Professor John McHale:

We must take this discussion off-line, as I believe the Deputy is looking at the wrong figure. The key figure we must look at here is the impact on real GDP. They have a number of tables and one must do a little bit of digging in the paper to identify the multiplier estimate that matches the other literature we are considering, which is the overall GDP multiplier. There, the initial effect is 0.7 and then it declines rapidly. If anything, we are going in the direction of these multipliers having bigger effects over time, because essentially, we are assuming that 0.5 is not just 0.5 in the first year but also in the second year, third year and so on.