Category: Unemployment

More evidence of Irish success

The CSO press release on the latest Irish employment and unemployment statistics is here. They are pretty terrible.

As Colm has frequently pointed out, it is very difficult to credibly ask for a new deal on bank-related debt when you are simultaneously telling the people in charge in Brussels and Frankfurt how well we are doing (i.e. how successfully their strategy has been working in Ireland).

Perhaps it’s time to ignore Johnny Mercer and start accentuating the negative, even at the risk of a little pandemonium?

Data journalism handbook

Via the excellent Flowing data, an interesting free guidebook: the Data Journalism Handbook.

Worth a look, including for the link to a rather good interactive data visualisation from the New York Times of 2009 “The Jobless Rate for People Like You“.

Spain

The news that Spanish unemployment is now at 24.4% deserves a thread. It is the latest reminder of the complete and utter failure of the Eurozone’s absurd strategy of generalized, undifferentiated austerity for all, simultaneously. What is so frustrating is that it was obvious in 2010 that this would be the result, which is why some of us objected at the time to what was happening: you didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out. I don’t see any way that the Eurozone will survive in its current form unless the macroeconomic policy mix changes, and I’m not sure it will change, even if M Hollande gets elected.

Action plan for jobs

The “2012 Action plan for jobs” is now available on the DJEI website. The press release is here

Tax Breaks for Job Creators

Stephen Collins reports that ‘project champions’ and their teams will be given large tax breaks to incentivize them to come to Ireland to set up projects that entail ‘new product development’.

Is this a good idea? Anyone know of any empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these types of tax breaks (assuming that they exist elsewhere)?