Dr. Martina Lawless:

Supply chain integration is certainly something that has increased very dramatically over time. We do know that there are a lot of movements, imports and exports within the same narrow sector, where firms appear to be moving things around at different stages of production. We talked a little bit about the forecasts having quite a significant downside risk to them and how they are a little bit too optimistic. We really cannot tell, if one item in a supply chain is disrupted, how it will knock on to the future stages. There is a little bit of an "all for the want of a horseshoe nail" problem there. Although we can see that all of the disruptions should be, on average, a particular amount, if one product from one sector is held up, the question is how will that have trickle-down effects. We do not really know. Our level of information on imports and exports from and to the UK is quite good. Because statistical agencies and the Revenue Commissioners do not want to put undue burden on smaller firms, the amount of specific detail we get on precisely what smaller firms are importing and exporting is not as great. We do not want to ask them to specify every single item they have brought in. They usually just have to report totals. There is extra information that we could have. It is certainly the case that this gives rise to a more negative impact than we have estimated in the overall models.