This ESRI conference is taking place this morning.
The new Governor Patrick Honohan delivered an opening address which provides an interesting analysis of the Irish economic and fiscal situation: his speech is here.
The ESRI has also released its new quarterly forecast: here.
The conference also features a number of research papers, which can be found here.
In addition, there was a roundtable on the Commission on Taxation Report: my contribution to that roundtable is available here.
2 replies on “ESRI Budget Perspectives 2010 conference”
As I say in another thread, ESRI are now clearly rowing back on their extremely pessimistic forecasts of early 2009. In today’s Quarterly Bulletin, ESRI have revised down their forecasts for the fall in GDP in 2009 from -7.9% to -7.2%, and in 2010 from -2.3% to -1.1%. Their forecast for the total fall in GDP between 2008 and 2010 is thus reduced from -10.0% to -8.2%. This is the second Quarterly Bulletin in a row that they have done this. Back in April, the period of Peak Pessimism in Ireland, the consensus forecast was that GDP would fall by 15% between 2007 and 2010, of which 12% would be between 2008 and 2010. On ESRI’s latest forecasts the fall in GDP will now be just 11% between 2007 and 2010 and 8.2% between 2008 and 2010. Davy’s and NCB’s forecasts are allready for much lower falls in GDP in 2009 and 2010 than that.
I hope they have allowed for the full negative effects of the decline in sterling. They didn’t mention it in the executive summary. I hope they are not underestimating it.