Documents Ireland 766 results

"This study aims at exploring whether host-country immigration policies related to the selection of immigrants with regard to human capital and other characteristics relevant for the labour market are effective and result in these immigrants' more favourable economic integration. The focus in on immigration policies in two groups of countries. We compare liberal regimes (Ireland and the UK) which policies aimed at attracting highly-skilled immigrants to meet these countries' economic needs in highly-skilled jobs with those of Southern European countries (Italy, Spain and Greece), which pursued more lax and unselective policies, trying to attract labour force for low-skilled jobs in their countries' economies. Economic immigrants are expected to have favourable employment entry chances in each group of countries, not least due to the fact that the supply of immigrants apparently met the labour demand in host countries' economies. We also expect that more selective policies attracting better-qualified immigrants in Ireland and the UK would lead to these immigrants' better chances of higher-quality employment."

"During the 1990s, a prominent strategy of economic adjustment to the challenges of competitiveness and budgetary retrenchment among the non-corporatist countries of Europe was the negotiation of social pacts. Since the onset of the great recession and the Eurozone crisis, social pacts have been conspicuous by their absence. Why have unions not been invited into government buildings to negotiate paths of economic adjustment in the countries hardest hit by the crisis? Drawing on empirical experiences from Ireland and Italy—two cases on which much of the social pact literature concentrated—this article attributes the exclusion of unions to their declining legitimacy. Unions in the new European periphery have lost the capacity either to threaten governments with the stick of protest or to seduce policymakers with the carrot of problem-solving. They are now seen as a narrow interest group like any other."

"Political independence is usually associated with an attempt to reduce economic dependency on the former dominant or colonial power. For most of the early period since Irish independence the attempt to reduce exposure to the UK was implemented through tariff protection and restrictions on foreign ownership. Inward orientation eventually ran out of steam, culminating in sustained emigration and deep recession in the 1950s. The genesis in the mid-1950s of Ireland's low corporation tax regime facilitated later trade liberalization and diversified the economy away from the UK. These developments facilitated the full convergence on UK and broader Western European living standards that was eventually achieved in the 1990s. From 1979 the UK would diverge from most of the rest of Western Europe on exchange-rate policy, and Ireland was forced to choose between the two. The resulting difficulties can be ascribed to design flaws in the European monetary project and Ireland's failure to recognize the constraints that the new regime imposed."