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Fri 07 Jul 2008Lost competitiveness will cost many jobs
ECONOMICS:THE IRISH economy is now wedged between a rock and a hard place, and it will extract itself from this uncomfortable position only with extreme difficulty.
The hard place is the domestic economy, where profitability is crumbling. Construction activity is collapsing. The steep downturn in house building will, by itself, subtract four percentage points from this year's growth rate. As a result, the official forecast for economic growth this year has now been cut to an anaemic 0.5 per cent.
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