Dr Emma Howard

speaker

282 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 25 Aug

Dr Emma Howard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

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Today with David McCullagh · Food prices likely to rise again, says the ESRI · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

And they're going to further impact on our food prices, particularly those that are global commodities.

Exactly, yeah, we're going to see it domestically in the products that are produced here, but we'll also see international commodities, so things like our coffee or our chocolate and all of those products that we buy and that we don't produce.

But again, even for those goods that we produce domestically, of course, there's a lot of inputs that we need to ship in.

So a lot of the

the grain and the feed in Ireland, for example, is imported.

So again, those costs are going to be higher for those imported inputs into domestic products.

Yeah, I mean, like the IMF have produced some guidelines on how governments should respond to this crisis.

And, you know, one of the big issues, obviously, is to shield vulnerable households and that any supports, any subsidies should be targeted and should be temporary and that they should also support viable small businesses, but vulnerable.

not with price controls, as has been suggested by some commentators, but with liquidity, with funds to ensure that they are able to get through this crisis.

The economic argument against price controls is that, well, firstly, often they lead to shortages.

So, you know, if you have price controls, people aren't going to respond to those price changes and they're not going to change their consumption accordingly.

But secondly, is that they're just they're really inefficient and they're really expensive.

And again, you know, we have to think about the context in terms of the overall fiscal response to shocks like this.

And already the government are spending and planning to spend into the future at a rate, growth spending at a rate that is not sustainable for Europe.

the growth rate of our economy.

And any of those universal measures or those expensive measures that are implemented further feed inflation.

And again, we know that it's those lower income households, those middle and lower income households that are most impacted by particularly by things like food price increases.

So, you know, if you look at the amount that households spend on food,

It's about a seventh of total household expenditure on average that people spend on food.

But the bottom 60% of households spend about 40% more as a percentage of their income than the top 20%.

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