Ireland — A Remarkable Economic Recovery?

The collapse of the Irish economy during the Global Financial Crisis brought a substantial decline in gross domestic product, a trebling of the unemployment rate and a sharp increase in public debt. Key to the scale of Ireland’s crisis was the scale of a domestic property bubble. In the Corden Lecture, I explored how Ireland’s notable turnaround since 2013 contrasts with the experiences of Spain, Portugal and Greece. This was primarily due to Ireland’s large, foreign-owned, modern, export-oriented, multinational sector and its early and sustained action to deal with the fiscal deficit that emerged in 2008.