In this week’s blog, NERI economist Chris Smart discusses his recent NERI Report Series on ‘Mapping the Labour Market in Ireland’.
When trying to understand the labour market in Ireland, it can be a challenge to separate out the anecdotal evidence from what we can objectively verify to create an unbiased picture. Identifying what we know, and don’t know, is important for highlighting areas of concern and proposing solutions or areas for further research.
Data sources such as the Labour Force Survey have the benefit of providing objective metrics such as the incidence of temporary or part-time employment, average hours worked, and so on, but it is limited in that it cannot provide us with the granularity we need to really delve into the differences between and within sectors and subsectors.
Contrast this with Census data, which, due to it being a full population survey, provides us with granular detail on sectors and subsectors, the occupational groups within those sectors, and the characteristics of those employed. The downside is it only happens every 5 years.
Combining these and other data sources allows us to build up an idea of the information we have available, understand what we don’t know, and decide how to proceed. This report attempts to do just that with a broad-based look at those employed in Industry (classified as NACE codes B to E).
As a case study of the above challenges, looking at Industry shows us just how much can be revealed when looking at a broad sector in detail, and also how much there is left to find out.
To give some examples, breaking down Manufacturing into subsectors such as ‘Electronic components and boards (261)’, or ‘Medical and dental instruments and supplies (325)’, highlights just how geographically concentrated these subsectors are. While these subsectors and the firms that operate in them are strong drivers of regional employment, this level of agglomeration can also have implications if there were an idiosyncratic shock or slowdown. The risks involved in such concentration should be no surprise to a country which has in the past been a victim of such sudden employment shocks in the past.
Another interesting finding was the sheer variety of occupations that can exist within a broad NACE sector, which complicates our understanding of factors such as sectoral productivity or overall working conditions in the context of such different types of work being carried out. To pick an example, presumably business sales executives have very different working conditions to those in welding trades, despite them both making up an equal share of employment in Manufacturing, and any analysis which fails to highlight this variety within a broad sector won’t be representative of these individuals’ experience of the labour market.
What can be done with this information? A regrettable consequence of uncovering such interesting variation is that we finish with perhaps more questions than we started out with.
This is the first in a series of reports that will look at information on sectoral, occupational, and regional dimensions of the labour market in Ireland. Our intention to bring together these data sources in a way that allows people to get more in-depth information on these dimensions in a single place, either through reports such as this one or through visual resources.
This will give people the insights they need to better understand and inform themselves about how our labour market functions and highlight areas for further research or action.