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Ireland’s Long Run Economic Development and VulnerabilityOutput and IncomesFrom 1993 to 2000, the average growth of GDP was 9.3 per cent peryear and the average growth of GNP was 8.3 per cent per year.GNDI has grown by an annual average rate of 7.2 per cent over the‘Celtic Tiger’ period or approximately one percentage point lessthan the growth of GNP. Living standards, as measured by GNDIper head of population, have grown by an annual average of justover 6 per cent during this period. Significant transfers from the EUmeant that the level of GNDI in 2000 was somewhat above the levelof GNP. However, the pace of growth of living standards whenmeasured by GNDI per head was around one percentage point lessthan when measured in terms of GNP per head.Trends in take-home pay and social welfare transfers are presentedin Chapter 2.EmploymentThe most significant development in the period 1993 to 2000 wasthe increase of employment, which grew by an average of 4.7 percent per year. The level of employment increased from 1.15 millionin 1993 to 1.65 million in the first quarter of 2000, an increase ofover half a million people (43 per cent) in employment. This wascompletely unprecedented in Irish economic history and was thefastest growth of employment in the OECD in this period.The increased rate of growth and the dramatic increase inemployment, meant that average Irish incomes converged rapidlywith the EU average. The influence of employment in allowing thisconvergence is explained in Box 1.2.There was a broadly based growth of employment across almost allsectors of the economy. As shown in Table 1.3, the fastest employmentgrowth was in the building sector, where there was phenomenalgrowth averaging 12.3 per cent a year. The cumulativeincrease in employment in this sector was over 170 per cent.Employment in market services grew strongly, with annual averagegrowth of 5.7 per cent, totalling more than 30,000 per year. Therewas also substantial growth of non-market services employment—11