The quarterly economic accounts published in recent days by Istat confirm the forecasts for August, placing the tendential growth of Italian GDP at +1,5% and the increase in the second quarter compared to the first at +0,4%. Within the overall figure, the dynamics of the main components of aggregate demand offer the image of a relatively balanced recovery. Against a GDP growing by 1,5%, the annual growth in consumption stands at 1,2%, doubling the rate of increase recorded a year ago (+0,6%).
Compared to the situation observed a year ago, investments and exports are also accelerating, growing respectively by 2,6 and 4,7 per cent. The acceleration of the recovery is also associated with an increase in the growth of imports of goods and services which in the second quarter of 2017 increased on an annual basis by 5,8%. In addition to the values of the annual rates of change, the balanced nature of the growth is also reflected in the composition of the contributions of the various components to the determination of the quarterly increase, with the four tenths of an increase compared to the first quarter equally distributed between consumption, investments and change of stocks.
Together with the data on the quarterly accounts - GDP and components of aggregate demand - Istat has made available the statistics relating to the corresponding labor inputs which, as is known, refer to a wider reference basin than that of the monthly survey on work force. The widespread results put the total number of employed persons in the second quarter of 25,1 at 2017 million. With the figure for the second quarter, the number of employed persons in the national accounts returns to the values prevailing in mid-2008, at the start of the first recession.
At the same time, the number of full-time equivalent work units also improves, which Istat quantifies to make the comparison homogeneous, taking into account the fact that a person can take on one or more job positions depending on factors such as working hours full-time or part-time) or the duration (continuous or non-continuous) of the employment. As of the second quarter of 2017, the number of full-time equivalent work units rose to 24,1 million, approximately one million units more than the minimum recorded at the end of the sovereign risk crisis. Nonetheless, the number of full-time work units today remains several hundred thousand units lower than it was before the 2008 recession: a confirmation of the complexity of the situation on the labor market where the legacies of the crisis and structural changes make it particularly the path of a recovery to be measured in terms of quality as well as quantity is challenging.
The Istat press release on quarterly accounts confirms that in each of the last three quarters, Italy's GDP has grown by four tenths of a percentage point. If a similar increase is also achieved in the third and fourth quarters, then the growth for the whole of 2017 will rise to +1,5%, more than a third above the target of +1,1% recorded in the 2017 DEF last year April. The objective for the coming quarters will be to consolidate and extend the recovery phase, starting with the interventions useful for giving new life and quality to employment opportunities for young people. This work of consolidating the economic recovery will contribute, together with the maintenance of non-restrictive conditions at the European level by monetary policy, to restore tone to the GDP deflator whose annual growth in the second quarter of 2017 does not go beyond a modest +0,3, XNUMX%.
The GDP deflator is the measure of inflation which, added to real growth, determines the nominal increase in product, a key variable for public finance targets which relate public deficits and debt to current GDP. In Italy as elsewhere in the euro area, the consolidation of the economic recovery will go hand in hand with a stable return of inflation to the targets indicated by the monetary authorities. Together with the "financial laws" that individual governments will present for 2018, the focus of attention in the coming months will be on the development of the explanatory variables of European inflation, first and foremost the exchange rates of the euro.
