Below are links to the unemployment session materials so that this thread can be used for thoughts people have on the contents of the session.
Chair: Minister Joan Burton T.D.
David Bell (Stirling)
Unemployment in the Great Recession: More Misery for the Young?
Aedin Doris (NUIM)
Employment and Unemployment: What do Sectoral and Demographic Patterns Tell Us?
Philip O’Connell (ESRI)
The Impact of Training Programme Type and Duration on the Employment Chances of the Unemployed in Ireland
“So, we hear Ireland is recovering”, a French friend said to me last night.
(Mind you, they said something similar in the summer of 2010. Our government has an incentive to sell the Irish good news story, and “Europe” has an incentive to buy it.)
So, here are the latest employment data, reporting the largest seasonally adjusted quarterly fall in employment in two years, and which surely deserve a thread of their own.
… happy!
So I thought I would share my thoughts on how the Irish are faring on this front.
I did a video session on Irishdebate.com yesterday on unemployment. It is available here A blogpost with various links to material discussed during the session is here The session went through: the extent of unemployment in Ireland; consequences of long-run unemployment; current government responses; and potential responses.
The format is an interesting one and worth thinking about for others here as it gives more time to work through topics than is usually possible on television and radio. Joe Garde on Irishdebate.com sets them up. Ronan Lyons, Stephen Kinsella and others have done sessions on it so far.
To Paul Krugman’s recent posts on Ireland and the Baltics, I would add two points.
1. Ireland’s quarterly GDP data are notoriously volatile.
2. Ireland is a small, open economy, and it is by common consent a relatively flexible economy. It is also an economy in which labour is both inwardly and outwardly mobile. And yet unemployment here is now running at 14.5%. So do we really think that the Irish experience can be used to argue that the austerity/internal devaluation medicine is appropriate for countries like Greece or Italy?