irisheconomy.ie – Or at least that is what the national accounts tell us. The CSO have published the National Income and Expenditure Accounts for 2015. These show that real GDP expanded by 26.3 per cent in 2015 and real GNP grew by 18.7 per cent. Do these numbers mean anything? It is hard to know.

Looking at the expenditure approach the big real changes were in investment (+26.7%), exports (+34.4%) and imports (+21.7%).

In nominal terms, exports in 2015 were put at €317.2 billion, up from €219.8 billion in 2014. Exports minus imports was €81.2 billion compared to €34.6 billion in 2014. We would usually expect most of this to feed through to the outflow of factor payments but net factor income from abroad only went from –€29.7 billion in 2014 to –€53.2 billion in 2015. That means most of the improvement in net exports also contributed to GNP but the “gross” part of this seems to be important.

Joseph Ryan