Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party)
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366. To ask the Minister for Finance if he will provide statistics on the national debt to gross national product ratio (details supplied) and the general Government debt to GNP ratio; if he will compare this to the ratios of the other EU countries and the EU-15 and EU-27 averages; and if he will provide projections for the estimated national debt to GNP ratio and the general Government debt to GNP ratio for each year to 2020. [31631/15]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy should note the standard for international debt comparisons is as a percentage of GDP and it is used in replies to PQs unless an alternative comparator is specified in the question.

It should also be noted that the Gross National Product (GNP) measure is no longer published by Eurostat. It is an outdated concept which continues to be retained nationally by the CSO because of its longstanding divergence from GDP. Internationally it has been replaced by Gross National Income (GNI) which is found by adjusting GNP for EU taxes and subsidies and is also the measure on which a large part of EU budget contributions are based. Currently on the Eurostat database, year 2014 data has only been reported by a handful of Member States but data is available for most in respect of year 2013.

National Debt is a presentation of the indebtedness of the Exchequer. It is calculated net of liquid assets and excludes certain liabilities recognised in the General Government Debt. There is no available set of data to compare measures on National Debt across the EU. The General Government Debt (GGD) is the standard measurement of gross indebtedness used for comparative purposes within the EU. It includes the debt of the Exchequer, the extra-budgetary funds, the non-commercial state-sponsored bodies, as well as the debt of local authorities.

Table 1 contains General Government Debt as a percentage of GNI for the EU area for years 2013 and 2014 (where available).

It should be noted that National Debt, General Government Debt and GNP projections for years to 2020 in Table 2 are consistent with the forecasts for Stability Programme Update published in April 2015. New projections of Debt measurement and GNP will be produced for Budget 2016.

Table 1 General Government Debt as % of GNI

Source CSO, Eurostat

Table 2. Debt Projections as % of GNP

Source Department of Finance SPU 2015, NTMA