Press Statement

Preasráiteas

25 June 2021

Go to release: Productivity in Ireland 2019

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (25 June 2021) published Productivity in Ireland 2019. This publication presents a comprehensive picture of productivity and economic growth in the Irish economy for both the Domestic and Other Sector, and the multinational-dominated Foreign Sector, since 2000. A separate analysis is also presented for 21 individual economic sectors in the economy.

Throughout this publication, the CSO has emphasised the need to separately assess productivity in the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) dominated Foreign Sector from productivity in the Domestic Sector. To enable this analysis, all indicators are presented for the total economy with separate results for the Foreign Sector and the Domestic Sector. This reduces the risk of analysts and policy makers attributing the results of the Foreign Sector, driven by globalisation events since 2015, to the economy as a whole.

Commenting on the figures, Michael Connolly, Senior Statistician, said:

‘‘In normal times, policy makers and analysts expect the highly globalised Irish economy to generally deliver strong productivity results. What is required is more detailed information on the performance of the overall Domestic Sector and for the economic sectors that make up this block. This is where the value of Productivity in Ireland is obvious as it presents a comprehensive analysis at these more detailed levels. What we observe are results for the Domestic Sector that in general compare favourably with the EU and with the individual member states where globalisation effects aren’t so dominant. For example, Labour Productivity growth for the entire period, 2010 to 2019, for the Foreign sector was 8.8% compared to 0.8% for the Domestic sector, the EU result was 1% for the same period.

Other impacts of globalisation on the data reported are the labour share in 2019 of 33%, a series low for this indicator and the increased level of capital assets per worker in 2019. However, for R&D intensity, an indicator on innovation activities in Ireland that excludes imports of IPP, we see Ireland ranked close to the EU average of 1.5% when using GNI*, this is probably a more informative indicator of this activity.

Considerable scope remains to develop and extend the productivity analysis presented today. Work has already begun on micro or firm-based analysis and we look forward to continuing the dialogue with our stakeholders once these results have been fully considered’.

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