Michael Taft: The latest EU Commission projections are out and, if anything, they show an even higher structural deficit than what the Government is projecting. This provides a perspective on what additional austerity might be in store for us under the Fiscal Treaty.
The EU Commission’s Spring Economic forecasts shows Ireland‘s structural budget balance to be far and away the highest in the Eurozone – at 7.9 percent for 2013. The Eurozone average is 1.8. We are much higher than Greece (4.5 percent), Spain (4.8 percent) and Portugal (4.6 percent).
The EU projection compares unfavourably to the Government’s own projection of 6.9 percent for 2013. In nominal terms, the EU is projecting a structural deficit over €1.6 billion higher than the Government for next year.
What is particularly noteworthy is how sluggishly the deficit is falling. Between 2011 and 2013, factoring in €7 billion worth of fiscal adjustments, the structural deficit falls by a mere 0.5 percent. The Government is hoping for a fall of 1 percent.
The EU doesn’t make projections outward to 2015. However, if we were to take 2013 as the starting point and use the Government’s pace of deficit reduction, we’d find a structural deficit of 4.5 percent for 2015. If this holds, the structural deficit has deteriorated and the gap between the EU projection and the Fiscal Treaty target has now widened to €7.2 billion. The Government estimated that it would be €5.4 billion.
To date, the Government has refused to engage with this issue. Instead, it insists that increased investment and micro-economic reforms will raise our productive capacity and that this will be enough to close the structural deficit gap without any further fiscal adjustments. However, whatever about the talk of growth and investment, the Government is doing the exact opposite as discussed here.
This is, of course, all a bit speculative as we don’t have EU projections out to 2015. But, with the new EU projections, we could now be facing into a higher structural deficit than that projected by the Government with a much slower decline. All things remaining the same, this means that the gap between the structural deficit and the Fiscal Treaty target just got larger. And, potentially, the amount of austerity needed just got greater.
Michael Taft @notesonthefront
Michael Taft is an economic analyst and trade unionist. He is author of the Notes of the Front blog and a member of the TASC Economists’ Network.
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