 Deciphering Ireland’s Macroeconomic Imbalance Indicators: Statistical ConsiderationsThe Economic and Social Review, 2015, vol. 46, issue 2, 293-313 Abstract: The recent financial crisis has highlighted the importance of the early detection and correction of macroeconomic vulnerabilities. This has led the European Commission to develop the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP). Under the MIP, the potential vulnerabilities of EU countries are assessed using standard indicators relating to internal and external macroeconomic imbalances. These indicators, however, assume cross-country data are comparable, despite economic and financial structures being very heterogeneous. This is not the case. This paper finds that for countries with substantial international investment, such as Ireland, five of the eleven indicators are materially distorted by financial and non-financial multinational activities. This paper disaggregates these five affected indicators into multinational and indigenous Irish components, insofar as the existing data allows. It finds that for Ireland the MIP indicators underestimate some external imbalances, significantly overestimate private sector credit imbalances and underestimate the deleveraging of the financial sector. Adjusting the indicators to allow for country-specific factors can help diagnose the underlying imbalance, while reducing instances of the MIP highlighting false positives. Keywords: macroeconomic indicators; statistics; Ireland (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eso:journl:v:46:y:2015:i:2:p:293-313 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The Economic and Social Review from Economic and Social Studies |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.