The ocean is an important natural resource and offers considerable income and employment opportunity to the Irish economy. The last two decades have seen a realisation that whilst nationally economies may benefit from trade liberalisation, specific regions may not. This has led to the...

Much economic policy focuses on increasing or maintaining employment at a national level. However, within the EU, the move to a single market and the increased rate of globalisation has led to a recognition that not all regions would benefit from trade liberalisation. This has led to an...

Wave Energy Conversion (WEC) devices are at a pre-commercial stage of development with feasibility studies sensitive to uncertainties surrounding assumed input costs. This may affect decision making. This paper analyses the impact these uncertainties may have on investor, developer and...

Spatial microsimulation modelling has developed for over a half century and is now a mainstream analytical tool within the microsimulation community accounting for a very significant proportion of papers at conferences and within the journal. There have been a number of recent surveys of...

In this paper we attempted to chart the impact of the early part of Ireland's economic crisis from 2008-2010 on the distribution of income. In order to decompose the impact of components of income, we utilised a microsimulation methodology the EU-SILC User Database. In order to do this we had to...

The economic impact of the marine economy is poorly understood at both a national and regional level in Ireland. A recent paper by estimated the economic value of the marine sector for Ireland at the national level. This paper presents a follow up analysis of the Irish marine sector at the...

The main aim of this paper is to provide a spatial modelling framework for labour force participation and income estimation. The development of a household income distribution for Ireland had previously been hampered by the lack of disaggregated data on individual earnings. Spatial...

The realisation that the world's oceans play an important role in climate regulation and many territory activities, notably food production, coupled with economic changes and the rapid advancement in ocean technology have seen a shift in the perception of the importance of marine resources. This...

This paper, using Ireland as a case study, examines the relationship between economic activities and river water quality. The stipulation from the EU water framework directive (WFD) that all surface waters in the EU must be of ‘good ecological status’ by 2015 necessitate a quantitative...

Using statistical matching techniques, economists can now create attribute rich datasets by matching across the common variables in two or more datasets. The farm level spatial microsimulation model developed in this paper uses one of many combinational optimisation techniques – simulated...