Inter-Industry Differences in Male
Percentage Unemployment
Compensation - A Cross Section
Analysis for Irish Manufacturing
Industry. Quarterly Economic Commentary Special Article, November 1976
It is widely accepted that unemployment rates vary substantially
amongst industrial sectors in Ireland. However, it does not appear to be
equally recognised that there are substantial inter-industry differences
in the percentage of net earnings which an unemployed person receives
from Unemployment and Pay-Related Benefits. These differences are
accentuated by the non-uniformity of the dependency structure of the
labour force in different industries. This paper, therefore, comprises two
parts. Part 1 is methodological and consists of an attempt to compute,
under fairly restrictive assumptions, for each of 36 manufacturing
industries, the proportion of net earnings obtained from unemployment
compensation. This is done for persons of differing dependency status.
These proportions are then weighted by the dependency distribution of
the unemployed in each industry in order to obtain a representative
percentage compensation figure for each of the 36 industries. Some
space is devoted to an examination of these results. In Part 2 an
attempt is made to explore the hypothesis that levels of unemployment
compensation may be an important factor in explaining the extent and
duration of registered unemployment
