Mr. John McCarthy:

What we are particularly interested in in terms of GNI* is to see where the economy is really going when we strip out some of these strange one-offs. As the Secretary General mentioned, other countries have this issue as well. Within the EU 28, I am aware of 14 or 15 national statistical institutes that have identified onshoring of intellectual property, IP, as being an issue for them. Some of them are large countries and the IP coming onshore is not ginormous, whereas we have the opposite. We are a very small country in terms of IP coming onshore, so it completely distorts our accounts. What we need to do is to try to get an indication in terms of repayment capacity. Debt to GDP is not a good indicator of repayment capacity. Debt to GNI* is.

The reality is that we are at the coalface in terms of these issues. We are a very globalised economy and that presents challenges for us as advisers and for politicians in terms of making decisions, but also for statisticians in trying to measure what is going on because we have issues such as production that takes place in the Far East but which is included in the Irish national accounts for legal and statistical reasons. There are huge statistical issues, so we believe GNI* will be a better indicator of what is going on in the economy.