Dr. Seamus McGuinness:

The unemployment rate can fall. They are getting more people into jobs and that has been a success. They are not necessarily getting more people into good jobs - the data suggest that the opposite is the case.

This is the only way we could see productivity falling, which is very unusual in international terms. Stagnant productivity could be expected, but falling productivity is very worrying and to the extent we have seen it, this is especially worrying for the North. The only way this can happen is if there has been an expansion of employment but the average quality of that employment has been falling over time. This then raises important questions in respect of how economic policy has been run, how successful the agencies involved in industrial policy have been and foreign direct investment and what they have been doing.