CESifo Forum: Articles on Ireland

These are useful papers for an international audience that is interested in the Irish economy.

On teh recovery, the jobs data remains a puzzle and this week Forfás published its annual employment survey.

Its useful for global figures but agency supported firms are only asked one question on numbers in full-time employment and other status.

It’s strange that after 20 years the format is the same apart from the addition of a few tables – no minister or senior official has been interested in getting one or two more pertinent pieces of information!

So separately, IDC, a US IT research firm, had to be commissioned to estimate the number of ‘techies’ in the ICT sector for a skills forecast report.

The Forfás report has 87,000 in the ICT sector while the CSO estimated the number at 82,500 at end of 2013 – no big deal there – but the CSO data suggests that 700 jobs were lost in 2013.

IDC estimated that there are 44,000 high tech skilled workers in ICT companies.

It’s interesting that over a decade, only 20,000 jobs were added despite the growing online and mobile telephony markets and priority support of public funding for tech ventures.

Remember the mantra of economists and ministers about rising services exports: “moving up the value chain,” “high quality jobs” and “high value jobs”?

The big question about the 61,000 additional jobs in 2013 is the ‘self employment without employees’ numbers which are back to boom times.

The jump in full-time jobs is partly explained by the surge in farmers.