Rate at which jobs were lost after 2008 was unprecedented
employment
THE number of jobs lost in Ireland after the property crash is unprecedented, according to the Central Bank. Its research says that between 2008 and 2010 the increase in job destruction was at historic levels.
Central Bank official Martina Lawless has looked at the rate of jobs created and destroyed in the years after the crisis began.
She also found that the drop in new jobs coming on stream hit an all-time low during those two turbulent years.
The Celtic Tiger years of the late 1990s are associated with a strong increase in the job creation rate that peaked at 16pc in 2000. Ms Lawless says this was followed by a fairly sharp but short-lived decline in employment growth in the dot.com recession from 2001 to 2003.
However, even during those heady days, when job-creation rates ran to between 12pc and 15pc of total employment each year, the rate at which jobs were lost never fell below 7pc.
But in 2009 the scale of job losses rose to 16pc while the rate at which new jobs were being created fell to below 5pc. Both rates are "unmatched" in the 37-year period she examined, her paper states. The rate of jobs losses began to steady slightly in 2010 as did the number of new job announcements.
Ms Lawless notes that the number of jobs lost in Irish firms was higher than those shed by multinationals during those two years.
- Siobhan Creaton
Irish Independent
