Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 24 November 2021

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Inflation: Discussion (resumed)

Dr. Mark Cassidy:

It is a very labour-intensive sector in terms of the amount of construction output that a given amount of labour can produce. Across most industries, we expect that to increase over time as technology improves, for example, where one gets more per unit of worker. In the construction sector, that rate of increase has been typically very low and has lagged behind increases in other countries. What we mean here is how much we can produce for a given labour supply because the labour supply is necessarily somewhat limited.