One more league table

It’s unlikely to rate a mention with all the other unfortunate events swirling around the government, but the Financial Times has offered a mixed-bag verdict on Brian Cowen’s job performance relative to the rest of the Eurozone finance ministers (unfortunately they don’t provide a matching table of salaries).  The punchline is that Cowen has slipped from the FT’s top-ranked Eurozone finance minister last year to a fourth place tie this year – a finding that needs to have many qualifications attached, nonetheless.

The FT started doing this last year and as with any summary ranking, there are various compromises and assumptions in the methodology.  The Ministers are being ranked on five-year changes in certain macroeconomic measures for their country, even if they weren’t in office all that time.  The measures are supposed to capture deficit reduction and tax efficiency, although the latter can end up sounding like a check for whether taxes are low, which may sound like an implicit measure of conservativism rather than performance.  In addition, the FT tweaks the rankings with a “political” weight, determined by their correspondents and supposed to capture the overall influence of each minister in domestic politics and in the Eurozone meetings.

Anyway, the Celtic Tiger was still alive and well last year so Cowen topped the rankings in 2006.  But he’s been overtaken this year by ministers who have seen sharp improvements in public finances and better outcomes on the tax measures (e.g. bigger reductions in dividend taxes).  In addition, the overall tax burden (taxes as a share of GDP) has increased.  Finally, Cowen doesn’t get points for weight of influence in the Eurozone (”little known outside Ireland”) and hasn’t faced a balancing act like his German counterpart trying to run a grand coalition.

Overall perhaps not to be taken too seriously but some interesting data to chew over.