The fact that we have had more than a decade of good economic performance, notwithstanding a difficult international environment at times, has helped build confidence in our ability to make our way in the world. Let me say a few words about international rankings. There are several organisations that publish rankings of countries according to income or GDP per capita.
That is, they rank countries from the richest down to the poorest. In the past, I have been critical of these rankings because there are so many statistical assumptions that are involved in their construction that the results are very approximate, and therefore cannot form the basis of policy interpretation or aspiration.