5/5/20: A V-Shaped Recovery? Ireland post-Covid

My article for The Currency on the post-Covid19 recovery and labour markets lessons from the pst recessions: https://www.thecurrency.news/articles/16215/the-fiction-of-a-v-shaped-recovery-hides-the-weaknesses-in-irelands-labour-market.

Key takeaways:
"Trends in employment recovery post-major recessions are worrying and point to long-term damage to the life-cycle income of those currently entering the workforce, those experiencing cyclical (as opposed to pandemic-related) unemployment risks, as well as those who are entering the peak of their earnings growth. This means a range of three generations of younger workers are being adversely and permanently impacted.

"All of the millennials, the older sub-cohorts of the GenZ, and the lower-to-middle classes of the GenX are all in trouble. Older millennials and the entire GenX are also likely to face permanently lower pensions savings, especially since both cohorts have now been hit with two systemic crises, the 2008-2014 Great Recession and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

"These generations are the core of modern Ireland’s population pyramid, and their fates represent the likely direction of our society’s and economy’s evolution in decades to come."

26/7/19: Stop Equating Low Unemployment Rate to High Employment Rate

There is always a lot of excitement around the unemployment stats these days. Why, with near-historical lows, and the talk about 'full employment', there is much to be celebrated and traded on in the non-farm payrolls stats and Labor Department press releases. But the problem with all the hoopla around these numbers is that it too often mixes together things that should not be mixed together. Like, say, mangos and frogs, or apples and moths.

Take a look at the following data:

Yes, unemployment is low. Civilian unemployment rate is currently at seasonally-adjusted 3.7% (June 2019), and Unemployment rate for: 20 years and over, at 3.3%, seasonally adjusted. On 3mo average basis, last time we have seen comparable levels of Civilian unemployment was in 1969, and 20+ Unemployment rate was in 2000. Kinda cool, but also revealing: historical lows in unemployment require  Civilian unemployment metric to confirm. Which means that factoring in Government employment, things are bit less impressive today. But let us not split hairs.

Here is the problem, however: record lows in unemployment are not the same as record levels in employment. Low unemployment, in fact, does not mean high employment.

To see this, look at the solid red line, plotting Employment rate for 20 years and older population. The measure currently sits at 71.2 percent and the last three months average is at 71.1 percent.  Neither is historically impressive. In fact, both are below all months (ex-recessions) for 1990-2008. Actually, not shown in the graph, you would have to go back to 1987 to see the same levels of employment rate as today. Oops...

But why is unemployment being low does not equate to employment being high? Well, because of a range of factors, the dominant one being labor force participation. It turns out (as the chart above also shows), we are near historical (for the modern economy's period) lows in terms of people willing to work or search for jobs. Or put differently, we are at historical highs in terms of people being disillusioned with the prospect of searching for a job. Darn! The 'best unemployment stats, ever' and the worst 'willingness to look for a job, ever'.

U.S. Labor Force Participation rate is at 62.9 percent (62.8 percent for the last three months average). And it has been steadily falling from the peak in 1Q 2000 (at 67.3 percent).

When we estimate the relationship between the Employment rate and the two potential factors: the Unemployment rate and the Participation rate, historically (since 1970s) and within the modern economy period (since 1990) as well as in more current times (since 2000), and since the end of the Great Recession (since 2010) several things stand out:

1. Unemployment rate is weakly negatively correlated with Employment rate, or put differently, decreases in unemployment rate are associated with small increases in employment; across all periods;
2. Labor force participation rate is strongly positively correlated with Employment rate. In other words, small increases in labor force participation rate are associated with larger increases in employment; across all periods;
3. Labor force participation rate, in magnitude of its effect on Employment rate, is roughly 14-15 times larger, than the effect of Unemployment rate on Employment rate; across all periods; and
4. The relatively more important impact of Labor force participation rate on Employment, compared to the impact of Unemployment rate on Employment has actually increased (albeit not statistically significantly) in the last 9 years.

These points combined mean that one should really start paying more attention to actual jobs additions and employment rate, as well as participation rate, than to the unemployment rate; and this suggestion is more salient for today's economy than it ever was in any other period on record.

But above all, please, stop arguing that low unemployment rate means high employment. Bats are not cactuses, mangos are not moths and CNN & Fox kommentariate are not really analysts.

13/7/19: Mapping the declines in jobs creation

Increasing market power concentration, falling entrepreneurship, rising concentration amongst the start ups, unicorns and billions in investment, the markets have been rewarding larger companies at the expense of the smaller and medium enterprises for years. And this has had a problematic impact on human capital and jobs creation.

Here is the data on the levels of employment in medium-large companies over the years, based on the U.S. markets data:

In simple terms, per each dollar of investors' money, today's companies are creating fewer jobs - a trend that was present since at least 2000, and consistent with the onset of the Goldilocks Economy. But the most pronounced collapse in jobs creation from investment has been since 2017. Excluding recessionary periods, in 2002-2006 average annual decline in the number of employees per $1 billion in market valuation was 3.45%. Over 2009-2013 this number rose to 4.73% and in 2014-2019 the rate of decrease averaged 8.05% per annum.

18/6/19: Obama v Trump: Jobs Creation

Who had the more impressive numbers in terms of jobs creation: President Obama or President Trump? This question is non-trivial. For a number of reason.

Take first the superficially-simple comparative:

• On a y/y basis, average monthly change in total non-farm payrolls under the last 28 months of President Obama Administration was 2,704,000 using non-seasonally-adjusted data. For the first 28 months of the Trump Administration, the same figure was 2,394,000. So by this metric, things were better under Obama Administration last 28 months in office.
• The caveat to the above is that as jobs numbers grow, each consecutive period, new additions of jobs should be harder and harder to come up with, especially during the mature period of the expansion cycle. In other words, after some number of quarters of economic recovery, creating more new jobs gets harder, primarily because the pool of potential employees to be hired into jobs shrinks. So, adjusting Obama figures and Trump figures for this, we can use rate of change in 28 months averages. This is not easy to do, because we do not have consecutive 28 months periods of first rising, then falling jobs additions averages for any period, except for the 1990s. Back then, jobs creation first run at 483,000 monthly average in 1991-1993, 3,124,000 in 1993-1995, 2,889,000 in 1996-1998 and 3,080,000 in 1998-2000. So within upside cycle, the net decline in jobs creation was between 1.74% and 7.2%. Applying these to Obama Administration’s peak jobs creation rate over any 28 months period gives us the rate of Obama Administration cycle-adjusted jobs creation of between 2,509,150 and 2,656,775 - both of these figures are higher than the raw numbers for the Trump Administration’s first 28 months in office. 
• In monthly average jobs creation measured on m/m basis, Obama Administration’s last 28 months in offer yielded 128,000 monthly jobs additions on average. The Trump Administration’s comparable figure is 294,000, vastly outpacing Obama Administration’s record. This means that, in total,  during the Obama Administration last 28 months in office, the U.S. economy has created net 2,527,000. In Trump’s Administration 28 months in office, the economy generated 7,206,000 jobs. 
• The above figures, however, is heavily weighted against the last 28 Obama Administration period due to the final two months of the period coinciding with heavily seasonality-related effects (December and January effects). Controlling for seasonality effects, Obama Administration comparable net jobs creation over that period was 7,139,000 against Trump’s 7,206,000.
• Finally, looking at the entire jobs cycle, as illustrated in the chart below:

Note, I consider the period of Obama Administration with sustained jobs creation - a sort of
‘jobs creation upside cycle’ that started in March 2011. Based on this comparative, Obama Administration did outperform Trump Administration so far into the latter tenure in office (see steeper slope in the trend line for Obama Administration, and flatter slope for Trump Administration.


Draw your own conclusions out of all of this, but there are my top level ones:

1. Whilst it is other daft to argue whether one Administration was able to ‘create’ more jobs than the other - the comparatives are a bit too sensitive to differences in economic environments and yearly cycles, overall, Obama Administration’s last 28 months in office seem to have been creating comparable number of jobs to the Trump Administration’s first 28 months in office.
2. Trump Administration has seen more substantial monthly increases than Obama Administration did, but annually, Obama Administration outperformed Trump Administration in this comparative.
3. In overall terms, jobs creation remained similar across both Administrations to-date, once we adjust for skewed seasonality effects, but Obama Administration appears to have outperformed the Trump Administration over the cycle of jobs expansion.

16/5/17: Technology: Jobs Displacement v Enhancement

Technological innovation is driving revolutionary changes across the labour markets and more broadly, markets for human capital. These changes are structural, deep and accelerating, and, owing to their nature, are not yet sufficiently understood or researched.

One theoretically plausible aspect of the technological innovation in terms of human capital effects is the expected impact of technology on demand for (and therefore supply of) different occupations. For example, we know that technology can act as a complement to or a substitute for labour.

In the former case, we can expect advancement of technology to create more jobs that are closely linked to enhancing technological innovation, deployment and productivity. In other words, we can expect more geeks. And we can expect - given lags in education and training - that as demand for geeks rises, their wages will rise in the short run before falling rather rapidly in the longer term.

In the latter case, there is a bit less certain, however. Yes, technology’s primary objective is to lower costs of production and increase value added. As a result, it is going to displace vast numbers of workers who can be substituted for via technological innovation. However, not all substitutable workers are made of the same cloth and not all technological innovation is capable of achieving unambiguous returns on investment necessary to sustain it. Take, for example, an expensive robot that costs, say, USD 600.000 a pop, but can only replace 3 lower skilled workers in a laundromat, earning USD16,000 per annum. So with benefits etc factored in, the cost of these 3 workers will be around USD70,000 per annum. It makes absolutely zero sense to replace these workers with new tech at least any time before the tech systems become fully self-replicating and extremely cheap. So, for really lower skills distributions, we can expect that jobs displacement by technology is unlikely to materialise soon. But for mid-range wages, consistent with mid-range skills, there is a stronger case for jobs displacement.

All of which suggests that we are likely to see a U-shaped polarisation process arising when it comes to jobs distribution across the skills segments: higher wage segment rising in total share of employment, as complementarity effects drive jobs creation here; and the lower wage segment also rising in total employment, as robots-induced increase in value added across the economy translates into greater demand for low-skills jobs that cannot be efficiently displaced by technology, yet. In the middle, however, we are likely to witness a cratering of employment. Here, the workers are neither complementary to robots, nor are they earning low enough wages to make expensive robots non-viable as a replacement alternative for labour.

Interestingly, we are already witnessing this trend. In fact, we have been witnessing it since the early 1990s. For example, Harrigan, James and Reshef, Ariell and Toubal, Farid paper titled “The March of the Techies: Technology, Trade, and Job Polarization in France, 1994-2007”, published March 2016, by NBER (NBER Working Paper No. w22110: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2755382) looked into “employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007” in France.

The authors “show that the labor market in France has polarised: employment shares of high and low wage occupations have grown, while middle wage occupations have shrunk.” So the story is consistent with an emerging U-shaped labour market response to technological innovation on the extensive margin (in headcount terms). And more, the authors also find that inside margin also polarised, as “…the share of hours worked in technology-related occupations ("techies") grew substantially, as did imports and exports.”

However, the authors also look at a deeper relationship between technology and jobs polarisation. In fact, they find that, causally, “polarisation occurred within firms”, but that effect was “…mostly due to changes in the composition of firms (between firms). [And] …firms with more techies in 2002 saw greater polarization, and grew faster, from 2002 to 2007. Offshoring reduced employment growth. Among blue-collar workers in manufacturing, importing caused skill upgrading while exporting caused skill downgrading.”

26/1/16: 'More than 1,000 jobs per week' Government Claims v Reality

One senior TD and a Junior Minister with position relating, indirectly, to employment and the labour market has just posted an interesting statement. A part of the statement goes thus: “we used the Action Plans for Jobs process to drive job creation, creating more than a 1000 jobs a week”.

Now, let’s raise two points. One philosophical, another purely arithmetic.

Philosophically, I am not aware of any Government that claims creation of jobs. Technically, public jobs are either created by the Civil Service or another Public body, as opposed to the Government itself. Practically, any jobs creation, in public or private sector is enabled by the economy (people working in, investing in, paying taxes in and interacting with public and private sectors) and not by the Government. Thus, Government may facilitate jobs creation by enacting supportive legislation or providing legislative and/or regulatory strategy, or not impede one, but it cannot create jobs. Minister can act as PR middle(wo)men and announce jobs created, but that is about as close to jobs creation as they ever get.

Aside from this, there is a simple matter of arithmetic.

Recall that the current Government came into power at the end of 1Q 2011. Let us suppose the Government really got down to ‘creating jobs’ by 1Q 2012. Which means the Government has been at its jobs game for roughly 14-15 quarters through 3Q 2015 or, at the lower end 3 years and a half. That means that the Government should have created “over” 182,000 jobs in that period. This benign to the Minister claim, because if we are to look at the record of the entire duration of the Government, his claim would have equated to roughly 221,000 jobs created.

Let us note that 1Q 20912 was the lowest point in employment levels during the crisis, so comparatives to that base should improve Government position: prior to 2Q 2012 jobs were being destroyed in the economy, past the end of 1Q 2012 they were being added.

Keep the two numbers in your mind: we are told that the Government has ‘created’ either more than 182,000 or more than 221,000 jobs over its tenure, depending on where one starts to count.

Now, consult CSO QNHS database - the source of official counts for numbers in employment. Between the end of 1Q 2012 and 3Q 2015 (the latest for which we have data), total employment rose 158,000. But wait, these are not all jobs. 4,500 of that increase is in the category of Assisting Relative. And 121,200 of these additions are employees, including schemes. Beyond this, the above increase also includes 30,100 new (added) self-employed with no employees.

It is hard to assume that the Government can claim it 'created' self-employment jobs where there is not enough activity to hire staff, or that it increased the need to help relatives.

So put things together in a handy table:

Numbers speak for themselves. By the very best metric, Government is more than 1/2 year shy of the lowest end of the claim of 'more than 1,000 jobs created per week'. It is more than 1/2 year shy of the claim that there were '1,000 jobs created per week'.

This Government deserves credit for helping sustain conditions for the recovery. Some of these conditions trace to the policies put in place by its predecessor and continued by the present Government, some are down to Troika and implemented by this Government, some are undoubtedly facilitated by the efforts of the current Government. The economy is recovering and, by some metrics, very robustly. And jobs are being created by the economy (yes, by entrepreneurs, enterprises, their employees and their clients and investors, but not by the Government).

This is not to take away from the positives the Government should rightly claim. But it is to point out that some of the outlandishly bombastic claims are not quite warranted.

25/2/15: QNHS Q4 2014: Employment Growth by Sectors & Activity

In the first two posts covering the QNHS results for Q4 2014, I discussed

• Labour Force Participation Rate (poor news showing decline in the already historically low participation) and Unemployment Rate (goods news with unemployment - absent seasonal adjustment falling to 9.9% and the rate of decline in unemployment on quarterly basis accelerating): http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/02/25215-qnhs-q4-2014-labour-force.html
• The size of labour force (which is worrying and static at and around crisis trough) and broader measures of unemployment (at high enough levels to arrant concern, but declining rapidly, although inclusive of the state training programmes participants and emigration figures the declines are shallower than across the officially reported numbers), here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/02/25215-qnhs-q4-2014-broader-measures-of.html

Now, let's take a look at employment.

Total employment across all sectors stood at 1,938,900 in Q4 2014, up 1.52% y/y - a rate of increase that is slightly faster than 1.45% rise y/y recorded in Q3 2014. In level terms, employment rose 29,100 in 12 months through the end of 2014. Taking annual average, employment over 2014 rose 1.74% compared to 2013 average level of employment.

Despite this, Q2 2014 employment was still down 2.88% on crisis period peak employment although it is 6.24% above the crisis period trough. Relative to 2008 average, current employment levels are down 8.9%.

In simple term, to sum this result up, things are improving, but they are far from normal or where they should be.

Stripping out agriculture and public sector, private sector non-agricultural employment stood at 1,335,400 in Q4 2014, up 2.6% y/y, beating 1.32% rise in the same over 12 months through Q3 2014. In level terms, employment in non-agricultural private sectors rose 33,900, beating the headline total employment figures - a major good news.

Nonetheless, compared to 2008 average, private sector non-agricultural employment remains down 13.19%, while public sector (including sectors dominated by public employment) employment is up 4.8%.

As chart above shows, total employment is doing well, rising to the levels that are above the pre-crisis average and close to the difference between Q3 and Q4 2009. However, private non-agricultural employment is lagging, current at the levels well below pre-crisis average and between Q4 2009 - Q1 2010 levels.

Public and state-controlled sectors employment rose to 487,600 in Q4 2014, up 1.24% y/y (slower growth than in Q3 2014 when it expanded by 2.33% y/y), adding 6,100 jobs. Full year 2014 average employment levels here are 1.13% higher than full 2013 average. Q4 reading marks the highest level of non-private non-agricultural employment for the entire crisis period and is 4.8% above the 2008 average.

Meanwhile, agricultural employment shrunk 9.33% y/y in Q4 2014, having posted a decline of 0.81% y/y in Q3 2014. Loss of employment in the sector in 12 months through the end of Q4 2014 was 10,900, which was most likely partially responsible for gains of 13,100 in construction jobs. Still, over 12 months of 2014, agricultural employment levels were averaging 2.08% above the same for 2013.

Chart above shows basically flat employment in the state and state-controlled sectors, which, when contrasted with official public sector employment figures suggests shift of some public sector jobs from state to private contracting.

High value-added sectors also added jobs in Q4 2014, with 14,000 new jobs additions y/y a rate of employment growth of 2.03% y/y, virtually identical to 2.02% growth recorded in Q3 2014. As with state-controlled sectors employment, employment in high value-added sectors posted peak reading in Q4 2014 for the entire crisis period and stood 6.56% above 2008 average.

Table below provides summary of changes in employment across all sectors reported:

To summarise, we have healthy employment growth of 29,100 over 12 months of 2014 and the rate of growth has accelerated between Q3 and Q4. However, some sectors did post declines y/y in Q4 2014 and some posted weak performance to the upside. Good news is: private non-agricultural employment is rising faster than total employment and the rate of employment growth here accelerated in Q4 2014. High value-added sectors employment is also rising, at a rate faster than the overall employment is increasing.

22/8/2014: Minimum Wage and Employment: Recent Study

The effects of minimum wage laws on employment levels and employment prospects for various categories of workers are subject of voluminous literature in economics. Still, little consensus exists on whether higher minimum wages impede new jobs creation or destroy existent jobs or suppress earnings growth for lower wage employees.

A recent paper by Meer, Jonathan and West, Jeremy, titled "Effects of the Minimum Wage on Employment Dynamics" (June 26, 2012, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2094726) offers estimates "how the minimum wage affects both employment levels and dynamics... To do so, we employ the Business Dynamics Statistics, a long (1977-2009) panel of administrative data on the aggregate population of non-agriculture private-sector employers in the United States, broken out based on establishment location. These data offer the ability to examine gross job creation and destruction separately, an important advantage."

The authors first discuss "why even a carefully-designed study may not find a statistically significant effect of the minimum wage on employment levels":

1) "…Newly hired employees within a company are more likely to be paid minimum wage than are more senior employees. …It follows that minimum wage employees are likely to be relatively recent hires. …A direct implication is that minimum wage increases are most likely to affect workers who are (or would be) recent hires."

2)"…any reduction in new employment should also be reflected in total employment, so theoretically the decision of which of these outcomes to analyze is arbitrary. However, for estimates using a finite panel of real-world data, the distinction becomes much more important because the impact of an unrelated shock to total employment may easily overwhelm an effect of the minimum wage. Furthermore, …relatively rapid transitions to higher wages are common for minimum wage workers; we… calculate that nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers who remain employed after one year earn more than the minimum wage. This illustrates the policy importance of focusing on the job creation margin; if higher minimum wages reduce employment entry by these workers, they never have the opportunity to develop the skills or tenure to earn even higher wages."

3) "…inflation can inhibit identification of statistically significant employment effects,
especially in studies relying on data from the 1970s-1980s, which experienced relatively
high rates of inflation. Historically, minimum wages have been set in nominal dollars and not adjusted for inflation, so any nominal wage differential between two states will become economically less meaningful over time."

4) "…sooner or later every state experiences a nominal increase in its minimum wage, either due to a revision to a state law or because the federal minimum wage increases. Unlike the slow erosion of nominal minimum wage gaps brought about by inflation, a discrete increase to the counterfactual's minimum wage may quickly close or even reverse this gap. To put this another way: in the long run, there is no permanent control group. This situation would not be problematic if the minimum wage affected employment in an abrupt, discrete manner. But if the minimum wage primarily affects new employment, then it may take years to observe a statistically significant effect on total employment."

So the authors conclude that "considered together, we believe that examining employee hiring and job growth directly provides for a more accurate assessment of minimum wage effects than examining total
employment. There are also theoretical arguments for why minimum wages are more likely to impact employment dynamics than employment levels."

The authors find that "…the minimum wage significantly reduces rates of job growth, that this occurs primarily through reductions in job creation, and that this effect is somewhat more pronounced in continuing establishments than for establishment births. We also find that the reduction in job creation cannot be attributed to reductions in employee turnover, as well as no effects on the entry and exit of establishments."

7/8/2013: Sunday Times, July 28, 2013: Ireland's Polarised Paralysed Economy

This is an unedited version of my article in the Sunday Times from July 28, 2013.


The latest news from the economy front both in Ireland and across the Euro area have been signaling some shallow improvements in growth outlook for the second and third quarters of 2013. However, the end game of a recovery currently building up will be a greater polarization of the real economy and little net new jobs creation. As supply of skills by indigenous workers remains mismatched to the demand for skills by exporting sectors, restart of exports-led growth of the future will not trickle down to the ordinary families. Meanwhile, long-term unemployment is hitting harder our older indigenous workers, and our entrepreneurship is in a structural decline. Responding to these problems will require a radical shift in the way we enable entrepreneurship, support professional labour mobility and increase investment in education and skills.


To see this, first consider the drivers for the latest improvements in the news flows. June Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for Manufacturing in Ireland has finally reached just a notch above 50.0, signaling expansion for the first time since February 2013. Services PMI jumped to 54.9, marking 11th consecutive month of index readings above 50. Across the Euro area, Spanish Manufacturing PMI reached above 50 in June for the first time in 27 months. Italian PMI posted a rise for the third month in a row, although it remains below the expansion mark of 50.0. Germany's July composite PMI estimate for services and manufacturing hit a 17-month high at 52.8 and French estimate came in at 48.8 - an improvement on 47.4 in June.

Even though the end to the longest recession in euro area's history might be in sight, the recovery is unlikely to be strong. Euro area economies, Ireland included, genuinely lack sustainable drivers for growth. In addition, the processes of establishing new sources for future growth - new entrepreneurship and investment cycles – have been severely delayed both by the crises and by our policy responses to these crises.

In normal recessions, higher unemployment leads to higher involuntary entrepreneurship, as laid off workers deploy their skills and expertise into the market through self-employment and as sole-traders. In Ireland, in part due to tax hikes hitting the self-employed the hardest, this did not take place. According to the Enterprise Ireland report published earlier this month, the proportion of early stage entrepreneurs here has fallen from 8.1% average over 2003-2008 period to 6.1% in 2012. Ireland now ranks 18th out of 34 OECD countries in terms of entrepreneurship, just as the Government is expending millions on PR campaigns extolling the virtues of its pro-entrepreneurial policies and culture.

Beyond shrinking entrepreneurship, Irish labour markets are continuing to show signs of long-term, structural distress. The headline figures on Irish unemployment tell the story.

At the end of June 2013, there were 516,751 recipients of Live Register supports, including those in state and community training programmes. Some of the latter are involuntary in so far as they are linked to continued receipt of unemployment benefits. In June 2011, the same number was 517,187. The Government is boisterously claiming the economy is creating 2,000 new jobs per month. The same Government has spent hundreds of millions on enterprise supports and investment schemes, published series of programmes promising new jets in tens of thousands. Amidst this PR circus, the unemployment supports counts have declined by less than 500 over two years.

Based on the Quarterly National Household Survey data, we can take a more granular look into the jobs creation dynamics in the economy.

Between Q1 2011 and Q1 2013, the latest period for which data is available, total non-agricultural employment in the country fell by 9,200. In 12 months through March 2013, Irish economy added only 4,900 non-agricultural jobs. Some 19,000 shy of what our ministers in charge of jobs creation and enterprise policies allege. Controlling for health and education jobs, private sector saw destruction of 11,600 non-agricultural jobs since Q1 2011 when the Government came to power. Even in the booming Information and Communication services, overall employment fell by 1,100 in 12 months through Q1 2013, despite robust hiring in the exporting MNCs operating in the sector.

Underneath the surface, the trend is for displacement of Irish workers by age cohorts and by skills. This means that more and more foreign workers are taking up new positions created in sectors such as ICT and IFS to replace positions lost in domestic sectors. It also implies that older Irish workers are now being consigned to the risk of perpetual unemployment.

On the first point, while there is virtually no net new jobs additions in the economy, the positions that are being created to replace those being destroyed by the crisis, are getting progressively worse in terms of their quality. In the higher value-added private sectors, such as ICT services, professional, scientific, and technical activities, financial, insurance services and the likes, employment shrunk by 6,100 in Q1 2013 compared to Q1 2011 and by 900 compared to Q1 2012. Year on year there have been some 9,300 new jobs created in the top three professional occupations when ranked by earnings. However, more than half of these were part-time jobs. These are hardly the jobs that are attracting foreign talent into Ireland, suggesting that of the full time jobs in ICT and IFSC sectors created, the vast majority are taken up by non-Irish workers.

Regarding the last point, in June 2013, compared to June 2010, by age, the only cohort of Irish workers that saw a decline in Live Register numbers are those under the age of 35. All other age cohorts saw increases in Live Register participation. Between June 2010 and June 2013, numbers of long-term unemployed and underemployed rose 20% for workers under 35 years of age, 54% for workers of 35-54 years of age, and 106% for workers older than 55. In effect, we are currently assigning older workers to spend the rest of their working-age life in unemployment.

All of the above is best summed by the quarterly data on unemployment. At the end of March 2013, 25% of Irish workforce was either unemployed, underemployed or marginally-attached to the workforce, up on 23.7% in Q1 2011. Adding to the above those in state training schemes pushes the true broad unemployment rate in Ireland to 29% in Q1 2013, up on 26% in Q1 2011.


As I asserted at the top of the article, evidence shows that there is basically no net jobs creation going on in Ireland since Q1 2011. It further shows that older and predominantly Irish workers are experiencing an ever-rising risk of perpetual unemployment. Amongst the younger cohorts of workers, the main beneficiaries of the ICT and IFSC exporting sectors boom are temporary residents from abroad. Of the jobs still being added in the economy, majority are of low quality and cannot be relied upon to sustain long-term financial viability of Irish households. Lastly, skills mismatches between indigenous workers and exporting sectors demand are offering little hope that exports-led growth of the future will trickle down to ordinary families in Ireland.

The response to the above problem will have to be a structural shift in the way we support and treat entrepreneurship, professional labour mobility and investment in education and skills.

Currently, government policies overwhelmingly disfavor self-employed, indigenous entrepreneurs, and risk-taking professionals. In return, our policies promote development of tax optimizing FDI-backed large enterprises. Thus, early stage entrepreneurs face higher direct and indirect taxes than mature corporations and PAYE employees. Risk-taking, mobile, highly skilled professionals face lower quality and higher cost safety nets than immobile, old-skills-reliant tenured employees. Both mobile employees and entrepreneurs are also facing higher risks of unemployment, greater prospects of disruptive shocks to their incomes and larger exposure to health and family shocks. Meanwhile, for would-be entrepreneurs and flexible markets employees currently in underemployment or unemployment, life-long learning systems are costly to access and, with few exceptions, are of dubious quality.

These obstacles to increasing functional mobility of workers and human capital investments in our workforce can only be dealt with via a drastic, costly and disruptive reforms of our welfare system.  In part, the Government is currently attempting to undertake some of these reforms, albeit against the rising tide of internal discontent between the coalition partners.

But the current reforms proposals are not going far enough. Specifically, we will need to separate unemployment supports from general welfare and make these supports available to self-employed and flex-employment workers at no increase in cost of provision to these workers. The test for accessing all benefits – unemployment insurance and general welfare – should include skills levels and the entire past history of employment and entrepreneurship. Thus, higher unemployment supports should be given to those who have contributed more in the past in terms of taxes paid and entrepreneurship or human capital investment efforts undertaken. Conversely, they should have lower access to welfare benefits. To afford the strengthening of the safety net at the front end of unemployment, we will have to cut back the general social welfare benefits for able-bodied adults.

Parallel to these reforms we also need to change the way we do business in the areas such as childcare and life-long-learning. The goal of such reforms should be to increase access and supports for families at risk of unemployment in the 30-35 years of age and older cohorts. One possible long-term improvement would be to incentivize on-shoring of corporate training services into Ireland by the multinationals, coupled with requirement that such services take on a set percentage of Irish workers for training purposes and apprenticeships. Another reform can see greater and more strategic engagement of multinationals with indigenous entrepreneurs and SMEs.

A deep re-think of our current policies on dealing with unemployment requires breaking down traditional siloes in public policy and management that exist between various departments. The last two years – filled with good intentions and loud policies announcements show that the strategies deployed to-date are not working.

Box-out:

The latest data from the Residential Property Price Index (RPPI) shows that Dublin property prices posted a year on year price increase of 4.15% in June and a 1.69% cumulative rise over the last six months. However encouraging this might sound, the data must be treated with caution for a number of reasons. Firstly, the main driver for the latest improvement in the RPPI was sales of Dublin apartments. These are highly volatile and are based on few transactions. Secondly, outside Dublin, the markets remain weak. Thirdly, latest mortgages data shows that while borrowing posted a cautious rise in the first half of 2013, mortgages affordability is falling. Lastly, current sales levels and valuations are not pricing in the upcoming wave of foreclosures (starting with Buy-to-Let markets around Q4 2013 and running though 2014) that will be required to deleverage banks balance sheets. The fact is: in June 2013 the All-Properties RPPI, was still down 1.5% on Q1 2012 average and is basically unchanged on December 2012-January 2013 levels. In other words, while pockets of strength might emerge in Dublin market, overall property market is currently bouncing at the bottom of the negative cycle, looking for a catalyst either up or down.

05/11/2011: Jobs destruction in Ireland 2008-2010

So we had the Celtic Tiger, now we are having a Celtic Bust. Our extreme (for a young, small open economy with high levels of tertiary education - in numbers, if not quality - etc). But how do we stack up against other advanced economies in this area?

Here's some data from the OECD covering the period of the crisis (2008-2010, no annual data for 2011 yet) on jobs destruction in Ireland, compared to same in other advanced economies.

For a small economy, even in absolute terms, the number of jobs lost in Ireland in 2008-2010 period was 261,000 or 8th largest loss in the sample of 24 advanced economies. Net of new jobs created (+11,000), Irish economy lost 251,000 (note rounding differences) jobs in the period covered. The net loss we sustained in terms of jobs destruction in absolute terms was the 5th largest in the advanced economies sample.

Chart below puts the above numbers in relative context. As a percentage of total employment, Irish net jobs destruction was 12.2% - second highest after Estonia.

In terms of sectors most severely impacted by losses, Construction leads with 87.8% share of all jobs changes during the crisis. Surprisingly - being the source of so much destruction via Irish domestic banking collapse - Financial Services jobs category posted the shallowest jobs declines at 15.1%. This is most likely due to the lack of layoffs in the state-controlled banking sector, plus the resilience of the IFSC. The only sector that saw increases in jobs numbers is the sector of Community, social and personal services.