QNHS for 2010:Q2

Results from the Quarterly National Household Survey for 2010:Q2 are now available (press release here, full release here.)

Employment is still falling, though at a slower pace than previously. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for the second quarter is 13.2 percent, which is the same as the average for these months that has been estimated by the Live Register figures over those months, so there will be no great revision to those figures (which last showed a standardised unemployment rate of 13.8% in August.) The decline in the participation rate seems to be easing, with the seasonally adjusted rate falling from 61.2 percent in 2010:Q1 to 61.1 percent in 2010:Q2.

9 replies on “QNHS for 2010:Q2”

Table A2 gives some evidence that non-Irish nationals do not displace Irish workers.

What I find most interesting is the column on Accommodation and Food Service activities. Employment hasn’t changed, but there has been a shift from non-Irish nationals to Irish nationals in this sector.

Overall non-Irish nationals had a larger proportionate decline in employment (and they are proportionately more likely to leave Ireland).

Q2 has turned out a bit of a curate’s egg. On the clearly positive side, the total rate of loss of employment is much reduced, and collapse in agricultural employment (down about 30%) has stalled. On the clearly negative side, industry is back to slowly bleeding jobs, despite the excitement expressed here recently on export data.

Employment in construction seems to be stalling out close to a sustainable level (not far below 7% of all employment), rather than undershooting badly. The various measures being taken by the Government to support employment in the area seem to be working, without maintaining it at a level that cannot be sustained into the future.

The “other shoe” is showing signs of dropping on employment in financial services and transport. In both of these major sectors, it looked as if employment was being held at an unsustainably high level, but it is now showing some signs of falling. I reckon this shows market forces at work in areas like the taxi and haulage industries, and perhaps the beginning of the end of current expenditure on excess financial services employment being financed by public capital injections.

Employment is still rising somewhat in the main sectors dominated by public sector employment, despite nominal cuts in public sector employment. It would be good to know to what extent this represents the privatisation of activity in these areas, and/or sharing available work among a greater number of people, and to what extent it reflects off-the-books employment financed by the public purse.

JtO will be happy to see employment rising in the wholesale and retail trade. I suspect that this may be an aberration that will be corrected in future quarters, but hope very much that I am wrong.

This isn’t new, but I think it’s worth highlighting. Almost 70% of those unemployed as of Q2 2010 are educated to upper secondary level or above. What we learned in the 1980s about the importance of keeping poorly qualified people out of long term unemployment is still true, but it is now only part of the picture. This time around, ensuring that well qualified people are ready to re-enter the labour force is centrally important too.

@Seafoid, Census 2006 found 1.47m private households. If you gross that up for the increase in population, you get about 1.55m. The long term trend in the average size of households is that they are shrinking, so the actual number may be a bit higher than that. On the other hand, current economic conditions could possibly be discouraging young people from moving out to form new householdsm, and discouraging mature people from separating/divorcing.

Assuming government spending continues as is and assuming the deficit would be plugged solely by income taxes, how much extra tax would the average employee then have to pay per year?

Or if done by household, how much more tax would each household have to pay per year to maintain current levels of government spending?

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