Madam, - Recent reports in your paper on the prospects for growth in the economy have rightly given the property industry cause for complaint.
There is little doubt that the model of creating jobs at any cost has gone. This fact has been well documented in Forfás reports over the past few years. Similarly, the job creation ability of the multinational model is near the end of its life cycle. Multinational industry continually seeks cheap labour sources and retains important management functions such as marketing and R&D at home base. It is normal and natural that jobs created in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s should move to new, cheap economies.
Our educational policies, initiated in the 1960s have served the economy well. Job creation initiatives coupled with positive educational policy goes a long way to explaining the recent Tiger economy years. Ireland, however, is now committed to the new knowledge economy, which as its name suggests, functions on generating new knowledge. Competitive advantage in world markets is a difficult challenge for Irish firms, but it will only be achieved by new knowledge, driving innovation.
R&D expenditure by government, industry and investment in fourth-level education and research are the pathways forward in this new world. The consensus is that Ireland has made a good start, with a developing profile in bio-technology and vastly increased numbers of fourth-level research students in the universities and institutes of technology.
The several concerns that exist are normal by development standards. These include the employment in industry of more doctoral graduates; the urgent development of the interface between industry and the universit-ies/institutes of technology; the adaptation by indigenous industry of the business strategies of the new economy, to develop exports as the lead driver of future economic growth; the reflection of the knowledge economy model in educational programmes of fourth-level business schools rather than traditional models, now in decay; and an overdue upskilling of the workforce.
There is a great potential to unleash a new Tiger if we can do these things well and soberly report the state of the economy in the national press.
- Yours, etc,
Dr GABRIEL J BYRNE, Adjunct Faculty, Smurfit Business School, University College Dublin, Blackrock, Co Dublin.