This month brings to a close a very busy year for the newly established Nevin Economic Research Institute. The NERI has begun to contribute to a much needed and long-overdue debate on policy evidence and policy choices in key areas of relevance to the trade union movement and wider society - labour...

The recent Government Medium-Term Economic Strategy, 2014-2020 ('A Strategy for Growth') is a welcome statement of key economic goals even if the Strategy lacks important detail and a more ambitious social perspective which learns from one of the greatest crisis that has emerged since the foundation...

A very strong narrative is gathering pace abroad and at home: There was ‘absolutely’ no alternative to ‘austerity’ in the case of Ireland once the storm broke in 2008; Ireland displayed remarkable and exceptional resilience, consensus and passivity in accepting the ‘tough’ decisions that ‘had to be...

The latest figures for Gross Value Added in Northern Ireland were released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. Gross Value Added is the closest measure to Gross Domestic Product we have for Northern Ireland, it is equal to Gross Domestic Product plus subsidies and minus indirect taxes...

The timeliest source of data on wages for PAYE workers in the Republic of Ireland comes from the “Earnings Hours and Employment Costs Survey” (EHECS). This is a very extensive survey and survey responses cover roughly 70% of employees. In comparison, surveys such as the National Employment Survey or...

Suppose you were the Minister of Finance in 2009 and that you were held up and forced to hand over a lot of money to a number of bust banks?. You didn’t have the money at the time so you took it out of a special pension savings fund built up by taxpayers meant for the next 50 years. Suppose that, in...