Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Central Statistics Office, CSO, convened the economic statistics review group, ESRG, in September 2016. The report of the group was published on 3 February 2017, along with the CSO’s response to the report. The focus of the ESRG was to identify a suite of analyses or indicators which would provide a better understanding of the domestic components of our highly globalised economy.

While GDP, gross domestic product, and GNP, gross national product, continue to be the international standard indicators, the development of a new level indicator, called GNI*, has been proposed by the group to address the specific nature of the Irish economy. GNI* is designed to exclude from gross national income, GNI, the depreciation attributable to relocated capital assets and the impact of re-domiciled firms. In doing so, it will aim to measure more closely domestic economic activity. This should provide useful information for analytical and economic modelling purposes such as budgetary forecasting.

The CSO will implement the review group’s recommendations on an incremental basis and will publish annual current price estimates of GNI* for the years 1995 to 2016 with the annual national income and expenditure 2016 results scheduled for mid-2017. The CSO plans to develop quarterly estimates of GNI* in 2018 with the estimates calculated at current and constant prices, namely adjusted for inflation.

EUROSTAT was international observer on the ESRG. The ESRG report was presented and discussed at the February 2017 European statistical system committee meeting of directors general of national statistical offices. It was subsequently discussed at a high level EUROSTAT task force on globalisation which includes directors of macroeconomic and business statistics.

The CSO has also made presentations on the ESRG report at EUROSTAT working groups on national accounts, balance of payments and business statistics. The report is helping to inform discussion of how globalisation is measured in European statistics.

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