Now showing 1 - 10 of 47
  • Publication
    Health insurance in Ireland : issues and challenges
    (ESRI, ISSC and University of Ulster, 2004-11)
    Over the past decade or so the context in which Irelands complex mix of public and private health care operates has changed radically, as the numbers purchasing health insurance have soared and the nature of the insurance market has changed in response to EU regulations. This has widened the divide between those with and without health insurance, and called into question the public-private structure on which Ireland has relied for many years. Almost half the Irish population now pay for private health insurance, one of the highest levels of coverage in the OECD. This is despite the fact that hospital care is what private health insurance mostly covers, and everyone has entitlement to public hospital care from the state. The insured can avail of private health care, but much of this private care is actually delivered in public hospitals. The resulting two-tier system is now widely regarded as problematic from an equity perspective, but there are also serious efficiency issues arising from the incentive structures embedded in this particularly close intertwining of public and private.
      1959
  • Publication
    Measuring consistent poverty in Ireland with EU SILC data
    (Economic and Social Research Institute, 2006-05) ; ;
    In this paper we seek to make use of the newly available Irish component of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) in order to develop a measure of consistent poverty that overcomes some of the difficulties associated with the original indicators employed as targets in the Irish National Anti-Poverty Strategy. Our analysis leads us to propose a set of economic strain indicators that cover a broader range than the original basic deprivation set. The accumulated evidence supports the view that a revised consistent poverty measure that combines a threshold of two or more economic strain items with income poverty at seventy per cent of median income, identifies those exposed to generalised deprivation arising from lack of resources in a manner consistent with their use as targets in the National Anti-Poverty Strategy. The consistently poor differ from others not only in relation to income poverty and economic strain but also in terms of exposure to a range of life-style deprivations and subjective economic pressures.
      1260
  • Publication
      441
  • Publication
    Evaluating the impact of a national minimum wage : evidence from a new survey of firms
    (Royal Economic Society, 2002) ;
    In April 2000 the Irish government introduced a national minimum wage of £4.40 an hour. This paper uses data from a specially designed panel survey of firms to estimate the labour market effects of this change. Initial results show that employment growth among firms with low wage workers prior to the legislation was not significantly different to that for firms not affected by the legislation. However, this measure of the minimum wage bite is likely to overestimate the number of firms affected by the legislation. When we use a more refined measure of the minimum wage bite, which takes account of general wage growth in the economy we find the minimum wage may have had a statistically significantly negative effect on employment for the small number of firms most severely affected by the legislation.
      1196
  • Publication
    The Great Recession and the Changing Distribution of Economic Stress across Income Classes and the Life Course in Ireland: A Comparative Perspective
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2016-01-26) ; ;
    The impact of the Great Recession led to changes in the distribution of economic stress across the life course in Ireland, one of the countries severely affected by the economic crisis. Our peak to trough analysis shows that in Ireland in 2008 there was a clear life course gradient in relation to economic stress with children occupying the most favourable and the elderly the least favourable position. Over time the gradient became sharper with the relative position of younger groups deteriorating. In 2008 life course differentiation was significantly sharper for the precarious and poverty classes than for the high income groups. For the former graduated differentiation across the range of the life course was evident while for the latter the primary contrast was between the elderly and all other stages. Thus the major line of differentiation in terms of both overall stress levels and their patterning across the life course was between the precarious and poor income classes and the high income group. While stress levels increased for all groups between 2008 and 2012, within the high income class the elderly group saw their relative position particularly enhanced while children experienced the sharpest deterioration. Among the precarious and poor classes, the elderly again experienced an improvement in their relative position while for the former the sharpest deterioration was experienced by the older middle aged group and for the latter the younger middle aged group. Thus while the elderly experienced a cross class improvement in their relative position for other life course stage the impact of the crisis was contingent on income class. That the Irish pattern of change was not an inevitable outcome of the economic crisis is illustrated by the fact that in Iceland a similar starting produced a quite different set of changes involving an erosion of life course differentials in the impact of precarity and poverty. Greece on the other hand provides an example of the emergence of life course differentiation where the prerecession period was characterised by their absence. Clearly policy choices not only affect such differentiation but the extent to which they operate differentially across income cases.
      332
  • Publication
    Reference dependent financial satisfaction over the course of the Celtic Tiger : a panel analysis utilising the Living in Ireland Survey 1994-2001
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2006) ; ;
    The link between income and subjective satisfaction with one’s financial situation is explored in this paper using a panel analysis of 4,000 individuals tracked through the course of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom period, 1994-2001. The impact of the level of individual and household income, the time-path of income and the impact of reference group income on financial satisfaction are all considered. To the extent that income influences financial satisfaction, there is strong evidence from this paper that household income has a greater effect on financial satisfaction than individual income. There is also evidence that changes in income have an independent effect on financial satisfaction with the time derivative of income entering positively in the financial satisfaction equation. Thus, our paper gives further evidence to support the hypothesis that individuals process changes as well as absolute levels of income. While reference group income has a negative effect at the start of the period it has no effect at the end.
      174
  • Publication
      5011