Ground Floor: Much attention was given to the recent Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) Medium-Term Review on the Irish economy, with some measure of relief at its conclusions that prospects remain bright for a "soft landing".

Naturally, a soft landing requires the rest of the world to discover the road back to growth, because without outside help the landing might be a great deal harder.

ESRI analysts believe the world economy can get itself back on track by 2005, which would then leave us in a position to return to growth of about 5 per cent a year until the end of the decade. Big sighs of relief all round. Growth is good, even if we still don't have the infrastructure to cope with it.

However, not being blind to the fact that you can forecast all you like but a dark cloud can still appear out of nowhere, the think-tank also looked at the shocks that could send the whole thing spinning wildly off course.

Leaving aside the fairly major fact that the world economy might not, in fact, manage to do the decent thing at all, one of their main cautionary factors is a possible deterioration (or possible further deterioration more accurately) in Ireland's competitiveness.

At the beginning of the 1990s, before we bludgeoned our way to the top of the growth lists, Ireland was marketed abroad as a place with a highly educated but inexpensive workforce. Tax breaks for multinationals persuaded them that setting up here was good for business, theirs and ours.

It was. The firms came, their businesses grew and Irish unemployment fell.

Now, as the boardrooms echo to the words "cost-cutting", those businesses are looking to places where labour is cheaper so that margins shrink no further.

As once we were the beneficiaries of a global marketplace, now we're losing out to countries where people will work more for less and where labour laws give fewer rights. Whereas employees set the agenda during the boom years, employers are starting to flex their muscles again now.

And it's all in the cause of being competitive, ensuring that costs are kept low so that margins can stay high. One cost of production is labour. Going where it's cheap helps the bottom line.

The ESRI thinks that, after peaking at around 5.7 per cent in 2004, unemployment will again begin to fall. Presumably a pick-up in demand will mean bigger order books for the firms located here. Unless, of course, they end up moving somewhere else. Somewhere cheaper.

This argument is sometimes used by management looking for more productivity from their staff. If they don't work harder, the firm will move overseas.

And it's a threat that carries weight because multinationals are now like the so-called "rate tarts" who switch their bank accounts every few months to take advantage of cheap interest rate offers; only they move around the globe to take advantage of cheaper labour costs. And they're not shy about closing down a plant as soon as a more competitive opportunity emerges elsewhere.

When somebody is setting up a new firm, it's because they've spotted a niche which they believe can be developed. Obviously they hope to make money out of it. In fact, the best firms were formed with an idea which took off beyond the expectations of their founders.

But firms in our global marketplace are different. They already have the product. It's all about brand awareness and unit cost. The big money isn't spent on the product itself, it's spent on marketing the product, turning it into an aspirational lifestyle choice so that you believe by choosing it you are making a statement about yourself.

The cosmetics industry has always known this, which is why make-up comes in pretty pots and the marketing promises a new you the moment you try it.

If big firms didn't spend so much on marketing, then it would be easier to improve the bottom line. But in a global marketplace, brand awareness is everything. Ask your children. Arrive home with the wrong pair of trainers and you might as well emigrate.

But as the marketing departments need more and more money, ways have to be found to cut costs in other areas.

The push towards constant competitiveness and the entire globalisation phenomenon begs other questions - like the wider social responsibility of the firms in which we are asked to invest. We wonder about the highly paid chief executives who do, indeed, increase profits but at the expense of people who have been in the firm many, many more years than they. And we wonder if the Holy Grail of ever increasing profits is really what we're after. Well, yes...

But here is the interesting moral dilemma. What happens to those profits? Do they get ploughed back into the business? Are they distributed as dividends to shareholders? Do they line the pockets of the directors? Are they repatriated overseas? And do the workers and the local economy share in any of it?

What is the ultimate aim of an employer - to provide decent jobs for a workforce while still returning a profit or to increase the bottom line by any and every imaginable method even if that means making long-term employees redundant?

Is it right that, in pursuit of the cheapest possible way to produce goods, an employer will set up a company in one country and then happily shift production elsewhere after a few years, leaving an unemployment hot-spot behind?

But should employees, knowing that their firm is in a global marketplace, withhold labour over grievances when cost to the firm of them doing that can make a precarious financial situation even worse?

When wondering about the road ahead, it's not just whether it's pitted with bumps and potholes, but what direction it's taking us that we should also care about.