Recent labour market changes consistent with polarisation
Data from the recent Earnings Hours and Employment Costs Survey show that recent trends in employee numbers (employee numbers exclude the self-employed) are consistent with a pattern of polarisation. The patterns are consistent with the effects of austerity combined with an underlying process of...
Women in Ireland: Better educated, living longer but paid less
Saturday March 8th marks International Women’s Day, an opportune time to reflect on the relative socio-economic position of women in our society. While there are a myriad of facts, figures and data that allow us to explore this topic I am going to focus on three ‘gender gaps’ in this blog which uses...
Monday Blog: Health a public good?
Health has been in the news a lot recently. Accident and Emergency under pressure. Budgets running over. Private health insurance costs ever rising. Standards of care concerns to the fore. People worried about whether they will get the treatment they need when they need it and within their means...
Employment of young women down 17,100
The latest data from the CSO shows employment up roughly 60,000 since the same period of last year, getting close to levels last seen at the end of 2009 (and first seen back in 2005). Interestingly, of the increase in employment of 61,000, over three quarters almost (47,100) of the increase was for...
NERI Seminar: The Impact on National Income of the Patent-Cliff
Today's NERI seminar in the INTO Learning Centre focussed on the impact of the patent cliff on economic and fiscal activity In Ireland. Shane Enright and Mary Dalton gave a detailed overview of their recent paper on the subject. Mary and Shane both work in the Department of Finance. Previously, Mary...
Monday Blog: Thinking aloud about goods and services in the public domain
‘Economics’ has been defined as a ‘science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’ (Lionel Robbins). While I have difficulty with an understanding which regards economics as a ‘science’ (scientific methods may be used but, surely...
Under-employment remains a major issue
Under-employment continues to be a major long-term issue for Irish workers. The broadest measure of unemployment (whereby people are either unemployed, or working part-time but wishing to work full-time, or discouraged workers) remains at 23.5%, down from a peak of 25.8% in mid-2012. In the third...
Monday Blog: Raising wages or cutting taxes?
‘Putting more money into the pockets of consumers and workers’ Now who could be against that? ...after six years of unrelenting austerity, wage cuts for some, tax increases for nearly everyone …. But the problem is that ‘putting more money into the pockets’ can be done in a number of ways. Taxes on...
Comparing Wealth in Ireland and the EU
Indicator 4.4 from the NERI’s latest Quarterly Economics Facts (QEF) document examines wealth across Europe using a measure of average net financial wealth per person. This measure, calculated using the latest data from Eurostat, captures assets such as cash, bank deposits and shares but does not...
Monday Blog: Time for a debate on Higher Education
Investment – or the lack of it – has been a frequent theme in the debate about how economic recovery could be assisted through targeted, timely and beneficial interventions. Typically, mention of investment invokes images of men and women with yellow hats, cranes in the horizon and engineers...