Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 October 2024

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Ireland's Medium-Term Fiscal and Structural Plan: Irish Fiscal Advisory Council

5:30 pm

Dr. Eddie Casey:

I can speak to the first point on the conservatism of the forecasting. We recently looked at this in more detail. To be honest, we cannot see any overarching systematic conservatism bias. We know that was the expectation and many people seem to think this is the case, but statistically speaking it was not that obvious when we looked at it. We want to do more work on that and look at specific parts of the forecast such as consumer spending, where maybe that is different, and investment. In the headline aggregates, it does not look like it is the case. We are not getting a clear signal on that. With regard to the tax revenue and GNI*, I do not have those numbers to hand but it is something we can look into.