5/2/2012: Irish Labour Productivity - some latest trends

Chart of the Week, folks, comes courtesy of the ECB database on labour productivity. It contains the full set of productivity indices for Ireland by sector, reported on the basis of productivity per person employed. And it speaks volumes of the myths we hear in the media.

So the Chart of the Week is:

Now, what does it tell us? (And please, no protests - I am decomposing the above chart into some interesting trends using as illustrations more charts).

• Irish productivity - overall, across all sectors - has been rising during the crisis 
• Although as I pointed out so many times, much of this rise in Ireland's overall productivity is due to jobs destruction in retail, construction and other sectors, not to some intrinsic rises in real productivity. Jobs destruction concentrated in less productive sector helps overall total productivity. Despite the fact that it causes massive unemployment and other problems. See chart below for evidence on this.

• Another interesting feature of the data is the rapid, continuous decline in productivity in the broadly-defined public sector, arrested around Q3 2010 and now running basically flat. But historically, public sector productivity has contributed negatively to overall productivity performance of the economy.

• Overall, so far, our labour productivity is 5.2% ahead of the EA17 and 4.7% ahead of EU27 in Q3 2011. Year on year, EA 17 labour productivity is up 1.04%, EU27 is up 1.34% and Irish total labour productivity is up 2.28%. This is a strong performance for Ireland, compared to EU and EA averages. As already mentioned above, Construction sector productivity declined in Q3 2011 some 15.2% yoy and productivity in Information & Communication sector fell 8.15% yoy. Productivity grew in Financial and Insurance Activities sector by 3.11%, in Agriculture and associated sub-sectors by a very impressive 24.8% (although this is largely due to higher commodities prices and exchange rates effects, as well as continued robust inflows of CAP money into Ireland). In Public Administration and the rest of the public sector sub-sectors, productivity grew 2.6% year on year in Q3 2011.

And to summarize the emerging new (crisis-period post Q1 2008) trends, here is a chart plotting correlations between productivity index performance for Ireland overall, against EU27, EA17 and specific sectors of the economy:

12/12/2011: QNHS Q3 2011 - Take 2

Another quick note on the QNHS latest data:

• Total labour force is now down 147,600 on peak levels
• Total employment is down 346,800 on peak levels
• The demographic dividend is bust.

Table of sectoral changes to summarize latest data (note, public sector data is from the main QNHS, so it is less accurate than data reported in previous post):

Notable differences arise in terms of part-time and ful-time employment changes. relative to pre-crisis levels, full-time employment is down 21.5% while part-time employment is up 9.6%. Thus, overall quality of employment is deteriorating rapidly. But while yoy full-time employment is being displaced by part-time employment -3.69% to +1.76%, qoq both part-time and full-time employment is shrinking.

Relative to pre-crisis levels, employment is down in all sectors except Transportation & Storage (+3.28%),  ICT (+9.35%),  Education (+3.02%), and Human Health and Social Work Activities (+9.46%).

Overall number in employment is down 15.82% on pre-crisis levels. Meanwhile, of sectors that posted declines in employment over the same period:

• Largest declines were recorded in the collapsed Construction (-59.53%), in the allegedly-booming Agriculture, forestry and fishing (-28.9%) and Industry (-23.25%). 
• In addition, Administrative and support services (-20.25%) and Accommodation and food service activities (-18.01%) posted deeper than average cuts.
• Shallow cuts were recorded in Financial, insurance and real estate activities (-6.12%) and Public administration and defence; compulsory social security (-5.45%)

12/12/2011: QNHS Q3 2011

Headline unemployment number out of QNHS for Q3 2011 is at 14.4% up on 14.2% in Q2. This is bad, but not as bad as two other core labour market performance parameters.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, Irish employment fell by 20,500 (-1.1%) in Q3 2011. This follows on from a seasonally adjusted fall in employment of 4,100 (-0.2%) in Q2 2011 - an acceleration of 5-fold!

Unemployment increased by 15,700 (+5.3%) in the year to Q3 2011 and the total number of persons unemployed now stands at 314,700.

Meanwhile, the long-term unemployment rate increased from 6.5% to 8.4% over the year to Q3 2011. Long-term unemployment accounted for 56.3% of total unemployment in Q3 2011 compared with 47.0% a year earlier and 25.5% in the third quarter of 2009.

The total number of persons in the labour force in the third quarter of 2011 was 2,120,300, representing a decrease of 30,200 (-1.4%) over the year. This compares with a labour force decrease of 51,800 (-2.4%) in the year to Q3 2010.

Charts to illustrate the above:

Adding to this emigration, the above chart paints the picture of mass-exodus from the labour force, most likely due to twin effects: layoffs and tax increases.

Now, updating figures for public v private sector employment:

 CSO provides more accurate, by their own admission, figures for public sector employment in the Table A3 of the QNHS release. Here is the summary, excluding temporary Census 2011 staff:

• Civil service employment in Q3 2011 stood at 39,900, up on Q1 2011 39,500 reading and unchanged on Q3 2010. In Q3 2008 the same number stood at 43,000 so net reductions on pre-crisis level are 3,100 or 7.2%.
• Total public sector excluding Semi-State bodies stood at 339,900 in Q3 2011, down 8,400 on Q3 2010 and 5.6% lower than in Q3 2008.
• Total public sector employment including Semi-State bodies is now at 392,900, down from 399,000 in Q1 2011 and down 8,200 on Q3 2010. Compared to Q3 2008, public sector total employment is down 24,000 or 5.8%.
• Total private sector employment is at 1,123,600, down from 1,147,800 (-2.1%) year on year and down 194,800 on pre-crisis levels or -14.8%.

So to summarize - public sector employment is down 5.8% relative to pre-crisis levels, while private sector employment is down 14.8%.

2/02/2011: Dependency ratios

Looking over LR data earlier tonight, I decided to update the charts for dependency ratios, based on a combination of LR and QNHS. Here are some charts.

From the top: in Q1 1998 there were 1,619.8 thousand persons aged 15 years or older in Ireland that were not in full-time employment and 1,237.4 thousand of the same age category persons who were in full time employment - a ratio of 1.3. By Q1 2000 this ratio fell to 1.1. The same was attained in Q1 2005. This ratio declined to 1.0 in Q4 2005 and stayed there until Q4 2008. Then in Q 12009 the ratio rose to 1.3. As of Q3 2010, there were 2,075.9 thousand 15 year old and over persons who were not in full time employment in Ireland. Against this, there were 1,436.8 thousand persons of the same age category in full time employment. The implied ratio there for has rise to 1.4. Chart below illustrates:
Not scared yet? Ok, another shot:
Oh, and another angle:
The above shows just how bad is the dependency ratio getting in Ireland during the current crisis.