1. Kevin Gardiner, “The Irish Economy: A Celtic Tiger,” in Ireland: Challenging for Promotion, Morgan Stanley Euroletter (31 August 1994), 9-21.

2. International Monetary Fund, Ireland: Staff Report for the 1999 Article IV Consultation (Washington, DC: IMF, August 1999).

3. Charles Sabel, Ireland: Local Partnerships and Social Innovation (Paris: OECD, 1996); see also chapters by Jeffrey Sachs and Kenneth Arrow in International Perspectives on the Irish Economy, edited by Alan Gray (Dublin: Indecon, 1998).

4. European Commission, The Economic and Financial Situation in Ireland: Ireland in the Transition to EMU, special issue of European Economy (Brussels: European Commission, 1990); International Monetary Fund, Ireland: Staff Report.

5. Sabel, for example, finds that Irish openness to transnational corporate desires for flexibility and agglomeration has attracted a more positive investment pattern in the 1990s, where “Irish units of multinationals in industries such as computers and software...are establishing collaborative relations with local suppliers and reorganizing their internal operations accordingly.” As I will argue below with regard to the software industry, this is an overoptimistic view of recent TNC operations in Ireland, although one that predominates among current observers of Ireland. Sabel, Ireland: Local Partnerships, 29.

6. Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Atul Kohli, “Where Do High Growth Political Economies Come from? The Japanese Lineage of Korea's `Developmental State,'”World Development 22, no. 9 (1994): 1269-93. For a summary of arguments on the role of developmental states, see Alvin So and Stephen Chiu, East Asia and the World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995); see also debates in World Development 22, no. 4 (1994).

7. “New tigers” include a small number of countries that have converged significantly with the industrially developed north since 1985, according to indicators such as gross domestic product. Among them, Ireland rose from 44 to 58 percent of U.S. per capita income levels during 1987-1995 (in terms of purchasing power parities), Chile from 25 to 35 percent, Malaysia from 23 to 33 percent, and Thailand from 16 to 28 percent. Apart from the East Asian tigers, the only other countries that made significant income gains relative to the United States during this period were the very small economies of Mauritius and Botswana. World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 46-48.

8. Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1996).

9. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1995); Giovanni Arrighi, Satoshi Ikeda, and Alex Irwan, “The Rise of East Asia: One Miracle or Many?” in Ravi Palat, ed., Pacific-Asia and the Future of the World-System (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 41-66.

10. Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy, 12.

11. Ibid., 13.

12. Ibid., 14, 140-46.

13. World Bank, World Development Report 1997.

14. Ibid., 1.

15. Ibid., 2.

16. Ibid., 42.

17. Ibid., 46-48.

18. Sean O Ríain, “Development and the Global Information Economy” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), chap. 1.

19. For an in-depth analysis of this period, see Denis O'Hearn, “The Road from Import-Substitution to Export-Led Industrialization in Ireland: Who Mixed the Asphalt, Who Drove the Machinery, and Who Kept Making Them Change Directions?”Politics & Society 18, no. 1 (March 1990): 1-38. What follows is an abbreviated account.

20. European Commission, The Economic and Financial Situation in Ireland: Ireland in the Transition to EMU, special issue of European Economy (Brussels: European Commission, 1990).

21. John Bradley, John FitzGerald, Patrick Honohan, and Ide Kearney, “Interpreting the Recent Irish Growth Experience,” in David Duffy, ed., Medium-Term Review: 1997-2003 (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 1997), 35-66.

22. I refer to the flow of TNC activity rather than to foreign direct investment. This is because TNC output and exports have grown rapidly during the 1990s but with relatively low rates of investment.

23. Denis O'Hearn, “The Irish Case of Dependency: An Exception to the Exceptions?”American Sociological Review 54, no. 4 (August 1989): 578-96.

24. Unpublished IDA data.

25. Part of the growth of software, as I will discuss below, was due to a parallel and somewhat independent development of an indigenous software sector, on which see O Ríain, Development and the Global Information Economy. The predominant proportion of the growth of output and exports of software, however, remains in the foreign-owned sector.

26. Denis O'Hearn, “Global Restructuring, TNCs, and the `European Periphery': What Has Changed?” in Jozsef Borocz and David A. Smith, eds., A New World Order? Global Transformation in the Late 20th Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), 71-89.

27. Distortions in the calculation of PPS arise from the use of government wage levels to estimate the cost of public goods and the failure to account for shifting shares in GDP of consumption, investment, and trade surpluses. In the Irish case, the rapidly increasing share of the trade surplus in GDP is a major cause of rising PPS rates because of the way export prices are calculated. Higher economic growth rates are responsible for just 13 percent of supposed Irish convergence to average EU income levels, while changing PPS rates are responsible for 21 percent (nearly two-thirds). The use of the PPS system of accounts instead of foreign exchange rates makes Ireland appear to be about 16 percent “richer,” Greece 36 percent “richer,” Spain 22 percent, and Portugal 55 percent (Germany, on the other hand, appears to be about 14 percent “poorer”). Moreover, the EU PPS system ranks Irish GDP some 15 percent higher than the World Bank's PPS accounts.

28. These proportions actually hold roughly for the whole period of the 1990s. The other component of GDP, investment, fell during most of the 1990s and only began to recover after 1994.

29. Antoin Murphy, The Irish Economy: Celtic Tiger or Tortoise? (Dublin: Money Markets International, 1994).

30. S. C. Borkowski, “Organisational and International Factors Affecting Multinational Transfer Pricing,”Advances in International Accounting 5 (1992): 173-92; J. H. Dunning and R. D. Pearce, The World's Largest Industrial Enterprises 1962-1983 (London: Gower, 1985).

31. J. C. Stewart, “Transfer Pricing: Some Empirical Evidence from Ireland,”Journal of Economic Studies 16, no. 3 (1988): 40-56.

32. Denis O'Hearn, Inside the Celtic Tiger: The Irish Economy and the Asian Model (London: Pluto, 1998), 82.

33. The gross investment rate rose significantly after 1995 but is still comparatively low.

34. W. G. Huff, “What Is the Singapore Model of Economic Development?”Cambridge Journal of Economics 19 (1995): 735-59.

35. John Page, “The East Asian Miracle: An Introduction,”World Development 22, no. 4 (1994): 617.

36. Brian Nolan and Gerard Hughes, “Low Pay, the Earnings Distribution and Poverty in Ireland,” Working Paper No. 84 (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 1997), 4-6.

37. On the breakdown of Irish housing policy, see Tony Fahey, ed., Social Housing in Ireland: A Study of Success, Failure and Lessons Learned (Dublin: Oak Tree Press, 1999).

38. Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, “Contradictions of Capitalist Industrialization in East Asia: A Critique of `Flying Geese' Theories of Development” (mimeo, 1998).

39. Labour Force Survey (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1996), 24.

40. ICTU, Minimum Standards for Atypical Work (Dublin: Irish Congress of Trade Unions, 1996), 11.

41. Labour Force Survey (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1995), Table 28.

42. IDA, IDA End-Year Statement (Dublin: IDA, 1995).

43. David Jacobson, New Forms of Work Organisation in Ireland: An Annotated Bibliography, Research Papers No. 9 (Dublin: Dublin City University Business School, 1996).

44. William Roche, “The New Competitive Order and the Fragmentation of Industrial Relations in Ireland” (address to IBEC Annual Employee Relations Committee, November 1995).

45. ICTU, New Forms of Work Organization: Options for Unions (Dublin: Irish Congress of Trade Unions, 1993); ICTU, Managing Change: Review of Union Involvement in Company Restructuring (Dublin: ICTU, 1994); Colin Gill, Therese Beaupain, and Hubert Krieger, Workplace Involvement in Technological Innovation in the European Community: Vol. 2. Issues of Participation (Dublin: European Foundation, 1993).

46. George Taylor, “Labour Market Rigidities, Institutional Impediments and Managerial Constraints: Some Reflections on the Recent Experience of Macro-Political Bargaining in Ireland,”Economic and Social Review 27, no. 3 (April 1996): 269-71.

47. James Wickham, New Forms of Work in Ireland: An Analysis of the “New Forms of Work and Activity” Data Set (Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 1993).

48. Sean O Ríain, “Remaking the Developmental State in the Global Economy: The Irish Software Industry in Comparative Perspective” (paper presented at the 94th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, August 1999). While my comments here are partly critical, I believe O Ríain's work is an important extension of the concept of developmental states and also an important challenge to some of my own analysis of the southern Irish economy.

49. Patrick Clancy, “Socialisation, Selection and Reproduction in Education,” in Patrick Clancy, Sheelagh Drudy, Kathleen Lynch, and Liam O'Dowd, eds., Ireland: A Sociological Profile (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1986), 125.

50. Ibid., 126.

51. O Ríain, Global Information Economy.

52. David Jacobson, “The Evolution of Networks around the Subsidiaries of Software MNEs in Ireland” (mimeo, Dublin City University Business School, 1999).

53. Mike Hobday, “Export-Led Technology Development in the Four Dragons: The Case of Electronics,”Development and Change 35 (1994): 333-61; David Smith, “Technology, Commodity Chains and Global Inequality: South Korea in the 1990s,”Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 4 (1997): 734-62.

54. O Ríain, Global Information Economy.

55. Evans, Embedded Autonomy.

56. The United Nations Development Programme found Ireland to have the second worst relative poverty rate in the “developed” world and the worst absolute poverty rates. United Nations Development Programme, Globalization with a Human Face: Human Development Report 1999 (New York: United Nations, 1999), 149. Irish child care deficiencies are criticized in a European Commission report on National Action Plans (NAP) on employment, reported in the Irish Times (6 September 1999): 4.

57. Fergus Bordewich, “Riding the Celtic Tiger,”Reader's Digest (July 1999): 129-35.

Globalization,“New Tigers,” and the End of the Developmental State? The Case of the Celtic Tiger

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