The Live Register has fallen below 400,000 – the first time since May 2009. While the Live Register is not an official measurement, the Seasonally Adjusted Standardised Unemployment Rate shows unemployment at 11.9 percent. Our unemployment rate is now down to the Euro zone average. This led the Minister for Social Protection to state:
'Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton said the figures were encouraging and signalled Ireland’s return to being a “normal euro zone country”'.
Yes, when it comes to a straight unemployment rate we may well be a ‘normal euro zone country’. But there’s something that has been not so normal and which has impacted directly on the Irish unemployment rate. Yes, I’m talking about emigration.
Let’s compare the increase in Irish emigration since 2008 with that of other EU-15 countries. We’ll do this by taking the annual average number of emigrants between 2008 and 2011 (the last year Eurostat has data for) and comparing it with the annual average number of emigrants between 1998 and 2007.
Spain has been particularly hard hit – with over 400,000 emigrating in 2011. Ireland comes second followed by Portugal. After these three countries, the next hardest hit by emigration was Italy.
Irish emigration has been more than five times the average of other EU-15 countries. In terms of emigration, Ireland is hardly normal.
The number of unemployed has been falling. The Government would have us believe that this is due to rising employment and the success of their ‘jobs’ policies (we will address the issue of the rising employment numbers next week). Here, let’s look at what might be contributing to falling jobless numbers.
This measures numbers between the 3rd quarter of 2011 (when unemployment in absolute numbers was at its highest) and the 4th quarter in 2013. The numbers in unemployment fell by 75,000. However, the number of working age people emigrating was 116,000 while the numbers on labour activation schemes (training, education, etc.) increased by 29,000.
The total number emigrating or additional labour activation participants increased at nearly twice the level of the fall in unemployment.
There are some notes to this table:
- Not all emigration can be put down to recession-related factors. Even during the boom times, there was emigration. So the number in the table above represents the level of emigration above the average annual emigration figures for 1995 – 2007 (the average during this period was an annual 26,000). Also, the estimated emigration data only goes up to April; the above assumes a year-to-year flow. The difference would be small.
- Some of the increase in labour activation participants can be a positive - especially when it represents a return to education, retraining, or maintaining contact with the labour market. Of course, some is not very positive: Jobsbridge which is a subsidy to employers and Gateway which constitutes coerced labour.
Even if there was no additional recession-related recession or an increase in labour activation participants, this wouldn’t necessarily equal a corresponding rise in unemployment. Some would be dependents, some would be ‘discouraged' (i.e. leave the labour force), some might be in education. However, it is reasonable to assume that unemployment would have increased substantially, even if we can’t put an exact figure on it. In all probability, the number of unemployed would have remained broadly the same, if not rise.
No, Ireland is not a normal Eurozone country. It’s just that Ireland has returned to form, exporting its excess labour. If not for that, we would be exposed for what we are - a truly abnormal Euro zone country.
This is a typical old world leftwing politically correct post.
Ehh - Micheal , I hate to break this to you but Ireland does not have a Irish labour market.
Whats happening is pretty simple - the most dynamic and money oriented Irish are leaving these shores.
The less capable Irish are then being subsequently replaced by euro and world based labour flows.
The objective is simply to maintain the rate of profit for the financial centers but at a grave cost to the local population.
The energy flux per person is crashing.
This is the reality of the modern market state we live in.
The population is increasing yet energy consumption is declining.
Need I remind you this is what happened in Ireland during the first half of the 19th century when the British banking union became a fully formed construct.
The euro experiment is a replica of the Victorian monetary petri dish .
Leftwing people who chose to join the euro market state are operating outside the Treaty of Westphalia.
Do you know what this means for the average person ?
Well on the one hand it means politics now has no meaning.
How can you be either left or right leaning in such a ecosystem ?
Posted by: The Dork of Cork | March 10, 2014 at 05:22 PM
Ahh the good gov Honohan talking about the famine thingy....
Governor Honohan
Faint echoes of pre-Famine in the recent bubble
"I hope it will not be considered invidious or distasteful to draw some parallels between the Famine and more recent events. A million dead and a million emigrants – the traditional aphorism, now regarded by scholars as conservative (Ó Gráda, 2012) – are not to be compared in scale or nature with the consequences of what has happened in the recent crisis. But there is some similarity in the build-up of vulnerability and monoculture through early marriage, subdivision of land-holdings and reliance on a single nutritious but vulnerable foodstuff that preceded the Great Famine and the property bubble banking monoculture of the recent bubble.
"True, even if there have been mistakes, it is surely the case that the Irish policy response has been less ideologically contaminated than that of the 1840s. But, as with many other episodes of economic downturn, international policy activism was stayed, not only by the constraints of infeasibility, but by censoriously excessive concerns about moral hazard."
What utter bollox.
He identifies the symptoms but the cause
Banker pox.
Here is Yves Smith from last year.
"Finally, for those watching the history of currency unions closely, it is interesting to note that the Irish pound was ended in 1826. One major (albeit dated) study of Irish economic history argues that “the suppression of paper money in 1826 the tragic effects of the Great Famine twenty years later were made inevitable”. If this latter point about the Irish pound is true, it implies that Ireland has fallen into another trap similar to the one that plagued it in the 19th century. The difference is that this time Ireland’s politicians gave up autonomy rather then having it yanked from them. Words such as tragedy and farce don’t begin to describe their crisis."
This is simple stuff.
Scarce currency policy forces you to export so as to obtain currency.
This destroys local economic redundancy such as basic trade connections between the village market town and city.
Its as predictable as night following day.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=T_x5dIwTzOQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Posted by: The Dork of Cork | March 11, 2014 at 12:00 AM