Assessing Economic Trends in Ireland and Northern Ireland
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What economic trends are being assessed in Ireland and Northern Ireland?
Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk.
Yes, this is Breakfast Business with me, Emmett Oliver. It's great to have you along on this Monday morning. Now, we oftentimes talk about Northern Ireland versus the Republic of Ireland in whole loads of political context. But what about in economic terms? The government is today launching a new report on assessing economic trends in Ireland and Northern Ireland. This is the first report in a new annual series from the ESRI examining economic developments across the island to see, I suppose, which ones are performing and in what way. And I'm now joined by Dr Adele Bergen, who is one of the co-authors of this report. Good morning to you, Adele.
Good morning, Amos. Thanks for having me on.
It's great. Now, of course, this is always the difficult first question because there's so many findings in here. We can pull out different ones about income. We can have ones about employment output. But which one do you think is the most interesting one to you that you kind of went, oh, that's not what I expected to see?
Well, I suppose maybe it's some of our results in terms of living standards. So the report looks at commonly used measures of living standards north and south. And we find gaps in living standards that generally favour Ireland. And most of these gaps are widening over time. So I suppose in terms of things like output per capita. So for Ireland, we look at GNI. The Republic of Ireland, just to be clear. Just to be clear, yeah. So for the Republic, we look at GNI star per capita. For Northern Ireland, it's GDP per capita. And between the two, there's a gap of around 84% favouring Ireland. In terms of household income, it's 10%. Hourly earnings around 30%. But I suppose one of the most valuable indicators is life expectancy because it reflects kind of cumulative impact of a wide range of social and economic factors.
So everything from income to access to healthcare, to the overall performance of public services and the socio-economic environment that we live in. And we find that there's a gap in life expectancy North and South favouring the Republic. So in Ireland, life expectancy for men is around 80.9 years and that's two years more than in Northern Ireland. And for women, it's 84.2 years in Ireland, and that's one and a half years more than in Northern Ireland.
Right. Fascinating. I mean, a lot of this stuff is economic, but then it kind of merges into the social. I know Northern Ireland traditionally has had difficulties with early school leaving and non-active participation in the labour market. So those two seem to be still in the mix. There hasn't been much closing of that gap that I understand.
No, absolutely. So Ireland, in the south, we consistently outperform Northern Ireland in terms of education participation with higher enrolment rates across most age groups and particularly strong retention for those beyond the age 16. Just to give you one kind of pretty stark statistic on this, in 2023, around 94% of 15 to 19-year-olds were enrolled in education in Ireland. compared to just 69.2% in Northern Ireland.
What findings reveal the differences in living standards between the two regions?
So that's a gap of 25 percentage points.
Now, you probably don't cover this in the report, but I just wonder, the fact that there's such a strong presence of multinational companies in the Republic of Ireland, which a lot of people think has forced us in this part of the world to, you know, up that level of education, investment, third level and so on. Is that possibly an explanation for the skills and education profile between the two areas?
Absolutely. FDI plays a more prominent role in Ireland than it does in Northern Ireland. So, for example, around... around 27% of employment in Ireland is in FDI foreign-owned businesses compared to just 22% in Northern Ireland. And if we were to strip out GB firms, that falls to around 13% in Northern Ireland. So overall, we see that Ireland has a more kind of globalised, diverse FDI base, while Northern Ireland is more reliant on intra-UK investments.
Now, you do slightly wade into the political side.
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