Trends in Living Standards

Brendan Walsh has an interesting post on the Irish Economy blog. I don't have anything much to add, but since he provides a link to the relevant Eurostat table I thought it would be interesting to start the graphs he presents in 1995 rather than 1999 and compare Ireland with somewhat different countries. This is the result:

Basically it's just another illustration of how the property bubble, which didn't really appear until 2002 or thereabouts, screwed up the development of a very promissing economy.