Brussels maintains forecasts for Portugal. Sees GDP growing 2% in 2019
The most current forecasts for Portugal indicate that GDP may have grown above the government's forecast in 2019. Good news can be confirmed tomorrow by INE.
The European Commission kept unchanged the forecasts for the growth of the Portuguese economy for the years 2019 to 2021. Despite this, and bearing in mind that Brussels updated the projections with information gathered up to February 4th, this may end up being good news for the government, which forecasts that GDP grew by 1.9% last year, but that the EU executive sees growth of 2%.
An expansion better than projected by the government that can be confirmed this Friday, when the National Statistics Institute (INE) publishes the quick estimate for the fourth quarter. It anticipates that the economy grew by 0.5% in the last quarter of last year compared to the previous three months.
For 2020 and 2021, the Commission anticipates, as it did last autumn, economic growth of 1.7% in each of the years, which translates into a slowdown compared with the performance of economic activity last year.
Forecasts for the Eurozone point to growth of 1.2% in each of the years between 2019 and 2021, which translates into an upward revision of one tenth of last year’s GDP compared to the autumn forecast. In January, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut growth forecasts for the Eurozone by one tenth to 1.3% this year. This means that despite the downward revision by the Washington-based institution, Brussels remains more pessimistic. The government believes GDP is growing by 1.9% this year, the most optimistic forecast among the institutions that accompany the Portuguese economy.
