BELFAST BRIEFING: Despite the gloom, the NYSE boost proved there were some reasons to cheer the city's economy

FROM A height of nearly 60m (197ft) and cocooned in a heated capsule, it is easy to imagine Belfast as picture-perfect without a cloud on the economic horizon.

The Wheel of Belfast is the perfect location to take stock of the city and enjoy a panoramic view of the changes of the past 12 months. Belfast’s ever-changing skyline is testimony to the city’s metamorphosis from its darker days to a top pre-recession tourist destination.

Visitor numbers to the North may have declined in the past year, but total visitor numbers from the Republic rose by 31 per cent in the first six months of 2009. It proved that the lure of the North’s biggest attraction for euro tourists – shopping – remained as strong as in 2008.

The joy of a wheel trip is that it transports you literally to a place where the economic realities fade away for 13 minutes. There are no mounting job losses, no local firms going bust and no major public sector cuts in the pipeline.

There is also a welcome absence of local politicians who during the past 12 months appeared clueless when it came to dealing with problems in the North’s economy.

It would be easy to assume, looking down on the city from one of the observation pods, that nothing much has changed in the past 12 months.

To the east, the giant cranes of Harland and Wolff still preside over the shipyard, the construction of Titanic Quarter continues, while Belfast City Airport, which carried about 2.6 million passengers in 2009, is now one of the fastest-growing airports in the UK.

To the right of the wheel, the city centre, with its high-street favourites and shopping centres such as the £400 million (€444 million) Victoria Square, appears relatively unchanged.

A glance to the north towards Divis Mountain also provides reassurance that the economic landscape remains intact.

But when you return to earth you find stark truths about Belfast and the North that are invisible from a height.

The number out of work in Northern Ireland has soared over the past year to 54,000. More than 18,000 joined the jobless queues during 2009. One in five of all 16-24-year-olds in the North is unemployed.

More worrying is the increase in the numbers officially described as “economically inactive”. These include students, the long-term sick and those who look after family or home.

In the past year there has been a 20,000 rise in those registered as economically inactive. The overall figure stands in the region of 571,000, markedly higher than the UK average. Out of this, 55,000 say they want a job.

This means the actual unemployment total in the North is now closer to 109,000.

It is not difficult to see why there has been such a huge increase in the jobless total during the year in the North.

Key employers – such as Bombardier Aerospace which announced a series of job losses including 1,000 in April alone – shed workers as they sought to survive beyond 2009.

Major cost-cutting programmes in long-established operations – from the American-owned FG Wilson to the likes of the telecoms group Nortel, Powerscreen and Visteon – all hit the local economy hard. Manufacturing may have been one of the sectors that struggled most last year, but it was not alone in feeling the pain of the global economic downturn.

Every industry came under pressure, from the financial sector in which Ulster Bank and the Lloyds Banking Group cut jobs to locally owned businesses such as some Pizza Hut franchises and Meteor, an electrical wholesaler, which closed their doors.

But by far the industry that toppled quickest as the recession deepened was construction, and any businesses exposed to this sector. Major building firms from the likes of Taggart Holdings to Eassda Limited and Euro Construction Corporation all suffered as the downturn chipped away at the sector’s financial foundations.

Thousands of building jobs were lost as employment numbers fell back to levels not seen in nearly a decade.

Research by Pricewaterhouse- Coopers showed that in general during 2009 businesses were going bust faster than at any other period over the past 10 years.

Latest insolvency statistics show there were 51 company liquidations in the third quarter of 2009, and 381 individual insolvencies.

But many firms have been quietly succeeding and there have been some notable highlights for the North’s economy, not least locally owned firms such as Belfast-based Andor Technology and Newry’s First Derivatives.

The biggest coup of the year came towards the end of 2009 when NYSE Euronext, a software company owned by the New York Stock Exchange, unveiled plans to create up to 400 jobs in Belfast.

Together with the establishment of a new US:NI Working Group, which will help promote investment opportunities in the North, the NYSE boost proved there were some reasons to cheer the local economy in 2009.

A quick trip on the Belfast Wheel may provide an opportunity to reflect on the North’s economic fortunes during the past 12 months.

But there is one question it cannot answer – will 2010 be any better?