Mr Jim Copeland shares the opinion common among many Americans that European leaders are mistaken to believe that a downturn in the US economy would not affect Europe. But the chief executive of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu expects any downturn to be less dire than some predict.

"Maybe it will cost you 70 basis points in GDP growth, but I don't think it will be something that will slow the European growth rate down to the US growth rate," he says.

Mr Copeland is upbeat about the future of the US economy, saying it is going through a normal business cycle. And he is not hung up on whether the US is experiencing a downturn or a recession.

"The economy is slowing and frankly whether the GDP growth rate is 1 per cent or minus 1 per cent is not nearly as important as how long it is before the line turns up again. The length of a recession or downturn has a lot more import than the severity of it," he adds.

He also feels that US companies will emerge from the downturn leaner, tougher and more efficient.

His comments that the downturn will be short will provide some relief to many in an Irish economy that has become very reliant on the US.

The decision by Deloitte & Touche to host the Europe and Africa meeting in the Republic partly reflects the economic changes witnessed in this State over the past decade and its growing standing internationally, according to Mr Copeland.

The meeting of the Deloitte & Touche regional heads is another step in the firm's plans for the global integration of management and financial arrangements of the different practices. The integration process reflects clients' expectations, Mr Copeland says.

"For a long time, globalisation of business was pretty much a buzzword but it has very much become a reality and clients have little tolerance for being slow in moving people across borders to places where you can serve them properly. So this is a way of helping us respond better to clients.

"The management model that they had, which was ownership, proved to be more nimble and quicker than ours. We did things by consensus and agreement and that took a while. Before the Internet and improved communications, that taking a while didn't matter - it was at the same pace as our clients, but our clients began to move more rapidly than we could in our present structure, so we decided to change our structure."

The Internet and the potential of e-business is a topic that excites Mr Copeland, who said

at the release of the firm's results in January that its strong financial performance was influenced by the continuing commitment to technology and e-business opportunities. He says the fallout from the dotcom collapse and the slowdown in the tech markets has not changed his mind.

"The pricing around the dotcom companies and the absence of a coherent business plan was just a stupid thing and a bubble in the economy, but the underlying power of technology is absolutely there. We're talking about things like reducing spending, depending on the category, from 5 per cent to 40 per cent in purchasing systems, for example. That changes the fundamentals of an industry."

While Deloitte & Touche is taking action on integration to reflect trends in the market, the one trend that it will not be following is that of spinning off its consulting business as some of the other big firms have done, according to Mr Copeland.

"First of all, the consulting part of our business and the rest of the business partnership worked very well together," he says. "There has not been either the animosity or the greed element entering into our decision because some years ago we separated the profit pools in which we practice, so Deloitte Consulting was basically keeping everything it earned minus some minor amounts of profit-sharing. There was no reason for it to separate from the rest of the firm in order to get its own fair share of the process."

He also says the idea of spinning off the consulting arm at the prices competitors were receiving did not make economic sense for Deloitte & Touche.

This divestment of intellectual capital by competitors has helped to put Deloitte & Touche in the best competitive position in the firm's history, he says.

"We were delighted to see the dismantling of the other firms. You'd worry about it, if the KPMG sale, for example, meant that it had a huge war chest of funds to attack us with. We wouldn't be feeling pretty good about that, but the transaction wasn't of that nature - neither was the Cap Gemini transaction."

Deloitte & Touche has two competitive advantages, according to Mr Copeland.

"We have a reputation from a human resource standpoint of being one of the best places in the world to work. We think this business is all about people and intellectual capital, so whoever wins the people wars wins the war altogether. And we have the ability to bring multidisciplinary solutions to solving complex problems."

With such huge clout among the larger firms, it is little wonder that many smaller firms are being squeezed out or taken over. But this process has been ongoing for more than 40 years and reflects market forces, according to Mr Copeland.

"Over time, you would expect to see the market divide into very large firms that are serving very large businesses, and very small firms that are serving very small business, with a few highly specialised niche firms. But you wouldn't want to be a general firm in the middle - that's a killing ground. Your overhead is too high to compete with the smaller firms and your cost per unit is too great to compete with the larger ones.

"Most highly dispersed industries are inefficient and that's why they consolidate, so I guess economically for the consumer that's good. If you look at the cost of auditing as a percentage of revenues over the past decade of large publicly traded companies, the costs have actually gone down and part of the reason is because the big eight firms consolidated down to the big five."

Allied to this growing strength of the bigger firms is a move to introduce international accounting standards.

"We don't believe it's a great idea to have a whole series of different accounting standards out there," says Mr Copeland. "We think it is very dangerous for investors. It's extraordinarily difficult for us to manage the whole process and it makes capital markets more cumbersome and less efficient."

He believes there is no reason for Europe and the US to have different accounting standards.

Mr Copeland says he would also like to see certain uniform principles of regulation. "Once you have the principles established, that would allow for local variation. As long as it doesn't affect the principle, I think that would be fine".

He says there has been a tendency in the past few years to regulate to a level where some people feel that the regulations are replacing market forces.

"There are places where regulation is necessary but I think it ought to be demonstrated. You ought to begin with the notion that whatever you're trying to regulate, you should first attempt self regulation. If it can't self-regulate, then perhaps the Government needs to move in."