The CSO has recently published a new and very valuable volume entitled Measuring Ireland's Progress, writes Garret FitzGerald.
This shows that by 2002 the purchasing power of our Gross National Disposable Income per head of population - which might broadly be described as our national living standard - was slightly above the average for the present 15-member EU, whereas as recently as 1989 we were running almost 40 per cent below. No other European country has ever caught up with its neighbours as rapidly as this.
It can now be estimated that after May 1st our disposable income will be about 12 per cent higher than the average for the newly enlarged Union, within which, in these terms, we will rank ninth, with a level of income per head 2½ times greater than in the cases of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. (It is, incidentally, a measure of our progress in the past 15 years that in purchasing-power terms the income levels of these poorest three new members are currently at the level of what ours was in 1989.)
If during the years ahead Ireland were to achieve the 5 per cent annual growth which the ESRI (in last summer's Medium-Term Review) regards as possible, then - despite our faster population growth as an immigrant-attracting country - by 2010 in terms of disposable income per head we could be one of the five wealthiest countries in Europe, joining Luxembourg, Denmark, Belgium and Austria at the top of the European league table.
Of course, this outcome is very far from certain. Indeed it is currently under threat from the loss of competitiveness caused by our exceptional inflation since 1997, the impact of which has now been aggravated by the recent sharp rise in the euro-dollar rate.
We know that our higher costs have already started to lose us some high-tech manufacturing projects. But just how much damage this will do to our growth prospects we simply do not know and at this stage cannot even reasonably guess.
It was always likely that the scale of our economic growth after 1993 would create a risk of inflation, with demand for both goods and services expanding more rapidly than we could readily handle.
As the euro was being introduced at the very time when rapid economic growth was bringing Ireland close to full employment, this made it vitally important to curb both the growth of current public spending and the rate of expansion of investment around that time.
Instead, just as we approached the moment when we were to join the euro, the Government actually chose to double the rate of growth of current public spending from 7 per cent to almost 14 per cent a year.
The result of this was that post-1999 the annual rate of increase in consumer prices accelerated from 2 per cent a year to almost 5 per cent, and over this period Irish prices rose by 10 per cent more than in the rest of the EU.
That is the source of our competitiveness problem, one that could largely have been avoided if even a modicum of common sense had informed Government economic policy in the closing stages of the Celtic Tiger boom.
It seems that our Government totally failed to grasp the fact that the commitment to join the euro made it absolutely vital to ensure that inflation remained at or below the general European level; for euro membership rules out the option of devaluing our currency, a weapon that had previously been employed to save us from the consequence of failures to curb inflation.
The policy decision to join the euro was justified by a combination of economic and political considerations, but only on the assumption that the Government that took this decision accepted the logic of the new situation thus created and was fully committed to pursuing an economic policy appropriate to the totally new situation that their euro decision created.
Instead there was a total failure to accept that euro membership was going to require the avoidance of this kind of political game-playing in pre-election periods.
It is, of course, likely that as the recent recession gives way again to economic growth - a process that may already have started - there will be some recovery in the flow of foreign industrial investment. It is, however, improbable that this investment flow will ever return to the levels of the late 1990s.
Of itself, that is not disastrous: the 8 per cent growth rate of the period from 1993 to 2001 was a one-off achievement, made possible only by a totally exceptional labour supply situation. In 1993 a high rate of unemployment at home and a large volume of recent emigrants abroad was available to draw upon.
Moreover, the peaking of the birth rate in the late 1970s created two decades later an exceptional flow, two-thirds greater than in the rest of the EU, of qualified young people from education into the labour force. Finally, an unusually large pool of women at home became prepared during the 1990s to enter our labour force; a movement several times greater during this period than elsewhere in the EU, where that process had been effectively completed much earlier.
Together, these special factors made it temporarily possible for us to increase our labour force by between 4 per cent and 5 per cent a year, three times faster than elsewhere in Europe.
But by the turn of the millennium all of these special factors were in the process of disappearing, and in the present decade we are unlikely to be able to expand our labour force by more than 2 per cent a year. But if we maintain our high rate of labour productivity increase - which, however, depends on a continuing high inflow of foreign industrial investment - this reduced rate of labour supply growth would enable us to increase our national output by an average of about 5 per cent a year. But not by much more than that, without an immigration rate that could overstrain our capacity to absorb and to house more people.
So we do not need, nor do we want, quite as much new industrial investment as we received between 1993 and 2001. What we cannot know is whether our loss of competitiveness has been low enough to sustain the 5 per cent growth rate that we can cope with, or whether it has been such as to cut our growth rate back below that desirable level.