posted on 2013-06-07, 12:57authored byMichael Anyadike-Danes, Helena Lenihan, Mark Hart
The extraordinary growth of the Irish economy - the ‘Celtic Tiger’ - since the
mid-1990s has attracted a great deal of interest, commentary and research.
Indeed, many countries are now looking to Ireland as an economic development
role model, and The Sapir Report (2003) has suggested that Ireland should be
seen as providing key lessons for other EU countries with regards to realising
the objectives set out in the Lisbon Agenda.
Much of the discussion of Ireland’s growth has focussed around growth triggers
such as: the long term consequences of fiscal stabilisation of the late 1980s; EU
structural funds; education; wage moderation; devaluations of the Irish punt.
From an industrial policy perspective, the focus has been on the importance of
FDI inflows and to a lesser extent on the performance of an indigenous stock of
firms to Ireland’s growth record. A notable absence from the industrial policy
discourse on the ‘Celtic Tiger’ has been any consideration of the role of new
business venture creation and entrepreneurship. In this paper we use
unpublished annual Irish VAT data for the period 1988-2004 to provide the first
detailed look at national and regional trends in business birth and death rates in
Ireland. We also undertake a sub-national analysis of the Irish VAT data to
understand more clearly the importance of new venture creation to past and
emerging spatial trends in Ireland. Our conclusion is that new business
formation made no detectable contribution to the acceleration of Ireland’s
growth in the late 1990s.
History
Publication
University of Cambridge Working Paper Series;March No. 380
Publisher
Centre for Business Research at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge