A Quality Adjusted Measure of Labour Services for Ireland

Mary Keeney ()

The Economic and Social Review, 2010, vol. 41, issue 2, 149-172

Abstract: This paper presents annual indices of labour input adjusted for the age, education and gender distributions of the Irish workforce for the period 1999-2008. Growth in labour services is divided between the increase in hours and improvement in the productive quality of these hours. Improvement in labour quality, as proxied by education, age and gender, has added on average 0.7 percentage points per year to the growth rate in total labour input. Changes in education account for two-thirds of the improvement in labour quality, with gender and age distributions equally sharing the remaining third. Even in the face of declining total employment, growth in labour services remained positive in 2008 due to past investment in human capital. A key application of this quality-adjusted labour series is that a proportion of growth usually attributed to total factor productivity growth can now be accounted for as an improvement in the quality of labour input.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esr.ie/Vol41_2/02-Keeney.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eso:journl:v:41:y:2010:i:2:p:149-172

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Economic and Social Review from Economic and Social Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aedin Doris ().