Only austerity can help Ireland out of recession

According to recent figures put out by Ireland's Central Statistics Office, the country's GDP shrank by 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. Nevertheless the Irish government's austerity measures will lead to growth in the long term, writes the chief economist of the Polish Kredyt Bank, Jakub Borowski, in his column for the liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza: "Certainly, the government could say that it makes more sense from a political point of view to go the way of controlled bankruptcy than to economise, because such a bankruptcy would only hurt for a short time and would disburden the national budget. But nevertheless the reforms must be implemented, because austerity measures are always the basic prerequisite - even when the debts have been partly written off. The entire Eurozone is condemned to stricter budget policies in the long term, even if it will be a few years before they produce decent levels of economic growth."

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