摘要：Irish industrial policy explicitly encouraged job generation in certain "designated" areasvia, amongst other things, preferential grant treatment, job targets and the building of advancefactories in the IDA's (Industrial Development Authority) regional industrial plans of 1973-1977and 1978-1982. To assess the impact of these regional plans, this paper compares the employmentperformance of the designated and the non-designated areas in Ireland since 1972 by employingthe job flow methodology pioneered by Davis and Haltiwanger (1992). We find that the convergencein aggregate industrial employment levels between designated and non-designated areas observedsince 1972 has been largely driven by a higher rate of job creation without an accompanying higherrate of job destruction in the designated areas. Our econometric study attributes an annual 27 percent of the job generation in the designated areas during the relevant period to the explicit regionalindustrial policy.
