Irish Wallets Are Smiling

A lot of writing on national or regional economic development concerns Asia, especially China, but the Times takes a good look at the country which the Economist magazine says has the highest quality of life in the world: Ireland.

In a little more than a decade, the so-called Celtic Tiger was transformed from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe to one of the richest in the world. Its gross domestic product per person, not quite 70 percent of the European Union average in 1987, sprang to 136 percent of the union's average by 2003, while the unemployment rate sank to 4 percent from 17 percent.

More.