Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 8 October 2013

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform

Macroeconomic Forecasting: Discussion with Department of Finance

6:40 pm

Mr. Shane Enright:

To touch a little on export performance, as I had mentioned previously, there was a contraction in the first half of this year. To give a sectoral explanation, service exports, which are about equal in the basket to goods exports, are continuing to grow. Goods exports appear to have peaked in late 2011 and have been on a downward path since. Essentially, if we go to the next slide, we see this is being driven by developments in the pharma-chem sector. As members know, Ireland has a high specialisation in pharmaceutical outputs. The patent cliff is essentially sweeping through the sector and that is impacting on measured output from Ireland.