The authors analyze Ireland's experience with equality legislation since the passage of the Anti-Discrimination (Pay) Act of 1974 and the Employment Equality Act of 1977. After providing a detailed analysis of how the Acts function, they econometrically estimate the effects of equality...

Irish industrial policy makers have a long history of extensively using grant subsidies in order to encourage the creation of jobs in Irish manufacturing sectors. In this paper we empirically investigate the actual success of this strategy using sectoral level data on employment and grant...

This paper investigates whether knowledge accumulating activities, such as exporting, R&D, or worker training, can enhance plants' productivity. To this end, we use plant-level panel data for Irish manufacturing. Our results importantly indicate that productivity enhancing effects of these...

Using comparable data sets for five African countries we estimate, and evaluate possible explanations for, the employer size wage effect across these. Our results indicate, just as has been generally found for other developing and developed nations, that apart from observable worker...

Using comparable data sets for five African countries, we evaluate possible explanations for the employer-size wage effect across these countries. Our results indicate that, apart from observable worker characteristics, most theories cannot explain very much of the wage premium received in...

This paper assesses Ireland’s current competitiveness position in light of recent trends in prices, costs and productivity as well as a range of relevant technological and structural indicators.

This paper provides a review of aggregate and sectoral trends in Ireland’s historical and more recent productivity performance.

This paper reviews Ireland’s recent export performance, with emphasis on the reasons behind the strong gains in market share experienced by the economy over the past 15 years.

This paper analyses trends in sectoral specialisation in the EU and concludes the following: 1) The European production structure appears more homogenous than that of the US. 2) While sectoral specialisation has shown a slight increase in some smaller euro area countries towards the end-1990s,...

Chapter 1 provides an overview and assessment of the price competitiveness and export performance of the euro area and the larger euro area countries, as well as an evaluation of how standard equations have been able to explain actual export developments. Chapter 2 carries out a constant market...