The business lobby group, Ibec, has said regardless of whether the partnership talks are successful or not, a long-term strategy to ensure flexibility in the Irish economy must be agreed.

In its quarterly economic review, Ibec warned that globalisation has only reached the first stage, in that the location of the manufacture of traded goods has increasingly shifted from developed economies such as the US and western Europe to lower cost parts of the world, namely eastern Europe and Asia.

"The second stage of globalisation forces will result in pressure to locate more and more research and development activity in these countries as their skill levels rise".

It added that in a further stage, services too, will be affected as advances in telecommunications and internet technology have unleased an array of services that can be traded electronically across borders.

The jobs to which these services give rise, such as impersonal services and many more, are all candidates to move to more cost competitive global locations, the report said.

Service jobs that are not as transferable, in so far as they require a higher element of personal delivery such as care, medical treatment or hairdressing. Ibec notes that even aspects of these jobs are transportable.

"The range of jobs that can be off-shored cover the spectrum of skills from low to very high, so that all grades of jobs will be increasingly vulnerable to global competition. These pressures will increase over the next 10 years and many developments will take place that we have not even thought about today" according to the report.

Ibec says the key to global competitiveness is flexibility in all areas. This requires ensuring that necessary adjustments needed to adapt to new circumstances are not hamstrung by rigidities or past inappropriate actions, it states.

Ibec insists that the partnership talks centre on these elements rather than be diverted from long-term strategies to focus on near-term issues.