GDP could be 2.5% if Portugal sticks to the plan
UTAO (Technical Unit for Budget Support) states that in order for Portugal to have a 2.5% GDP, the country just needs the Stability Programme to go according to plan.
The Technical Unit for Budget Support (UTAO) estimates that if the upcoming quarters’ economic growth is in line with the forecasts made by the Government and the Stability Programme, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will increase 2.5% this year.
In a note about budget execution until April, UTAO did an exercise concerning economic growth for 2017 already considering Statistics Portugal data about the first quarter and acknowledged a 2.8% homologous and a 1.0% quarter-on-quarter growth.
According to UTAO, “if the remaining quarters of 2017 have a zero quarter-on-quarter growth, the 2017 GDP will stand at 2.0%”, which means, 0.2 percentage points over the Government’s projections. However, if quarter-on-quarter growth over the upcoming quarters stands in accordance with the Stability Programme’s forecast for this year, “2017 GDP will stand at around 2.5%”.
Experts who help the Parliament in budgetary issues further estimate that the economic growth will only correspond to the Governments expectation, of 1.8%, “if there is a quarter-on-quarter decrease of around 0.2%”.
