Professor Peter Clinch:

On infrastructure, it is important to say that the key determinant of our economic growth rate in the future is our productivity growth rate and the key lever that Government has is the public capital programme to boost that. Investment is required in both hard infrastructure, but also soft infrastructure such as business supports, education and investing in our people. At the moment, it is rather startling that our gross fixed capital formation is about 2% of GDP equivalent; it is 2.7% in the United Kingdom, as a comparison, and our capital investment is half of what Finland is investing. Clearly, what we are investing is deficient relative to what our competitors are investing. Everything else being equal, one would expect that to have a negative impact on our competitiveness in the future. This is one of the challenges because for many of the indicators or determinants of competitiveness in five or ten years time it is about what we do today. We saw that in the recovery where our capital investment was an aid to our recovery. It is absolutely crucial, then, that we find ways to enhance our capital programme.

With regard to the fiscal rules, the key thing we will have to do, and which we urge Government to do, is articulate the case for a relaxation of the fiscal rules around capital spending at a European level. There is a very big difference between current spending and capital spending. Capital spending is an investment for a return. With that in mind, what we have asked for in the review of the capital programme is that the case is made clear on having a methodology underpinning that capital programme, that is a strong cost benefit methodology to show where the investments can create the greatest return. One of the issues around the capital review relates to the sorts of ex antecost benefits; those things tend to happen on the individual projects that take place rather than on the overall programme. In the review, there is an opportunity to revisit that and to revisit it in the light of the Deputy's first question on Brexit about whether there are areas where we need to create greater investment in order to head off some of the international challenges we are facing. It is worth saying that in our competitiveness rankings, we rank very poorly on capital spend in the perception of those who answer the surveys, including a lot of business people. In the WEF ranking, we rank fiftieth in terms of the perception of the quality of our capital, which is extremely poor. We have a perception problem as well as a reality problem.

To move on to the Deputy's second question, linking this to the national planning framework is essential. There is no point in having a national planning framework if the capital spend does not match up to that. That joined-up policy framework is crucial. When the national planning framework is produced, we would expect to see that it maps to the capital programme and vice versa.

I can make a number of points on the national planning framework. It is a critical piece of economic policy infrastructure and should be seen as such. I hope that when it appears, it is clearly grounded in economic realities and that there is an economic strategy document that would demonstrate through that its impact on the social fabric of the country as well. It will be important that, unlike the national spatial strategy, it is grounded in that reality and is something that can actually be delivered. It is not easy to change the spatial pattern of economic activity. The Deputy referred to Dublin versus the rest of the country. It would be unfortunate to go down that route and to see it as some sort of competition. We are in a global competition-----