Trutz Haase was the speaker at the most recent NERI seminar on deprivation on the island of Ireland. Over the course of the presentation, Trutz provided an overview of the Irish deprivation indices, covering the conceptual underpinnings of the 2011 Pobal Haase-Pratschke (HP) Deprivation Index for...

Sunday marks International Women’s day, an opportune time to reflect on gender equality issues and the latest data on this topic. Last July the CSO issued their annual ‘ Women and Men in Ireland’ report and included for the first time a new index summarising gender equality in Ireland and comparing...

Yesterday, the UK think-tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies issued a report noting that average UK household incomes had returned to around their pre-recession level after a “historically slow recovery”. The latest data on Irish income levels tell a different story. Using data from the CSO’s SILC...

In the last year the Central Bank has urged trade unions to raise their wage demands. What? Yes it did happen. But not here. The German Central Bank, the Bundesbank, urged German trade unions to up their wage demands – at least above the rate of inflation (the message was relayed through Jens...

At a meeting earlier this week, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation focused on the topic of Low Pay and the Living Wage. In a contribution to the committee, I first outlined some context for their examination of these issues, before going into more detail on the concept...

The NERI’s Quarterly Economic Facts contains a range of indicators on the public finances. One of these indicators compares levels of government revenue and public spending in the Republic of Ireland with that of other European Union economies. The basic method of comparison is to measure total...

Economics has been described as a ‘science’. A ‘science’ is a body of knowledge and methods which uses evidence and measurement linked to the exercise of testing, repeating and predicting. Most first-year students of ‘economics’ will be taught that it is a ‘positive’ science in the sense that it...

The construction sector in Northern Ireland saw the largest fall in employment across the economy. Even now, over six years since the property crash there are still 30% fewer jobs in the sector than there were in 2008. Many of the jobs in the construction sector would have been mid-level skilled...