How Important is Agriculture and the AgriFood Sector in Ireland?

Alan Matthews

Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department

Abstract: Conventional estimates of the economic contribution of agriculture and the agri-food sector suggest that the overall sector still accounts for around 10% of total employment, GNP and exports, even after the structural changes brought about by the Celtic Tiger economy in the 1990s. These estimates, however, conceal the extent to which primary agriculture, in particular, is now dependent on public policy transfers. This article undertakes a statistical deconstruction of agriculture's contribution to the Irish economy to highlight its dependence on subsidies. It goes on to query the sustainability of these subsidies to commercial agriculture in the light of WTO agricultural negotiations and EU enlargement and argues that more vigorous steps are now needed to prepare a more competitive agriculture which would be viable at world market prices.

JEL-codes: Q10 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2001_papers/tepno18AM21.PDF (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:tcd:tcduee:200118

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Colette Angelov ().