Living standards in the Republic are higher than in Northern Ireland, a new report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has found.<\/p>\n
Household disposable income was \u20ac36,900 in the South compared to \u20ac33,400 in the North in 2022, a gap of 10.4%.<\/p>\n
Hourly earnings were 29% higher in the Republic last year.<\/p>\n
Life expectancy, which is a key indicator of income, education and access to health services, is longer in the South with men living two years longer and women 1.5 years longer.<\/p>\n
In 2022 life expectancy was 80.9 years for men and 84.2 for women in the Republic compared to 78.9 and 82.7 in the North.<\/p>\n
Economic activity per head of population was significantly higher in the South with gross national income per capita \u20ac63,500 compared to \u20ac34,500 in Northern Ireland a gap of 84% in 2023.<\/p>\n
The population in the South grew by 14.8% between 2015 and 2024 compared to 3.9% in the North over the same period.<\/p>\n
In 12 months to June 2025 the Republic’s domestic economy grew by 3.2% while growth was 2.8% in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n
The ESRI said: “Employment increased in both jurisdictions in 2025 compared to 2024, with Ireland adding 63,900 jobs (a 2.3% annual increase) and Northern Ireland adding 20,640 jobs (a 2.5% annual increase) in the year ending Q2 2025.”<\/p>\n
The report\u2019s co-author Adele Bergin said: “Northern Ireland continues to show lower levels of disposable income compared to Ireland, and also lower levels of educational attainment, labour force participation and export intensity.”<\/p>\n
She added: “However, the most recent data show comparable rates of employment growth in the year ending Q2 2025 (2.3% in Ireland and 2.5% in Northern Ireland).”<\/p>\n
The report said that last year Republic had a higher labour force participation, which measures how many people are active in the jobs market, at 78.5% and an employment rate of 75.1% compared to the North which had 75.7% and 74.3% respectively.<\/p>\n
However, Northern Ireland has a lower unemployment rate of 1.8% compared to 4.4% in the Republic last year.<\/p>\n
The report called, Assessing Economic Trends in Ireland and Northern Ireland, is part of a joint research programme between the ESRI and the Shared Island Unit in the Department of the Taoiseach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Living standards in the Republic are higher than in Northern Ireland, a new report by the Economic and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-221207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}