Jim Power

And looking at over the last five years, the sectors that are driving this, it's the information industry, that's software, telecoms, publishing, filmmaking, 6% year on annual growth in productivity over the last five years.

professional services, management services growing strongly, the oil and gas sector growing strongly.

So there's a lot of very, very impressive statistics coming through there.

And the economist commentator who wrote the piece says that the U.S.

is unusually flexible, dynamic and innovative by rich world standards.

So

You know, despite everything we have discussed about Trump and the damage he's doing globally and to the US economy, that underlying productivity performance is pretty impressive.

And one of the factors that's been cited has been really important in all of that is the energy revolution issue.

In the States over recent years, particularly the fracking revolution, the US has become virtually energy independent.

Electricity is about half the price as in Europe and a third of the price or a third lower than in Japan.

So a lot of very positive stuff there.

How do you read that?

Here in Ireland, the productivity numbers are pretty impressive, but it's obviously very skewed.

The multinational sector, very strong.

The indigenous economy, much less strong.

But nevertheless, it has fed into pretty dramatic improvements, really, in the standard of living in this country over the last couple of decades.

And in that context, Chris, I wanted to talk a little bit about the budget that's coming up on October 6th in this country.

And it's something we are going to be talking a lot more about as time evolves.

Yeah, well, it is interesting, Chris, does the spring economic statement that was published there in April, it was looking at the exchequer balance.

OK, the exchequer balance is basically I'm going to get a little bit geeky here now, but the exchequer balance is basically the difference between what the government collects in taxation and a few other revenues, but mainly taxation and what it spends on the day to day running the country.