO, Laurence Molke.
  • "We're on a mission to reduce GHG emissions now and help meet the revised RePowerEU target of producing 35 bcm of biomethane by 2030.
  • Investing in Ireland's new biomethane sector is another step towards reaching those goals."
  • As of 2021, there were just a handful of biomethane plants operating in Ireland, —compared to 365 in France and 238 in Germany.

Assure Leads Industry-Wide Surge in SPV Deals, Closing more than 1,000 SPV Deals in First Half of 2021

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Assure announced today that in June 2021, the company surpassed 1,000 SPV (special purpose vehicle) deals closed for 2021.

Key Points: 
  • Assure announced today that in June 2021, the company surpassed 1,000 SPV (special purpose vehicle) deals closed for 2021.
  • To date, Assure has helped entrepreneurial investors establish and manage more than 10 times as many SPVs as its nearest rival.
  • Assure closed a daily average of 1.9 SPV deals in the first six months of 2020, and 2.7 per day for all of 2020.
  • For the first six months of 2021, Assures daily average of SPV deals closed has jumped to 5.7.

ESMA registers European DataWarehouse GmbH and SecRep B.V. as Securitisation Repositories

Retrieved on: 
Friday, June 25, 2021

25 June 2021

Key Points: 
  • 25 June 2021

    Press Releases

    Securitisation

    The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has approved the registrations of the first two securitisation repositories (SRs) under the Securitisation Regulation (SECR).

  • The following entities are registered as SRs for the European Union (EU):

    Anneli Tuominen, Interim Chair, said:

    The registration of the first securitisation repositories marks the final step in the implementation of the securitisation transparency regime.

  • The securitisation repositories will now start receiving, verifying, and distributing standardised data and information to investors as well as to EU and national authorities.
  • Reporting to Securitisation Repositories to start on 30 June 2021

    The registered SRs can be used by reporting entities to fulfil their obligations under SECR.

How Digital Strategy Agency Kings Crest Global Grew Despite The Pandemic

Retrieved on: 
Monday, June 14, 2021

But the founders of Kings Crest Global weren't to know that their first year of operation would coincide with such unprecedented shifts to the business landscape.

Key Points: 
  • But the founders of Kings Crest Global weren't to know that their first year of operation would coincide with such unprecedented shifts to the business landscape.
  • Over the last two years, Kings Crest Global has built a vibrant international team and client base, despite a rapidly-changing, unpredictable environment.
  • For those curious to learn how, the team at Kings Crest have identified the key elements of their journey that enabled them to successfully grow through the pandemic.
  • The Kings Crest Global team believes in helping other people to make the world a better place.

First-time homeowners get a boost as Tembo helps generation rent buy with the power of family lending

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, June 9, 2021

- Over 70% of its users to date were unable to get a mortgage until they used Tembo.

Key Points: 
  • - Over 70% of its users to date were unable to get a mortgage until they used Tembo.
  • Tembo offers a range of family deposit boost and guarantor products which allow first-time buyers to lean on their loved ones to help them onto the property ladder.
  • After being unlocked from the family property, the 'boost' amount is added to the homebuyer's deposit to help them buy their first home.
  • Tembo is a London based FinTech on a mission to transform consumer lending through the power of family.

Aquis Stock Exchange: Application for admission update

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, May 27, 2021

Instead, Computershare Investor Services Plc ("Depositary"), acting as depositary, will issue Depositary Interests in respect of the underlying Common Shares.

Key Points: 
  • Instead, Computershare Investor Services Plc ("Depositary"), acting as depositary, will issue Depositary Interests in respect of the underlying Common Shares.
  • The Depositary Interests will be independent securities constituted under English law which may be held and transferred through CREST.
  • Application is being made for the Depositary Interests in respect of the underlying Common Shares to be admitted to CREST with effect from Admission.
  • In respect of an update to a prior application announcement, the date of the original announcement should also be disclosed as follows:
    UPDATE TO A PRIOR APPLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT RELEASED ON:
    Dissemination of a CORPORATE NEWS, transmitted by EQS Group.

Enterprise Ireland marking St. Patrick's Day with over 50 virtual trade events across the world and launch of international Green Innovation campaign

Retrieved on: 
Monday, March 15, 2021

DUBLIN, March 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As the world turns green for St. Patrick's Day (17th March), Enterprise Ireland, the Irish Government's trade and innovation agency and the number one VC in the world, today launched a green innovation international campaign 'Ready for a Green Future'.

Key Points: 
  • DUBLIN, March 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As the world turns green for St. Patrick's Day (17th March), Enterprise Ireland, the Irish Government's trade and innovation agency and the number one VC in the world, today launched a green innovation international campaign 'Ready for a Green Future'.
  • The trade agency will host over 50 virtual trade events across the world to engage international partners and support the growth of Irish enterprise internationally.
  • Launching the campaign today, Leo Varadkar, Ireland's Deputy Prime Minister, Tnaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment said:"St Patrick's Day is the day the world turns green as we come together to celebrate our national holiday.
  • It's also a great opportunity to showcase Ireland's green innovators and the positive contribution they are making to industries across the world.

UrbanGold Options Stargold to Crest Resources

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Upon completion of the Option, UrbanGold will transfer a 100% stake in the Claims to Crest.

Key Points: 
  • Upon completion of the Option, UrbanGold will transfer a 100% stake in the Claims to Crest.
  • At that time, Crest will grant a royalty to UrbanGold equal to 1% of the NSR on the Claims that are not subject to the Existing Royalty.
  • Crest Resources Inc. is a British Columbia company listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol CRES.
  • UrbanGold does not undertake to update any forward-looking information except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

The digital economy and the euro area

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, January 7, 2021

Prepared by Robert Anderton, Valerie Jarvis, Vincent Labhard, Filippos Petroulakis, Ieva Rubene and Lara Vivian1 IntroductionSome of the key effects of digitalisation relevant to monetary policy relate to output and productivity, labour markets, wages and prices.

Key Points: 


Prepared by Robert Anderton, Valerie Jarvis, Vincent Labhard, Filippos Petroulakis, Ieva Rubene and Lara Vivian

1 Introduction

    • Some of the key effects of digitalisation relevant to monetary policy relate to output and productivity, labour markets, wages and prices.
    • The impact of digitalisation on the economy is a function, inter alia, of national economic structure and economic policies, institutions and governance.
    • However, it is not clear whether digitalisation is going to deepen differences between countries or reduce them.
    • This article mainly summarises and updates the evidence on the euro area and the EU digital economy, including international comparisons.
    • [2] This article also takes a closer look at the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on the digital economy.
    • Since the start of the pandemic, both producers and consumers have become more accustomed to and more reliant on digital technologies.

2 The size and growth of the digital economy

    • The digital economy is smaller in the euro area and EU than in the United States, and the gap has not changed dramatically in the past few years.
    • Most euro area countries have much smaller value added from digital sectors (as a percentage of GDP) than the United States, with the euro area digital economy about two-thirds the size of that of the United States (see Chart 1).
    • In the United States, the digital service sector alone contributes as much as the entire digital economy in the euro area.
    • [3] For most countries in the euro area, the annual percentage point increase in the share of the digital economy has been less than 0.1, the same as in the United States, leaving the gap more or less unchanged.
    • The Digital Economy and Society Index has risen from below 40 in 2015 to above 60 in 2020, as shown in Chart 2.
    • [4] These differences in digital adoption across countries imply that the impacts of digitalisation may also differ across the euro area and EU countries.
    • Chart 2 Digital adoption in the euro area and EU economies (Digital Economy and Society Index)

3 Productivity and the supply side

    Productivity

      • The last two decades have seen a protracted slowdown in productivity across advanced economies.
      • Productivity growth in the euro area started to slow significantly in the mid-to-late 1990s, well before other advanced economies, but the slowdown eventually became widespread even before the financial crisis.
      • As such, ICT capital is complementary to a more complex set of other inputs and synthesising them efficiently can generate higher productivity returns from ICT investment.
      • [8] show that UK-based firms owned by US firms are more productive, owing to higher ICT-related productivity.
      • The productivity of frontier firms has, in fact, been growing rapidly, but laggard firms have been slow to catch up, suggesting bottlenecks in innovation diffusion (Andrews et al.[11]).
      • Schivardi and Schmitz[12] show that countries whose firms had adopted good management practices achieved much faster productivity growth than others in the 1995-2008 period (when ICT-driven productivity growth in the United States took off) than the previous decade.
      • [16] There are substantial differences between digital and non-digital companies in their productivity distribution and leadership persistence.
      • Using firm-level data for the big four euro area countries, the top panel in Chart 3 shows the relative productivity of digital, compared with non-digital, firms across the distribution.
      • Chart 3 Productivity distribution and leadership persistence (Germany, Spain, France and Italy)
      • There is evidence that ICTs contribution to productivity growth has declined across advanced economies.
      • While the euro area performed substantially worse than its peers in terms of productivity growth in the 1995-2004 period, over the past decade, productivity gains from ICT capital have been muted across North America as well as the euro area.
      • [18] Digitalisation, including more recently artificial intelligence and machine learning, is a form of general purpose technology (GPT) with wide-ranging impacts across the economy.
      • It is the combined effect of these three qualities that makes GPTs unique and leads to their singular productivity effects.
      • Investment in physical capital is lumpy, given adjustment costs, while the production of technology itself becomes more efficient over time.

    Supply side

      • [24] According to some estimates, between one-third (for the less digital economies) and two-thirds (for the more digital economies) of digital investments are in intangibles.
      • The term refers not only to the size and complexity of a dataset, but also to its corresponding analytics.
      • [25] As with intangible assets in general, big data can take very different forms and are often highly firm-specific, i.e.
      • not particularly valuable outside of the firm (an example of the sunk aspect of intangible assets).
      • [26] Big data can be collected through online platforms and service providers and can be processed and analysed to generate revenues in many ways, e.g.
      • The value of such data capital is difficult to estimate, but is potentially very large.
      • [27] Alternative sources of finance to traditional bank financing appear better suited to the financing of intangible investment, which is hard to collateralise.
      • Many digital technologies are also associated with substantial network effects, so early movers have a sizeable advantage and dominate their markets.
      • Box 1 Online platforms and the collaborative economy Prepared by Lara Vivian The collaborative or sharing economy relies on digital platforms to coordinate and supervise the matching between the supply and demand sides of the market.
      • According to estimates, although the size of online platforms has grown rapidly, their contribution to the economy remains relatively small.
      • [40] Although surveys and studies often rely on different definitions of platform employment, other studies confirm similar magnitudes and cross-country heterogeneity.

    4 Labour markets

      • This section reviews the effects of digitalisation on the labour market.
      • [43] From the early 1990s, labour markets in advanced economies started to polarise, whereby the share of low and high-skilled jobs increased at the expense of middle-skilled jobs.
      • While employment and wage premiums for high skills rose, there was also a substantial increase in the employment share of low-skilled labour, albeit not always necessarily accompanied by rising wages.
      • In this framework, RBTC automates some tasks and creates new ones, destroying some existing jobs and creating new ones in the process.
      • [47] The evolution of job polarisation by task content for selected European countries is shown in Chart 4.
      • [51] find that declines in average hours worked over recent decades across a selection of EU countries have exacerbated job polarisation.
      • [52] Chart 4 Evolution of the task content of the mean job in selected European countries (change in share of tasks)
      • A leading example of a modern automation technology with a high potential to displace labour is that of industrial robots.
      • Robots are currently primarily used to perform repetitive tasks in manufacturing and hence represent a prominent example of routine task replacement.
      • Graetz and Michaels[53] show that robots raise TFP and labour productivity in Europe with no significant effects on employment except for a small shift in favour of high-skilled workers.
      • Two EU countries Estonia and Sweden consistently top the digital employment charts.
      • [55] Sectors with higher digital intensity made substantial contributions to employment growth across advanced economies during the decade 2006-16 (see Chart A, left-hand panel).
      • The trends of those countries at the forefront of the digital transformation may hold lessons for others still in the catch-up phase.
      • How can labour markets still generate enough jobs after two centuries of incredible labour-saving technological advances?
      • Acemoglu and Restrepo[56] argue that technology has a reinstatement effect, which creates new tasks as it destroys others.
      • They argue for a reinterpretation of the relationship between technology and labour as a race between automation and new labour-intensive tasks, which reinstates labour and increases productivity.
      • At the same time, these mechanisms may lead to greater inequality in the labour market.
      • [57] In addition, the higher market power of large digital firms may also compress wages and be associated with a lower labour share.
      • Structural framework conditions, including both labour and product market policies, may need to be further adapted to fully reap the potential gains from digitalisation while maintaining inclusiveness.

    5 Digitalisation and consumer price inflation

      • Digitalisation is often associated with a negative impact on the price of some goods and services and on overall inflation.
      • online retail, effects on inflation as cost savings, higher price transparency, intensified competition, and productivity gains which are generally very difficult to disentangle empirically.
      • [63] Finally, it is important to distinguish the impact of digitalisation on price level from the rate of change, i.e.
      • inflation, and to examine if there is a bias in measuring inflation using the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) given the increasing importance of online retail for household consumption.

    The direct effects

      • The direct impact channel of digitalisation on consumer prices functions via the prices of digital products purchased by consumers.
      • Because such products are part of the HICP for the euro area and its member countries, this will have a direct impact on inflation as measured by this index.
      • Over the same period, the range of impacts for individual euro area countries was around 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points per year on average.
      • [65] Chart 5 ICT product contribution to headline HICP annual inflation rate across euro area countries (percentage points)
      • First, digital products in the consumer basket do not comprise only the four categories used for the reported index.
      • Many other goods and services are also exposed to ICT developments to various degrees.
      • Failure to appropriately incorporate the prices of such products in the HICP basket can lead to a bias (upward or downward) in the respective price indices.

    The indirect effects

      • The indirect impact channels of digitalisation operate via cost savings and higher competition owing to increased price transparency.
      • Considering e-commerce between businesses and consumers, the inflation-lowering impact of growing e-commerce occurs in two ways.
      • online sales require lower expenditures than maintaining shops), which both traditional and online retailers may pass on to consumers.
      • Second, e-commerce may lower prices (or constrain their increase following cost rises) because of higher transparency and intensified competition between suppliers.
      • Both effects can take place when the share of e-commerce retail in total retail trade is still low.
      • The extent to which the indirect effects described above have an impact on inflation partly depends on the prevalence of e-commerce in the euro area.
      • The empirical evidence on the effects of e-commerce penetration on inflation so far is scarce but points to a small negative effect.
      • [67] Overall, however, price-lowering impacts from a more intensified use of e-commerce, if there are any, will only last until the diffusion of e-commerce technologies through markets has levelled off.
      • [69] Changes in market power and digitalisation in general may have implications not only for inflation but also for the transmission of monetary policy.
      • Companies with high market power in general respond less to changes in costs, and hence to monetary policy, than perfectly competitive firms.
      • The transmission of monetary policy will depend on how the pricing decisions of firms change as market power changes.
      • [75] Overall, the impact of digitalisation on monetary policy needs further research, both to enrich structural models to capture its effects and to verify their empirical implications.

    Online retail and measurement of the HICP

      • The inclusion of goods and services traded online in the HICP will have an impact on HICP inflation only if the prices of such products and services change at different rates than the prices of goods and services traded offline.
      • The methodology for compiling the HICP implies that price-level differences between online and offline shop prices do not have a direct effect on the HICP.
      • Moreover, the statistical offices of the euro area countries continuously enhance their data collection methods and some online prices are already reflected in the HICP.
      • [77] The available evidence on possible measurement error in the consumer price indices resulting from the incomplete incorporation of online sales is scarce and inconclusive.
      • [79] Overall, there is still not enough evidence to conclude that the partial exclusion of online sales leads to measurement error in price indices (upward or downward).

    6 Digitalisation and the COVID-19 pandemic

      • Since the onset of the pandemic there has been an increase in the take-up of digital technologies, especially in connection with lockdowns restricting physical mobility within and across regions and countries.
      • Chart 7 Euro area retail trade July 2020 compared with February 2020 (percentage change)
      • This may be an important step towards a larger digital economy in the euro area and EU; whether this represents a permanent change will be a key factor for the likely medium to long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the digital and broader economy in the euro area, EU and elsewhere.
      • As the COVID-19 pandemic is still unfolding, its impact on the digital economy remains uncertain, especially beyond the short term.
      • Its impact on the digital and broader economy depends both on digital supply and demand.

    7 Conclusion