The problem facing other European economies is not that large amounts of actual economic activity is moving to Ireland, it's that Ireland's tax rules let it suck out the tax revenue from work, production and sales that occur across Europe. Ireland isn't getting a £1bn new Google office - London is - but the UK will see no corporate tax revenue from the products those people develop.
They wouldn't if they would actually tax work, production and sales that occur in their jurisdiction. This whole game works by assigning a jurisdiction to "profit" independent of those things, when profit is an accounting fiction. Unlike customers or employees, it has no physical existence, so it's easy for companies to arrange for it to be wherever it's most advantageous.
If you want to tax companies for employing or selling to your people, you can perfectly well have a payroll tax or sales tax.
It's extremely easy to draw conclusions specifically because it's a linear chart about per capita economic output over a relatively short duration of time.
The conclusion is that Ireland has drastically outperformed all the other nations in the chart since 1990. I think it would be hard to read that chart any other way, it's extremely obvious. For example it's not difficult to see approximately where each nation starts out and where they end up. Nor is it difficult to see just how large the output gap has become between Ireland and the rest. Logarithmic would mess up the clear visual that Ireland is pulling away from everyone else.
The point of the chart, is to show how Ireland has gone from an underdog economy in the EU, to an affluent powerhouse, leaving the other major economies behind per capita.
Or, it shows that the point is incorrect.
> Logarithmic would mess up the clear visual that Ireland is pulling away from everyone else.
No, if you don't see Ireland pulling away from everyone else in a logarithmic chart then they are not pulling away.
If you only see that signal in a linear graph then you are misleading yourself by thinking that they are doing so.
> Nor is it difficult to see just how large the output gap has become between Ireland and the rest.
Exactly. The "large output gap" you see clearly does not exist if you don't see it on a logarithmic chart!
Please post it, let the data speak for itself. If there is a large gap we will see it, if not, we won't.
It's really not if you're France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Italy, or any other major EU economy.
France has seen zero per capita economic growth, inflation adjusted, since at least 2003. They've had to sit by and watch as Ireland gets richer and richer.
Ireland now has a GDP per capita over $70,000, among the highest of any nation. Soon it'll be 100% higher than France, Germany and Britain. There's no way they want to see that continue, it's a humiliation to them while they all struggle to generate any growth at all. In nominal terms, Britain's GDP per capita has seen zero growth since 2004; you can imagine how much worse the inflation adjusted figure is. In that time Ireland went from $47k to $70k per capita.
Since 1990, Ireland has gone from a GDP per capita on par with Spain (with France ~50% higher than Ireland), to where Ireland is now 150% higher than Spain and 84% higher than France. In economic terms, that's extraordinary.
Here's what that looks like:
https://i.imgur.com/q99EtMk.png
No chance the other powers in the EU don't want to restrain that.