by WALDEN BELLO
With the European Union and the International Monetary Fund now having to bail Ireland out to the tune of a whopping 85 billion euros, this is not the “Celtic Tiger” of recent lore. The Irish economy that drew the admiration of a whole generation of neoliberal economists and technocrats successfully rode the wave of globalization to become Europe’s fastest growing economy from the 1990s to the middle of this decade. In 1988, the Economist described Ireland as “the poorest of the rich.” By 1997, it pitched Ireland as “Europe’s shining light.” By 2005, the country’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) was the second highest in the EU, after Luxembourg’s.
After the Asian financial crisis brought down Asia’s tiger economies in the late 1990s, Ireland remained, along with China, the stars of export-oriented growth, seen by orthodox economists as the road to prosperity in the era of globalization. China learned the lessons of the Asian financial crisis and kept its financial sector on a tight leash. Ireland did not, and paid the price when the Western financial system unraveled in 2007.
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