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

6:50 pm

Mr. Shane Enright:

I mentioned the divergence between goods and services exports. We are expecting a small contraction in exports this year of about 0.6%. We have split that figure into services and goods. In respect of services we were expecting reasonably healthy growth, although not as strong as last year, but goods exports will exert a negative drag on overall exports both this year and next year, primarily due to the contraction in the pharma-chem sector, and there is not enough growth in the rest of our goods exports to compensate for the contraction that we are seeing in that area.