I laughed my balls off

From the Guardian.....

Not many people on the UK side of the Irish Sea have noticed it but Ireland is now a richer country than its former imperial master, if you believe international comparisons. In 2002, according to United Nations figures, Ireland generated a gross domestic product per capita of $36,360 compared with only $26,159 for the UK. These results were worked out using purchasing power parities which adjust for international price differences to find out what incomes can really buy. One reason this historic development has gone largely unremarked in the UK is because people cannot, or do not want to, believe it. Even in Ireland it has been greeted sceptically. Economists are saying that the statisticians are measuring the wrong kind of GDP. They have a point. One factor behind the emerald miracle is that much of the wealth has been generated by international corporations, attracted by a low-tax regime, which then dispatch most of their large profits back to their home bases.
If economic wealth is recorded by the less fashionable measure of gross national product, which adjusts for remitted profits and other international monetary flows, the picture looks different. As Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute points out, GNP accounted for only 83% of GDP in 2003: in that year official GDP growth of 1.2% was bumped up to 3% on the GNP measure. So that's that then.
Not quite. These crude figures are arrived at before applying purchasing power parities which are supposed to give a fairer picture. On the PPP measure, the size of the UK economy is only 72% of that of Ireland - so what Ireland loses on the GNP swings, it may gain on the PPP roundabouts. Maybe it is time for Gordon Brown to dispatch a team to find out what's really been happening. They would be met with a cornucopia of reasons for Irish success, including EU membership, immigration, high investment, a multi-national base, fiscal stability, social partnerships and so on. Of course, if anyone really knew the formula for growth in an economy, there would be no need for economists in the first place.