BELFAST BRIEFING:A SIGNIFICANT number of people in the North are likely to return to work today after the bank holiday to brood on whether the person who sits next to them earns more than they do.

New research, conducted by professors at the Paris School of Economics, shows 75 per cent of people in Europe, including the UK and Ireland, say it is important to them to compare incomes.

According to Prof Andrew Clark and Claudia Senik, most people compare their incomes with those of their work colleagues.

Workers in Ireland are slightly more “comparison sensitive” than those in the UK but in general people who earn less compare their incomes more.

The key to “self-declared happiness”, according to the study, appears to lie with “richer, younger people, the married, women and skilled workers”.

According to the authors of the report, as you get older you tend to be less concerned about office pay scales.

Those over 50 years of age who took part in the research worried less about what their colleagues earned compared to single people under 25.

The study highlights that self-employed people compare their incomes significantly less.

There is no difference between men and women when it comes to who worries most over salary levels. Both are equally obsessed about who is earning what.

The only issue between men and women is that men tend to compare their salaries with colleagues while women compare theirs to other family members.

Clark and Senik also identified some other interesting characteristics during their research.

“Higher levels of education are positively correlated with comparisons to colleagues, but reduce comparisons to friends.

“The married compare more to colleagues and family members but less to friends. Respondents with children compare more to family members,” they state in their study.

Male and female workers agree that constantly comparing salaries is a “toxic” habit that will make you at the very least unhappy or quite possibly ill.

The research found that people who constantly compare their incomes are “less happy”, more likely to feel unsatisfied with life as a whole and are prone to a “feeling of depression”.

“The greater the importance that people attach to comparisons, the lower they rank on different satisfaction scales.

“Man may well be a social animal, but constantly looking over one’s shoulder seems to make the world a less happy, and more unequal, place,” conclude Clark and Senik.

It is timely advice for the man who has just taken over running the North’s regional economic development agency, Invest NI.

For more than a decade, chief executives of the agency have spent a fair share of their time looking over their respective shoulders at the success of their counterparts in the south of Ireland.

In the past, Northern Ireland was forced to take a back seat and watch with envy as the Republic won billions of dollars in new inward investment every year.

Before the global economic crash the peace process had helped level the playing field.

Northern Ireland’s investment ambassadors had enjoyed a degree of success in selling the advantages of locating in the North to international businesses.

Provisional figures for the 12 months to March 2009 reveal that for the first time in a single year Invest NI secured investment commitments worth more than £1 billion (€1.12 billion).

According to the agency this could translate into a £165 million a year boost in wages and salaries for the local economy.

How many of these investment commitments will go ahead now against the backdrop of the current economic climate remains to be seen.

The new chief executive of Invest NI, Alastair Hamilton, is under no illusion that his new role with the economic development agency is going to be anything but easy.

In the last year under review, 79 of Invest NI’s client companies announced a total of 3,499 job losses across the North.

Hamilton, a former senior BT executive, has warned that “this current year is likely to present equally challenging conditions for all involved in economic development”.

He intends that Invest NI will “deliver the most effective and efficient support” to help businesses survive the economic downturn.

Hamilton is also hoping that there will be some positive results from the US:NI Investment conference last May.

But in the meantime no one is going to blame him if he takes the occasional glance over his shoulder just to compare what the competition is up to.