Europe got an unexpected dose of good news on June 6th: its economy turns out to have been growing twice as fast as had been previously thought. Granted, the new figure is a modest 0.6% rise in GDP in the first quarter compared with the prior one, but Europe takes what it can get these days.

"Ireland in recent years has seen its GDP balloon for reasons unrelated to what its workforce is up to. The unexpected fortune stems not from oil, but from global tax-shifting"

Through a web of royalties and licensing fees, accountants as versed in the arts of surreal creativity as James Joyce can magic away profits to Ireland, which taxes them at just 12.5% a year, one of the world’s lowest rates.

1. distort GDP (Irish officials don't use it) -- nice little extra hospitals-and-schools financing from global megacorps
2. ...makes orange men upset:

America, notably, has good reason to gripe. Beyond the profits it might have taxed itself, a side-effect of this transatlantic profit odyssey is to produce the appearance of huge goods exports as, say, Viagra pills developed in America are sold to Americans via Cork Illusory though it is, America’s massive goods deficit with Ireland—the biggest after those with China, Mexico and Vietnam, all rather larger economies than Ireland—is a problem these days.

3. annoys the Europeans, too. [unclear point]

Dubliners gripe that the presence of Googlers and their ilk has exacerbated a housing shortage. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has warned of Ireland falling prey to “Dutch disease”, the imbalance that struck the Netherlands in the 1970s as natural-gas money sent the rest of its economy off-kilter. Ideally the authorities there should have squirrelled away their tax windfall in a long-term fund, as Norway did [#899606] with its oil revenues, better to manage if the windfall ends.