BALANCE OF PAYMENTS:THE SURPLUS on the balance of international payments in the third quarter of 2011 stood at €850 million, according to figures published by the Central Statistics Office yesterday.

This compares with a deficit of €488 million in the previous quarter and a surplus of €1.2 billion in the same quarter of 2010 (see chart 3). A surplus on the current account of the balance of payments means the economy is earning more from the rest of the world than it is paying to foreign entities.

Among other things, yesterday’s figures provide the most detailed information available on Ireland’s large export-oriented services sector.

In the third quarter the value of total services exports stood at €19.7 billion. This was a fall of almost €200 million on the previous quarter, when services exports reached an all-time high.

Over the first three quarters of the year total services exports reached €57.9 billion, an increase of just under seven per cent on the same period in 2010.

The figures, which are not seasonally adjusted, suggested growth in services exports continues, albeit at a pace that has been moderating for the past year.

Computer services are the largest single services export, accounting for one-third of the total. In the third quarter of the year they fell back sharply on the previous quarter to €7.3 billion.

The value of business services exports, which are the second largest category of services exports, stood at €5.7 billion in the third quarter, up strongly on the previous quarter, to continue a long-term growth trend.

Receipts from foreign tourists coming to Ireland, which are categorised as services exports, reached €1.2 billion in the July-September period, the annual peak period for the tourism industry. That represented an increase of 10.6 per cent on the same quarter in 2010.

The balance of payments data also include capital flows into and out of Ireland. These show that inward foreign direct investment rose sharply in the first three quarters of the year, to reach €28.6 billion, more than four times higher than the same period in 2010.

These inflows were overwhelming accounted for by investment into Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre (IFSC).

In the final quarter of last year and the first quarter of 2011, non-IFSC foreign companies engaged in disinvestment from Ireland. This was likely to reflect acute uncertainty surrounding the Irish economy at the time of its EU-IMF bailout in November.