So how smart really is the economy?

A perennial trope of the Irish economic debate is that of the “smart economy”. This is to be contrasted, one imagines, with the “dumb politics”. So how smart is the economy?

Persons in employment are classified according to where they work, among other categories. These get quite detailed, allowing a fairly high granularity. At a higher level a standard international classification is used. Each coding contains a fairly exhaustive description of what exactly is and is not in that section.

The CSO collects data on a quarterly basis on employment, including details of where, in the above sense, people work. This gives a great picture of where we are and as it is longitudinal, where we have come from. Starting in 1998 it gives us now a 16-year picture: over the end of the tiger, through the boom, the crash and now into the nascent recovery.