Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 6 September 2016
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Analysis of Economic Forecasts: Central Bank of Ireland
1:00 pm
Dr. Gabriel Fagan:
I will take the second and third questions and will leave the first question for my colleague. With regard to the underlying domestic demand, that is a measure that has been developed within the bank specifically to take into account the distortions we have seen, not just in 2015 but even in previous years with regard to GDP. It is not a widely used international measure. However, from the available data, we could construct such a measure but I am pretty sure that when we do that, the comparison of Irish growth with the growth elsewhere in the euro area will clearly show much stronger growth performance using this indicator than in the rest of the euro area. With regard to credibility, we are at an early stage. The group has just been set up by the CSO, chaired by the Governor and that group is going to try to tackle precisely the issues identified by the committee such as how one can come up with credible measures of what is going on in the Irish economy. We will await the outcome of that group but in the meantime available indicators, whether in underlying domestic demand, employment growth and so forth, confirm the story we have presented in the bulletin.
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