In Irish manufacturing, the foreign sector accounts for about one half of employment and some 60 per cent of gross output. The Irish experience therefore provides us with a textbook case study of the effects on an EU host economy of export-oriented FDI. We explore in this paper the structural...

There are a number of factors that are generally agreed to have a role to play in the story of Ireland's recent success. These include the long-term consequences of the fiscal stabilisation of the late 1980s, the European Structural Funds, the increased educational attainment of the workforce,...

Why did the West grow so rapidly over the last 500 years, while much of therest of the world stagnated? And why several countries, especially in East Asia, grown so fast over the last half-century? If we can understand these growth experiences, and identify the forces which made them possible,...

Why, after more than a half-century of under-performance, has the Irish economy finally found its feet? A recent authoritative study suggests five factors, without attempting to rank them: shifting demographic structure, increasing human capital, infrastructural investment, a benign...

Exogenous growth models imply that, if human capital formation is endogenous, there is a negative relationship between human capital and growth. This prediction is tested against the alternative of the Lucas- Uzawa model which posits an increasing relationship between growth and the ratio of...

This paper is estimating the correlation between tariffs and growth in the late 19th century in the context of three types of growth equation : unconditional convergence equations; conditional convergence equations, associated with Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992); and factor accumulation models of...

In my contribution to this Symposium I wish to explore two main themes. The first deals with the contribution of education to economic growth at the macro level. In this part I shall discuss the evidence of the importance of eduaction - or human capital formation - as a determinant of the...

This paper analyses the evolution of an economy where growth is driven by increased specialization caused by the geographical expansion of markets.

This paper analyses disaggregative growth models which treat development as progress through a space of commodities, from simple to more complex goods.