Europe got an unexpected dose of good news on June 6th: its economy turns out to have been growing twice as fast as had been previously thought. Granted, the new figure is a modest 0.6% rise in GDP in the first quarter compared with the prior one, but Europe takes what it can get these days. Was this a sign of German or French revival after years of lethargy? Not quite. Look at the fine print and a single statistic stands out: a 9.7% bump in the GDP of Ireland. A country of around one-hundredth of the population of the European Union was responsible for over half the entire bloc’s growth. A casual observer of economic statistics might surmise Ireland had accidentally struck oil while nobody noticed.
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