2020 will be another difficult year for Italy's GDP. Second the European Commission, which published its winter forecasts on the performance of EU economies on Thursday, this year our country will grow by only 0,3%.
The new estimate, in addition to be the weakest in the whole Union, is 0,1% lower than that published in November and exactly half of that indicated by the government (0,6%) in the update note to the Economic and Financial Document (Def) published in September. A figure that in recent days the Parliamentary Budget Office had revised downwards to 0,2%, even worse than the latest calculations from Brussels.
Moreover, the 0,3% now expected by the EU executive is also an optimistic figure, because it does not take into account the damage caused by the Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic, which is still too difficult to assess.
Last year, on the other hand, went slightly better than expected, with the GDP that eventually grew by 0,2%instead of the 0,1% estimated in the autumn forecast. And this despite a difficult fourth quarter.
Paolo Gentiloni, former Italian prime minister and current European Commissioner for the Economy, admitted that for Italy there is "a more accentuated slowdown", but he also said he was certain that "the government will establish a dialogue with the Commission because the much work that will be necessary in the coming months goes in the right direction”.
The Brussels report states that basic income supports private consumption. In this regard, Gentiloni said that “when we record the effect of some economic measures, we do not give a political assessment of whether or not they are appropriate. Certainly it is a measure that produces distributive and technically measurable effects in terms of growth, but I would not confuse this with a positive or negative evaluation of this or other measures”.
As for theUe andEurozone, the Commission left its growth forecasts unchanged at +1,2% and +1,4% respectively, but defines the Coronavirus epidemic as "a source of growing concern" which keeps the outlook "anchored to the downside".
For Gentiloni, “any assessment of the economic effects of the coronavirus is subject to great uncertainty. The virus will affect China's GDP mainly in the first quarter of 2020, with relatively limited global spillovers. This is an assumption – not a forecast – which is obviously subject to downside risks should the epidemic last longer or worsen further.”
