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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline

I wonder. I know the UK has put a lot of its eggs into the basket of having London be a major financial services centre, and I don't know how much that distorts statistics. I know for Ireland, the way we set up our economy, we need two metrics: the on paper one, and the real one. Because we put so much effort into luring in American multinationals who use Dublin as the convenient hub to move profits around, there's a lot of "Wow the GDP is so high, the Irish are so rich" which doesn't reflect reality:

Ireland's reliance on large multinational intellectual property has resulted in GDP for 2022 exceeding the EU average by over 130%.

Preliminary figures released by statistics agency, Eurostat reported Ireland as having the second-highest GDP in the EU last year, which, along with Luxembourg has far outpaced all other EU countries.

...Multinationals including Apple, Facebook, Pfizer, and Google, among others alone accounted for almost 56% of the so-called total value added to the economy, up from 53% in 2021, the CSO said. Sectors dominated by multinationals, including information and communications, expanded greatly.

However, the CSO found that an alternative measure of economic activity known as Modified Domestic Demand, or MDD, which more accurately reflects the activities for Irish households and businesses in the domestic economy, contracted a second time in Q4 of 2022 by 1.3%.

With MDD falling by 1.1% in Q3, its consecutive decline fulfilled the criteria for a technical recession.

There's even a name for this. I don't know if the UK has the same thing going on, but I do think it's fair to say that there are pockets of very thriving economy, and other swathes of what would be the rust-belt in the USA which have declined and never replaced their former activity with something new.

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