Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 5 December 2013
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform
Fiscal Assessment Report November 2013: Discussion with Irish Fiscal Advisory Council
4:05 pm
Mr. Sebastian Barnes:
I guess it will sound like an evasive answer when I say that the methodology we are using for the GDP charts, which is our main measure of uncertainty, is based on a symmetric construction. Upsides and downsides are the same. We have indicated that we believe the risks are on the downside. That means we think the probability of reaching it is less than 50:50. We do not have a quantitative measure for exactly how far this might be. In a way, it is somewhat meaningless because it does not matter that much if it is a little less.