Ireland as a Digital Economy - Hannah Dunphy

 Ireland as a Digital Economy 

Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. I hope you enjoyed my blog from last week. Today's blog is going to give a break down of the Digital Economy in Ireland.

Corporation tax:  The Corporation Tax rate in Ireland is 12.5% which is very attractive for multinational companies to set up due to it being one of lowest in the world (Linkedin, 2023).TikTok, Facebook, Apple, Google and much more household names are located in Ireland (O'Carroll & Partington, 2021), which employ over 300,000 people in Ireland (IDA, 2022).From January 2024, the corporation tax rate in Ireland will increase to 15% (Moore, 2023)

Here is a link to Pascal O'Donohoe explaining the changes around corporation tax increasing to 15%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbkEWkzJjrw

Member of the EU: Ireland is one of the 27 countries that is part of the EU (European Union, n.d.), which participates in free trade arrangements of the European Union. This is a huge innovative for multinational companies to set up in Ireland as they will have free trade within the EU. Due to Brexit, a lot of multinational companies that were set up in the UK have relocated to Ireland to benefit from the free trade agreement (Gleeson, 2021).

Here is a link to an interview with Martin Shanahan CEO of the IDA explaining how 4,500 jobs are being created by Irish based companies moving out of the UK

 https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/21485394/

Language: Now that the UK has left the EU, Ireland is the last primary English-speaking country in the EU (Chaudhury, 2022).

Unemployment rate: In July 2023, the unemployment rate in Ireland was 4.1% (Clarke, 2023), which is below the EU average of 5.9% in July 2023 (Eurostat, 2023).

Education: Ireland has the highest educated workforce in the EU, with 59% of the Irish workers have a short cycle tertiary education, Bachelor’s, a Master’s or Doctoral Degree (Walsh, 2023).63.2% of 23-24-year olds have completed third level education (IDA, 2023).

Population: The population has a population over 5 million people (CSO, 2022), with 49% of the Irish population under the age of 35 (Nathan Trust , 2022.

Multicultural Society: Ireland is a very multicultural society, with 631,785 non-Irish living in Ireland with Polish, French and Russian being the most spoken languages at home (CSO, 2023). This is attractive for Multinational companies looking to locate in Ireland, as they may need employees to be multilingual.

Road Infrastructure: Due to the EU funding, Ireland was able to improve their roadways with Motorways which has and is making peoples and businesses lives easier and faster.

Technology Infrastructure: Ireland is a huge attraction for US tech companies, who employ over 106,000 people over the country (IDA, 2022).

Here is a video of Apple opening up in Cork in 1980.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLMTmm08o8

Pharmacy Infrastructure: The top 10 Biopharma companies in the world all operate out of Ireland (Nathan Trust , 2022)

I hope you enjoyed this weeks blog, please let me know what you thought of it and if you have any suggestions of what you would like to see next from me !! 

See you soon , Hannah.