Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

If you look at a list of countries ranked by GDP per capita, Ireland comes in as one of the richest

nations in the world. According to the IMF, Ireland's GDP per capita is $145,000, the highest in the world, and

nearly three times that of the UK.

Ireland also has the fastest growing economy in the EU.

The country's GDP grew 12.2% last year, despite a significant slowdown in the global economy.

The Irish economy's growth in the fourth quarter of 2022 was so strong that it single-handedly

kept the Eurozone out of recession that year.

Corporation tax receipts have more than tripled in the past eight years,

hitting a record 22.6 billion euros last year. Tax receipts have been coming in so fast

that the government expects a 10 billion euro surplus this year, and the country is setting up

a sovereign wealth fund and a public

investment fund to finance infrastructure projects in the country.

It may not surprise you that these figures have provoked some scepticism, as for most

of Ireland's history the economy underperformed.

And when you visit, it doesn't necessarily

strike you as an unusually wealthy place. Ireland's current unemployment rate of 4% contrasts

strikingly with its 15% level in the early 2010s, when the country needed an EU lifeline amid the debt crisis that

engulfed countries like Greece, Spain and Ireland. So how did all of this happen? Well,

we need to look at some of Ireland's economic history. Ireland won its independence from Britain

in 1922, but as a result of the Civil War, the

free state started out with a very serious budget deficit, which wasn't fully cleared until

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