Competitiveness: Most indigenous companies in the Republic grew faster in the 1990s than their EU counterparts, according to a new ESRI analysis of industrial competitiveness.
The study, presented by ESRI economist Dr Eoin O'Malley, shows that while indigenous companies did not expand as much as Irish-based multinationals during the prelude to the boom, they did contribute to the Celtic Tiger.
Dr O'Malley finds that the Republic's share of EU production and employment increased in almost all domestic sectors in the decade to 2001.
The only laggards in this progression were textiles and leather & footwear, according to the analysis.
A number of indigenous sectors, such as machinery and equipment, and paper and printing also competed well on exports throughout the 1990s, Dr O'Malley notes. He argues that the Republic's share of EU industry was already rising strongly in most sectors at the start of the last decade, before the period that most see as the Tiger years.
Dr O'Malley acknowledges that his findings may run contrary to those of the Enterprise Strategy Group, which concluded in July that sales and exports growth in indigenous industry had been "negligible" between 1990 and 2002.
He points out that he has approached the issue from a different perspective, by comparing the indigenous firms to their EU counterparts rather than just to the Irish multinational sector.
