Ireland Expected to Grow 6% This Year

Ireland’s government expects the economy to grow by about 6% this year, far more than originally forecast after data showed that it grew by 1.9% quarter-on-quarter from April to June.

After increasing by more than 5% in 2014, Ireland’s fast-recovering economy was already set to be the best performing in the EU for the second successive year when the government forecast in April it would grow by 4% this year.

However, the strong second quarter followed upwardly revised growth of 2.1% in the first three months, and put GDP 6.7% ahead of the second quarter a year ago, the Central Statistics Office said.

“If you get 7% in the first half of the year, if the economy didn’t grow at all in the second half, you’d still have 5.7 by year end,” the finance minister, Michael Noonan, said. “The economy is growing very strongly in the third quarter, so somewhere around 6%, slightly below, slightly above for the 2015 figure.”

Ireland’s debt to GDP ratio will fall below 100% by the end of this year, rather than 2016 as initially expected, Noonan said. Ireland’s debt peaked at 125% of GDP in 2013 as it completed a three-year international aid programme.

via The Guardian

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza