Britain’s productivity flatlined in 2008, eight years before the referendum. Brexit added cost, and serious frictions but the real causes run deeper: weak investment, weak industrial strategy, and an employment model that grew jobs while output per hour stalled. Even Northern Ireland, the one part of the UK with a genuinely distinctive post-Brexit settlement, tells the same story.
The Irish Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) was commissioned by the Shared Ireland Initiative in the Department of the Taoiseach, to report on relative productivity between the North and the South. Previous ESRI reports have looked at comparisons on health and education delivery and cross-border trade. Historically, most reports circulating in NI tend to compare NI with GB for obvious reasons and this report on productivity is thought to be the first to attempt an island-wide analysis. The results …
A texter to Good Morning Ulster today asked the question: ‘Why do we need cheap foreign labour when we have 100,000 unemployed?’ I voted against Brexit and I also believe it is good to have free movement of labour, but I must admit the texter had a point. It is a strange state of affairs that we import labour from all over the world when we have so many local people economically inactive. From the NISRA Report on Economic Inactivity: …
Interesting report by the Centre for European Reform, BREXIT BRITAIN: THE POOR MAN OF WESTERN EUROPE? Contrary to what many would have you believe the UK economy is not exactly the dynamic powerhouse they make it out to be. Some details from the report: The UK has economic strengths, such as a flexible labour market, which ensures that unemployment is low even in many of its economically struggling regions. But contrary to much of the received wisdom, Britain has not been one …
Since the financial crash of 2008, and the Great Recession which followed, the UK has been struggling with a productivity crisis. Productivity, defined here as the increase in GDP per hour worked, increased very steadily in the UK for fifty years until 2008. Since then, productivity growth has halted entirely. As is becoming traditional when looking at any sort of economic analysis, the situation in Northern Ireland is particularly bad. Northern Ireland has always had lower levels of productivity than …
