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Google to finish the double Irish Dutch sandwich

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Comments

  • #32
    Rosahane
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,430 ✭✭✭Rosahane


    murphaph wrote: »
    It's actually not totally irrelevant because those roles require multilingual talents, usually native speakers. So, if I want to concentrate my sales team, full of native speakers of foreign languages, I need to be able to attract them to my location. English is by far the most widely spoken second language. If I set up shop in a country where my staff cannot interact with the local bureaucracy, I may struggle to find people willing to work for me.

    You can probably squeeze by in a limited subset of EU countries like the Netherlands but in France or Bulgaria or Greece I suspect you can forget about getting the local ISP to communicate with you in English! Even here in Germany they might find someone who will speak to you in English but nothing in writing. It will all be in German.

    There are other countries in the EU with lower corporation taxes than us but they are not poaching jobs from us.

    Similarly Ireland has a strong legal system, built on English common law. That is hugely attractive to US companies especially, where the same legal foundation exists (almost everywhere).

    The tax situation helps but it isn't the only thing. We are physically closer to the US. I often wonder should we move time zone by 1 hour to give us an extra hour's overlap with the US and Canada. I suspect if there was no land border with the UK we would have already done that. Losing one hour overlap with the UK and EU should be worth it IMO.

    School costs, language and standards are also a big factor for US corporates that want to get their senior managers and engineers to relocate with their families.


  • #33
    dubrov
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,591 ✭✭✭dubrov


    Rosahane wrote:
    School costs, language and standards are also a big factor for US corporates that want to get their senior managers and engineers to relocate with their families.

    You could argue all those things were present in the eighties.

    For languages skills, it would be cheaper to setup Italian localisation and sales teams in Italy. They are only here as part of the whole corporation tax agreement with the Irish government.

    Multinationals only moved here in a significant way once Ireland demonstrated a good track record of low effective corporation tax. Note, headline rate is irrelevant.

    Even now, the multinationals that move here are all in low labour intensive and high profit industries


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