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Ireland's dramatic economic boom of the 1990s has been referred to as 'the era of the Celtic Tiger'. In a little over a decade, real national income per head jumped from 65% of the Western European average to above parity, unemployment tumbled from double to less than half the European Union average and numbers at work increased by over 50%. Much research has been carried out on the impact of each of the separate elements agreed to have been important in stimulating or sustaining the boom. The present paper focuses on one key under-researched synergy - the nexus between the country's industrial strategy, which focused on attracting foreign direct investment in certain high-tech sectors, and the orientation of the third-level educational system that had been developed in Ireland over recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to assess the major sources behind the exceptional Irish growth performance in the 1990s. Unlike other Tigers, Ireland's growth is due to efficiency gains, rather than capital deepening, but the causes for the swift growth in total factor productivity cannot be pinned down to a single factor. Human capital, foreign direct investment, social partnership agreements, sound budget and economic policies since the late 1980s, EU membership, all seemed to have interacted to produce this high-growth economy. This article focuses on the two mostly quoted catalysts, i.e. FDI and human capital. It provides evidence that — although crucial as enablers for the Irish economic performance — neither the rapid expansion of the compulsory education system in the 1970s and 1980s nor the sheer volume of FDI inflows can by themselves explain why Ireland has grown so much faster than other world economies. Instead, it argues that higher education, especially the vocational/technical stream of educational provision, and the sector composition of FDI in favour of high-tech industries, were self-reinforcing factors and have been decisive for the Republic's extraordinary boom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]