Ireland's fiscal stabilisation ? achievements and prospects: editors' introduction

Abstract

The papers in this special issue of the Review were initially prepared for a conference of the Irish Economic Association held at Trinity College, Dublin on Thursday 19th September 1991. The purpose of the conference was to study in detail the remarkable turnaround which took place in Ireland's fiscal position in the late 1980s and which has endured into the early 1990s. Through much of the last decade, Ireland's fiscal problems had been the subject of much adverse comment both from inside and outside the country. The problems began with the fiscal expansion programme of the late 1970s. Public borrowing increased, the debt/GNP ratio mounted, and the economy stagnated. By 1986, the debt/GNP ratio had reached more than 130 per cent, a figure well i n excess of the debt ratios of what were termed the heavily indebted developing countries. The Exchequer Borrowing Requirement (EBR) remained apparently immovable at an alarming 13 per cent of GNP. A mood of fatalism and despondency prevailed about the nation's ability to come to grips with this problem.