Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 20 September 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach
Banking Issues: Central Bank
Mr. Vasileios Madouros:
I wish to add a couple things related to that. There are two ways of thinking about it. One is the aggregate fiscal position and not making, in aggregate, inflationary problems worse. There is then the composition of these decisions – spending as well as revenues. We are talking about the aggregate position and what this might mean for the economy as a whole which, as the Deputy mentioned, in turn, also has distributional consequences. We look at many aggregate measures when we think about macro aggregate policies but we have done much work on, for example, the distributional effects of the inflation shock we have had. Those on lower incomes were particularly hurt in the most recent inflationary shock. We have a lot of distributional works on the savings that have been accumulated across the economy and who is holding them. I just want to make the distinction between the aggregate fiscal stance and the issue around difficult decisions for the Government on spending and revenue, which have a lot more important distributional consequences.
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