Leprechaun economics significant person Paul Krugman
Leprechaun economics was a term coined by economist Paul Krugman to describe the 26.3 per cent rise in Irish 2015 GDP, later revised to 34.4 per cent, in a 12 July 2016 publication by the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO), restating 2015 Irish national accounts. At that point, the distortion of Irish economic data by tax-driven accounting flows reached a climax. In 2020, Krugman said the term was a feature of all tax havens.While the event that caused the artificial Irish GDP growth occurred in Q1 2015, the Irish CSO had to delay its GDP revision and redact the release of its regular economic data in 2016–2017 to protect the source's identity, as required by Irish law.  Only in Q1 2018 could economists confirm Apple as the source,  and that this was the largest ever base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) action, and the largest hybrid–tax inversion of a U.S. corporation.The event marked the replacement of Ireland's prohibited BEPS tool, the Double Irish, with the more powerful Capital Allowances for Intangible Assets (CAIA) tool.  Apple used the CAIA tool to restructure out of its hybrid–Double Irish tool, on which the EU Commission would levy a €13 billion fine in August 2016. As a result of the action by Apple, a range of academics calculated that Ireland, already held by some to be a major tax haven, was the world's largest tax haven.The "Leprechaun economics" incident had follow-on effects. In September 2016, Ireland became the first of the major tax havens to be "blacklisted" by a G20 economy, Brazil. In February 2017, Ireland replaced GDP with "Modified GNI (or GNI*)" (2017 Irish GDP was 162% of 2017 Irish GNI*, whereas EU–28 2017 GDP was 100% of GNI).  In December 2017, the U.S and the EU introduced countermeasures to the Irish BEPS tools. In October 2018, Ireland introduced a reverse tax, to discourage IP from leaving Ireland.  In 2018, the OECD showed that Ireland's public debt metrics differ dramatically depending on whether Debt-to-GDP, Debt-to-GNI* or Debt-per-Capita is used; and in 2019, the IMF estimated 60 per cent of Irish foreign direct investment was "phantom".Climax of 2015
Apple's Q1 2015 BEPS transaction implied that Irish GDP was now well over 155% of Irish GNI, exceeding even Luxembourg, and making it inappropriate for ongoing monitoring of the high level of Irish indebtedness.  In response, in February 2017, the Central Bank of Ireland became the first of the major tax havens to abandon GDP and GNP as metrics, and replaced them with a new measure: Modified gross national income, or GNI* (or GNI Star).In July 2017, the Financial Times reporting on the new GNI* measure said: "The Irish economy is about a third smaller than expected. The country’s current account surplus is actually a deficit. And its debt level is at least a quarter higher than taxpayers have been led to believe"; and that "Embarrassed by what Paul Krugman, the economist, denounced as "leprechaun economics", Ireland's policymakers were determined to avoid a repeat".
At this point, multinational profit shifting doesn't just distort Ireland’s balance of payments; it constitutes Ireland’s balance of payments.
The move was timely; in 2018, research using 2015 data showed Ireland had become the world's largest tax haven (Zucman–Tørsløv–Wier 2018 list).In April 2018, Eurostat welcomed GNI*, but showed it could not eliminate all BEPS effects (e.g. as the distortion in OECD Irish debt metrics showed).