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...

In the Autumn Statement today the Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded forecasts for growth in the UK economy from 0.6% to 1.4% for 2013. Furthermore they have upgraded forecasts for 2014 and 2015 to 2.4% and 2.2% respectively. While much attention has focused on the speed of the UK...

The latest live register figures present something of a puzzle. Comparing to January to November 2013 with the same period last year numbers on the Live Register are down roughly 20,000 people. This is almost entirely due to a drop of new people claiming Job Seekers Benefit (new claimants are down...

Not that bank again! Much has been said and written about Anglo-Irish in the context of the banking collapse in 2008 and the sequence of historical events that takes us from the night of the Big Guarantee on 29th September 2008 (or perhaps a modern version of Oíche na gaoithe moiré ) When the Anglo...