Professor John FitzGerald:

The first one was published in 1986 but I was not involved in that. Since 1987, I have been involved in these medium-term reviews. Initially with my colleague, John Bradley, through the 1990s we were jointly responsible for it. Since 1989, I have been the lead author but with other colleagues. It has been published every two or three years. It uses a range of tools to understand how the economy behaves and to look in a longer term context over several years at what are the strategic issues and how policy can produce a better outcome.

Reflecting the fact we do not know what the future is going to bring, we always publish a range of scenarios. This always poses problems for the media. We tried producing two scenarios and it asked if it was the higher or the lower. Then we tried producing three scenarios and it asked is it the middle one. The rest of the world has difficulty dealing with uncertainty just as we do. Since 1987, we have developed the Harmonised Econometric Research for Modelling Economic Systems, HERMES, model and have a range of other tools we use in undertaking the work.