Kevin Doogan in his excellent book, New Capitalism? correctly points out that employment is the achilles heel of right-wing economic analysis.
You can’t model jobs - either they are there or they are not.
If you follow work, and keep focused on the jobs, then more realistic appraisals of the actual dynamics of the economy start to [...]

When the CSO’s industrial production numbers were produced there was a sense among some commentary that at least this side of the economic equation is producing plus signs. But they might want to pause that until they read the whole report (and not just the headline figures).
First, production figures tend to rise in September, after [...]

The ESRI’s Autumn commentary (full commentary available on November 21st) was just one big writedown for 2011. From the three months previous, they revised downwards the following:
GDP: from 2.7 to 2.2 percent
GNP: from 2.2 to 2.0 percent
Employment: from -2,000 jobs to -10,000 jobs
Consumer spending: from 1.5 to 1 percent
Investment:  from 2.2 to -3.2 percent (turning [...]

Apologies for being away so long - workload and such.Will be attempting to provide some insight into the issues facing us (IMF receivership, the apocalypse) in more bite-sized contributions. That’s the plan, anyway. Let’s see how it goes.
Batt O’Keefe has made a name for himself, launching documents predicting thousands, even hundreds of thousands of jobs [...]

Statement from the Communist Party of Ireland
The announcement by Bank of Ireland that it would be cutting its workforce by 750 jobs to be imposed over the next two years is clearly just the beginning. These job losses come on the back of thousands of jobs already gone from the financial services sector and at [...]

Adrian Weckler is doing what journalists should be doing - investigating stories rather than report press releases. We have, of late, been subjected to an avalanche of job-creation announcements. Take one example: Weedle, a Dublin-based company that marries recruitment with social marketing; Minister Batt announced 50 new jobs from this company.
‘The company, which already employs [...]

The figures below are based on the Quarterly Household Survey reports of employment by SOC classification. They relate to the changes in employment from the fourth quarter 2008 to the fourth quarter 2009.
The Quarterly Household Survey is a sample survey, details of which are outlined here.

According to the 2006 Census 15% of the Irish workforce was comprised of non-Irish nationals from 188 different countries. Although this figure has certainly declined since the onset of the current recession, a large percentage still remain.
Migrant workers from the EU and EEA (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland) are entitled to take up employment in [...]

Monday night’s Frontline discussion was an object lesson in how to miss the point - a really big point in a really big way. In discussing spending cuts we were treated to all sorts of suggestions - from getting rid of Minister’s drivers to shaving departmental estimates; all with a view to saving a few [...]

First of all, the caveats.
The Quarterly Household Survey (QHS) is a sample survey, compiled by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), the details of which are outlined in Tuesday’s post which looked at broad occupations.
There are 21 economic sectors in the NACE Rev.2, and for its purposes, the CSO has amalgamated some of these to give [...]