Tag: Unemployment
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Ireland – Not yet out of the economic woods
10 years on from the onset of the crisis we could take some time to take stock. The government is keen, as are many, to wipe it from memory – keep the recovery going. The recent undoubted recovery has softened memories for the most part. But if we forget the past we will sure as…
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Searching for the HighTech economy in Ireland
A perennial trope of the Irish economic debate is that of the “Smart economy”. This is to be contrasted one imagines with the “dumb politics”. So how smart is the economy?
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Lets not focus on construction to get us out of this recession
This is a version of my Irish Examiner Column of 8 March 2014 . Spring is in the air and the economic sap is rising. Or is it that economic saps are rising? Anyhow, the other thing that spring brings is growth and it does look as though finally those long hearalded green shoots are…
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Microsimulating the Unemployed to work…
The Irish Times today carrys a report that the Department of Social Welfare will soon contact all 400,000 people on the live register to explain that they would be better of working. Which seems fairly obvious The report is interesting in that it first of all was and is still in the print version headlined…
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Negative Equity, Household Mobility and Job Matching – what do we know?
One of the arguments that many (including yrs trly) has adduced for negative equity in residential housing being a problem is that it may well reduce mobility. Economists talk about matching – jobs exist and people exist who could fill them but can they be matched and what are the impediments to that. Negative Equity…
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Getting to the Hartz of the Irish unemployment problem
Earlier this week I chanced to listen to an interview on the Pat Kenny show. Pat interviewed the Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, about reforms and unemployment etc. We have a major problem with unemployment in this country and so any reform is worth looking at if it can assist in solving this issue.…
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Should we cut longterm unemployment payments?
There is some comment today in the newspapers on an EU commission report which states, inter alia, that welfare rates should be cut in the forthcoming budget. They state in a draft report (which doesn’t seem to be publicly available) “In part this may reflect the structure of the benefits system in Ireland, whereby activation…
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What will solve the jobs crisis?
This is an extended version of an opinion piece published in the Irish Examiner on Saturday 18 May. The new government jobs initiative is welcome, in so far as it again demonstrates an acknowledgement by them of the seriousness of the employment crisis. Coming less than a year after the last one, we must however…