The recovery is now a thing of the past and the recession remains a possibility for the future, but, at the moment, the GDP of Italy 2022 record "a substantially stagnant trend”. She writes it Ref Searches in the latest edition of his monthly report on the economic situation, explaining that this scenario emerges from the public budget numbers relating to the first quarter of 2022 and from the trends that emerged from the first numbers relating to the second.
According to the experts of the research center, in any case, the stagnation is even "a good news”, given that “the evaluations of the past months envisaged the hypothesis of a contraction in this first part of the year”.
This result was achieved through the balanced action of opposing forces.
GDP Italy 2022: building bonuses and reopenings support the economy
To push in a positive sense, Ref Ricerche underlines again, are mainly two factors:
- i building bonuses, which have caused investment in construction to increase at a particularly high pace in recent quarters;
- e the reopening of service activities which, in the absence of further flare-ups of the Covid infections, allow us to predict the recovery of the tourism supply chains for the summer.
GDP Italy 2022: the enemy is commodity inflation
The force that more than any other tends to depress the dynamics of GDP is the rush of commodity prices, “which has led to a significant loss of terms of trade for our economy”, continues the report.
In general terms, in May, Italian inflation reached 6,9%: a sidereal share compared to the "zero point" of the recent past, but "the price increases would have been even greater if the Government had not intervened with measures to mitigate energy taxation – continues Ref Ricerche – and if the companies had not absorbed part of the pressure on costs by reducing profit margins”.
The erosion of wages has reabsorbed the glut of savings
As for wages, "their purchasing power has been penalized by price increases" and this has led to an almost total reabsorption "of the excess savings that had formed in the Covid-19 period".
Enterprises: Profits fall in all sectors
Finally, on the corporate side, "the fall in profits characterized most sectors - continues the analysis - It was very marked in manufacturing, but also the commercial distribution it absorbed part of the price increases by limiting the transfer downstream of the higher purchase costs of the goods. This contraction in profits is unlikely to be sustained for long and will have repercussions on investments in the second half of the year”.
The first quarter was "interlocutory"
In summary, according to Ref Ricerche, the first quarter was “a moment of interlocutory passage”, in which some trends that had already emerged in previous quarters were consolidated, such as the construction boom, and Covid still made itself felt with a certain weight. For this reason, "the reduction in infections in recent months suggests that a second positive factor for growth may emerge from the second quarter, linked above all to the reopening of tourist services".
On the other hand, between January and March some negative forces, such as the energy crisis and inflation, were “still in the making”. Phenomena that have not yet exhausted themselves and which, together with the erosion of the purchasing power of the middle classes, will weigh more and more during the year, "with negative consequences on consumption decisions", concludes the report.
