Many previous studies have shown that the localisation of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

Ireland is the most successful EU economy in attracting export-platform foreign direct investment (FDI), and the increased FDI inflows of the 1990s are widely agreed to have been one of the most important factors in generating the remarkable boom that the country experienced over that decade....

Many previous studies have shown that the localisation of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

The Investment Development Path (IDP) hypothesis holds that a country’s net outward direct investment position is systematically related to its level of economic development. Ireland is an interesting test case because of the importance of inward FDI over the last three decades, the country's...

Ireland, in employment terms, is the most FDI-intensive economy in the EU. International comparisons of trends and levels of FDI intensity are usually based on balance-of-payments data however, and the international data series on Ireland’s inward FDI tell hugely conflicting stories. Such...

Ireland’s dramatic economic boom of the 1990s has been referred to as “the era of the Celtic Tiger”. In a little over a decade, real national income per head jumped from 65 percent of the Western European average to above parity, unemployment tumbled from double to less than half the...

Ireland was one of the first countries in the world to adopt an FDI-oriented development strategy. It remains to this day the most FDI-intensive economy in Europe. These factors have helped configure the institutional structure of the economy to be able to respond rapidly to changes in the...

Ireland, the “Celtic Tiger” economy of today, had for decades been one of the poorest of the Western European economies. This paper analyses the three-pronged approach of the Irish authorities in promoting successful high-tech start-up firms. An investment climate conducive to the emergence...

The information technology sector in Europe, comprising the production of computer hardware and software, is disproportionately located on the continent’s western periphery. The vast bulk of computers sold in Europe in the 1990s were assembled either in Ireland or Scotland, while Ireland also...

Many previous studies have shown that the localization of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...