AN ECONOMY-WIDE PERSPECTIVE ON EARNINGS DATA

The objective of this article is to give a detailed description as to how earnings data is recorded in the Irish economy and to develop new methods of presenting this data in order to give a more comprehensive picture of wage movements over the period since 1998. Currently, earnings data are published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) on a sectoral basis with similar methodological backgrounds across the surveys. However, the surveys can vary in terms of their scope. For example, the survey of industrial earnings presents both hourly and weekly earnings series while the survey of distribution and business services contains just weekly earnings data. The type of worker being surveyed can also vary, some surveys covering all workers and other surveys covering just full-time workers. 1