The Celtic Tiger is a nickname for the Republic of Ireland during its period of rapid economic growth between the 1990s and 2001 or 2002. Many economists credit Ireland's low taxation rate (10 to 12.5 percent throughout the late 1990s) and business-friendly regulation policies as responsible for much of the growth. A more sceptical interpretation is that much of the growth was due to the fact that the economy of Ireland had lagged the rest of northwestern Europe for so long that it had become the one of few remaining sources of a relatively large, low-wage labour pool left in Western Europe.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger

Today's selected anniversaries:

1777 San José de Guadalupe, the first town in the Spanish colony of California, was founded. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose%2C_California)

1890 The Diet of Japan, modelled after the German Reichstag, first met, when the Meiji Constitution went into effect in Japan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Japan)

1929 Rear Admiral Richard Byrd and two passengers completed the first flight over the South Pole. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Byrd)

1947 The United Nations General Assembly voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_of_Palestine)

Wikiquote of the day:

"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness." ~ George Washington (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Washington)