Monday Blog: Dealing with a terrible marriage
They were tall, elegant, famous, beautiful and affluent. It was a fairy-tale marriage deemed to last forever …. until the gales of crisis struck and deep cracks were exposed. In 2002 and in the run-up to the introduction of the Euro most commentators and policy makers imagined that peace, stability...
Monday Blog: Researching the macro-economic impact of the Living Wage
The idea of a ‘living wage’ is gathering momentum in many parts of the world. It is conceived and measured as a wage rate which is adequate to meet the needs of workers and their families in a given society at a given time. But affordability of life for workers is one thing – what about...
Monday Blog: Wage repression - the new orthodoxy
Wages have been falling since 2009 in the Republic of Ireland. This deterioration has been accompanied by (i) an erosion in purchasing power as the prices of most goods and services rise and (ii) less money in people’s pockets as taxes and public charges have risen and many social payments have been...
Monday Blog: Youth labour market still in recession
The week gone by brought some mixed news in regards to wages and employment trends in the Republic of Ireland. The recovery in total estimated employment from about the end of 2012 has continued into 2014 but at a much reduced pace. At the same time, wages are dropping slightly on average (before...
Monday Blog: Wages stagnation in Northern Ireland a brake on recovery
The speed of economic recovery in the UK has taken many by surprise. First the good news. Employment is up. Retail sales are up and business investment is expanding. This is good news for exporters in the Republic of Ireland especially those in sectors such as agri-food where, traditionally, the UK...
Monday Blog: The Energy Debate: touch choices
Fracking – or Induced hydraulic fracturing to give it its full technical term – is rapidly developing as an issue of public debate. In the United States where fracking has been in operation for many years the output of oil and gas is making a significant contribution to opening up alternative...
Monday Blog: It's party time again?
ews of rising house prices, fewer households in negative equity, falling dole queues, rising spending in the shops and the long farewell to the Troika together with a relatively benign Irish summer, so far, have lifted the economic mood a little in the Republic of Ireland. In the North the spillover...
Monday Blog: The economics of aye or nay
Adam Smith, a Scottish political economist and philosopher of the 18thcentury is famous for having written The Wealth of Nations. He is less well known for having written an important work entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiment. The latter work is a very important contribution to moral and political...
Productivity a danger for UK and NI
There were conflicting messages in the statistics released today on the Northern Ireland economy and labour market. On the labour market side, both measures of unemployment have fallen significantly for the three months from March to May of this year. The claimant count (literally a count of those...
Uncertainty and Economic Recovery
Slowly, the Irish economy is recovering; very slowly! Over the weekend, I and other economists contributed to a journal.ie article ( see here) on the two-speed nature of the recovery. While the exchequers finances are improving (lower unemployment, higher employment, some increased spending...