Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 1 June 2022
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Fiscal Assessment Report: Irish Fiscal Advisory Council
Mr. Eddie Casey:
I am definitely not an expert in this. We have recently been using the cards and ATM data to really understand in granular detail what is happening on a day-to-day basis in the economy and what is happening with consumer spending. It has proven really useful. It is a brilliant resource that the Central Bank has started to produce. It gets those data from banks. It gives a very clear read of how consumers responded to the pandemic and how they came out of it. It is possible to see the falls as the lockdowns hit and the sharp recoveries thereafter. It has been a good forward glance of what we will see from the CSO in a few months when it does its own numbers and looks at retail sales, surveys and things like that.
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