What’s going on with the current account?

Ireland’s balance of payments is subject to huge volatility.  Among the reasons for this are transactions in intellectual property and aircraft for leasing as well as income flows link to redomiciled, but not Irish-owned, PLCs.  In response to this the CSO have been publishing a modified current account, CA*, which strips out the above of these issues.

Getting on a handle on a country’s underlying current account position can be an important part of determining if imbalances are building up.  As the long-run series in the chart below shows, Ireland experienced widening balance of payments deficits in the late-1970s and mid-2000s which precipitated severe problems.

Last week, the CSO published the 2020 estimate of the modified current account.  The surplus of €23.5 billion was equivalent to 11.5 per cent of national income.  This is an extremely large surplus by historic Irish and current international terms.

The only time Ireland ran a current account surplus of an equivalent size was during World War II when trade restrictions and rationing were in force.  Ireland’s current account needed to improve to wash out the imbalances built up prior to 2008, but the ongoing rise to record levels seems to be overstating it.

When can get some insight into this from the Institutional Sector Accounts.  The current account of the balance of payments is savings minus investment.  The sector accounts allow us to see the contribution by sector to the current account.  The chart below takes the annual outcomes from the sector accounts for saving minus investment with the figure for the non-financial corporate sector adjusted to make the total across all sectors consistent with the modified current account.

Immediately, we are drawn to the 2020 figures.  The household sector has been a net lender since 2009 but this increased very significantly in 2020 – due to restrictions on spending.  The support incomes the government sector moved to being a significant borrower. Financial corporations and the impact of items that are not sectorised have not had much impact on the current account in the last four or five years.

That leaves us with the red segment of the bars – the adjusted figure for non-financial corporations.  For the last few years this has been making a positive contribution to the current account and last year it was €12.5 billion.

For the time being we don’t have much insight into this.  While the modified current account is showing a significant surplus some caution should be exercised before considering it available for spending.

Later in the year when the annual sector accounts are published we will get a domestic/foreign split for the corporate sectors in 2020.  Here is what the 2019 figures showed:

There wasn’t really a whole lot going on the domestic sectors up to 2019.  By 2019 all of the household, government, domestic non-financial and domestic financial sectors were net lenders.

However, the most significant changes were happening within the foreign-owned sectors – those sectors we hope would be largely stripped out of the modified current account.  Either via standard net factor flows (repatriated profits etc.) or via the CA* adjustments for IP, aircraft and redomiciled PLCs. 

But even after all those the impact of foreign-owned sectors went from –€7.2 billion in 2017 to +€0.4 billion in 2019.  This was the largest contribution to the rise in the black line (the modified current account) up to 2019.

And the recent update to the modified current account shows that the 2019 figure has been revised up.  It €16.5 billion for last year’s annual sector accounts; when this years sectors accounts are published they will reflect last week’s update which put the 2019 modified current account at €20.2 billion.

It is clear there is something going on – and that it likely to be within the foreign-owned sector. What is not clear is whether it is something that would justify a further refinement of the adjustments made to get to the modified current account. 

It could be due to “good” investment such as manufacturing plants for pharmaceuticals or processors.  Or it could be another distortion that should be stripped out.

There is no doubt that Ireland’s current account has improved relative to the large deficits that were evident up to 2008 but there must be some doubt that that improvement has led to a surplus equivalent to 11.5 per cent of national income. A surplus, yes, just not a record one. 

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