Business

When a country experiences recession not all areas experiences the recession in the exact same way. Some regions possess a greater degree of economic stability compared to their counterparts in that they possess the means to ride out a recession while the other regions suffer. Due to globalization it has become easier for a company to just pack up and leave for better pastures when the going gets tough. Namely increases in local taxes, minimum wages and overall cost of doing business in a certain area. When companies choose to pack up and leave it is usually the manufacturing sector that is the first to go. Skilled hands can be found the world over. A person in China can just as easily assemble a computer as a person in the U.S. yet at the fraction of the basic wage cost. Thus in the case of Ireland what was hit first were the foreign manufacturing sectors. The result were regions with a steep unemployment rate of skilled blue collar workers as opposed to areas with low unemployment rates dominated by white collared professionals.

For me the geographies of recessions helps us to understand that in economics as compared to society itself it is always the lower class that is affected first before the upper class (ie skilled workers vs. white collared professionals). That even in economics there is an isolation of the lower class from the upper class as shown by the fact that factories are located only in certain regions as opposed to being evenly spread out and finally that wealth is not always evenly distributed that there will always be regions richer than others due to the presence of white collared workers which will cause resentment to build in the regions where multiple layoffs occur. The geographies of recession helps us to understand that society at the present is unequal, that gap between the rich and poor is large and that at the present there is still no solution to permanently bridge the gap and create a truly equal society.