This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
For the purpose of this analysis enterprises were considered to be part of the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors if they had one of the seven included NACE Rev 2.0 codes.
Note that many large companies in these sectors also have separate head offices and financial management companies. These companies have a different NACE code to their manufacturing or sales counterparts, due to the difference in their primary work, and are not included in this analysis. The activities of companies in the above sectors were reviewed and any companies with activities outside the scope of this analysis were removed.
Data for the Employment and Earnings chapter of this release are based on monthly PMOD (PAYE Modernisation) files as well as additional enterprise information available in the CSO Business Register.
Data cleaning was carried out prior to analysis on this data whereby those listed as PRSI Class M (mostly pensioners) were removed as well as any employee who had a total income of less than €500 or less than 2 insurable weeks in a given year. Data with critical missing values were also removed.
Not all surveyed employees had completed 52 weeks of work in a given year. Data was also not available on hours worked for any employees. In order to obtain a reasonable estimate of employee counts in a given year, employees were converted to full year equivalents, where one full year equivalent was an employee with 52 insurable weeks. The count of employees represents the total number of full year equivalent employees in a given year, though we do not know if they were full time or part time workers.
For estimates of weekly earnings and annual earnings, in order to compare year to year and to facilitate data matching with Census 2022, the data was restricted to those who were active in employment in April, an approach similar to that used in the CSO Earnings Analysis using Administrative Data Sources though with a different reference month. In addition PRSI Class S (self-employed or company directors) were removed from this analysis.
For weekly earnings, employee with between 2 and 54 insurable weeks worked were included and weekly earnings were calculated by dividing the gross annual earnings (before deduction of tax, PRSI and superannuation) by the number of weeks worked.
For annual earnings employees with at least 50 insurable weeks worked in a given year were included and the gross annual amount (before deduction of tax, PRSI and superannuation) was considered their annual earnings.
Data matching with data from Census 2022 was used to obtain information about employee educational level and county of residence.
Economic information from the largest companies involved in the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors is collected through the Central Statistics Office (CSO) Large Cases Unit (LCU). Enterprises which do not meet the criteria to be included as part of the Large Cases Unit are surveyed under the Balance of Payments survey BOP 44 survey which is intended to cover the activities of manufacturing and non-financial enterprises which trade internationally. In addition data was available from the CSO International Trade division regarding the merchandise imports and exports and data from PMOD was available for labour costs. The combination of data from these sources feeds our macroeconomic results.
Data have been suppressed where there is a risk of the disclosure of data relating to an individual firm.
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