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...

Child benefit is a universal payment to all households with children in Ireland. Unlike other transfers however it is paid to the mother. This paper analyses expenditure patterns out of this transfer payment and compares them to expenditure patterns from other sources of income using Irish...

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,...

This paper studies the effect on Anglo-Irish trade breaking the link between the Irish pound and sterling in 1979. A gravity model is used to explore this issue. No evidence is found of a structural break following the dismantling of the currency union. Nor did the resultant exchange rate...

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...

The Great Irish Famine was truly a 'great' famine; it killed one million of 8.5 million people. Though Amartya Sen's surmise that no famine in history killed such a high proportion of the people is an exaggeration, certainly nothing remotely like the Irish famine had happened in England since...

Our goal here is to offer a better understanding of why workhouse mortality was as high as it was, how it varied across Ireland, and how it affected different groups in the population such as women or children.

The macroeconomic crisis of 1955-56 was the defining event of post-war Irish economic history. What had been an underperforming economy slid into deep recession for reasons which were poorly understood. The long-term consequences were considerable: the reorientation of economic policy that...

Along with other prospective EMU members, the Irish government is now commited to the "Stability and Growth Pact", which proposes heavy penalties for countries whose deficit-to-GDP ratios breach certain stipulated conditions. Agreement on the broad outlines on the Pact of Dublin Summit of 13-14...

This paper presents and discusses new estimates of the manufacturing and public capital components of the Irish gross capital stock for the ten-year period 1985-1994. The new data are used to estimate aggregate production functions for Irish manufacturing in the period 1951-1994, in order to...