IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v12y1996i3p74-86.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Stabilization and Adjustment in a Small Open Economy: Ireland, 1979-95

Author

Listed:
  • Walsh, Brendan

Abstract

At the end of the 1970s, the Irish economy was faced with an unsustainable current account deficit, rising unemployment, high inflation, and a rapidly increasing public debt. By the mid-1990s Ireland's growth rate was the highest in the OECD, unemployment was declining rapidly, the current account was in surplus, and the country seemed likely to meet the Maastricht financial and fiscal convergence criteria. Domestic absorption has been sharply reduced despite a mild appreciation of the real exchange rate. External competitiveness, measured in terms of relative unit wage costs in a common currency, improved dramatically owing to the sharp increase in the share of foreign direct investment (FDI) in total capital formation. While the fiscal correction of the late 1980s helped restore private-sector confidence and was indispensable for progress on financial convergence, the boost to labour productivity given by the increased inflow of FDI is credited with the key role in the economy's transformation. Copyright 1996 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Walsh, Brendan, 1996. "Stabilization and Adjustment in a Small Open Economy: Ireland, 1979-95," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 12(3), pages 74-86, Autumn.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:12:y:1996:i:3:p:74-86
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Valerie Cerra & Jarkko Soikkeli & Sweta C. Saxena, 2003. "How Competitive is Irish Manufacturing?," The Economic and Social Review, Economic and Social Studies, vol. 34(2), pages 173-193.
    2. Brendan M. Walsh, 2003. "Taxation and foreign direct investment in Ireland," Open Access publications 10197/1602, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    3. Velimir Šonje & Boris Vujčić, 1999. "Croatia In the Second Stage of Transition 1994–1999," Working Papers 1, The Croatian National Bank, Croatia.
    4. FitzGerald, John & Kearney, Ide & Morgenroth, Edgar & Smyth, Diarmaid, 1999. "National Investment Priorities For The Period 2000-2006," Research Series, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), number PRS33.
    5. Raymond Parsons, 2007. "The Emergence Of Institutionalised Social Dialogue In South Africa," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 75(1), pages 1-21, March.
    6. Frank Barry, 2000. "Foreign direct investment, cost competitiveness and the transformation of the Irish economy," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(3), pages 289-305.
    7. Eamonn D'Arcy & Tony McGough & Sotiris Tsolacos, 1999. "An econometric analysis and forecasts of the office rental cycle in the Dublin area," Journal of Property Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(4), pages 309-321, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:12:y:1996:i:3:p:74-86. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.