Article Review
By
Majed Harfouche

Doing the maths: how real is Ireland's economic growth?
The article I reviewed discusses the issue of Ireland’s growth GDP and GNP wise. It addresses why the GDP of Ireland may not reflect its real growth due to the circumstances related to the Irish economy and the effect of the low corporate tax rate in increasing the GDP. So according to this article the GDP of Ireland had increased by 4.8pc and the Irish economy as a whole grew by 6.7pc. Many jobs have been added and the unemployment rate has decreased. The Irish government also had a surplus from taxes for the first 11 months of 2015. However this increase is not a full reflection of what is happening to the Irish economy. As the article explains usually there is a slight difference between a countries GDP and its GNP but in Ireland this difference is quiet large, there was about a 15pc difference the GDP had outweighed the GNP. The article explains this difference in that Ireland has a lot of foreign companies that operate on its soil due to the low corporate tax rate it has and this is the reflection of the GDP being very high. However it goes on to point out that the GNP may not be a better indicator due to various issues. Some of these issues include some UK companies registering as Irish to benefit from the low tax rate. Other more important is tax inversion, when a company gets taken over by an Irish company so that it can benefit from the tax rate and is now registered as an Irish company which is somehow legal. Now the profits of these companies who are to be redistributed to the shareholders appear as the profits of the Irish economy and is represented on the Irish GNP. This all drives the question is to how all the statistics and numbers are supposed to reflect how the economy of Ireland is doing if it does not really reflect the produce of Irish companies and