EU commissioner foresees ‘fairly strong recovery’ of Portuguese economy in H2

  • Lusa
  • 4 May 2021

Valdis Dombrovskis, EU commissioner, expects a "fairly strong recovery" of the Portuguese economy in the second half of 2021.

European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis foresees a “fairly strong recovery” of the Portuguese economy in the second half of this year, at a time when restrictions are lifted and vaccination progresses, also allowing tourism to pick up.

“The Portuguese economy has broadly followed the pattern we saw across Europe last year, with a substantial recession, mainly due to restrictive measures that were put in place to contain the pandemic,” he said in an interview with Lusa news agency in Brussels.

Even so, “as the vaccination campaign progresses and since it is possible to gradually ease and lift the restrictive measures, we can expect a fairly strong recovery of the [Portuguese] economy in the second half of the year.”

Valdis Dombrovskis expects a more optimistic scenario for the tourism sector.

To this contributes the legislative proposal presented by the EU executive in mid-March for the creation of a digital certificate to prove vaccination, testing or recovery from Covid-19, a bilingual document with a QR code that should come into force by June to allow the resumption of free movement in the EU in the summer.

“Of course, we know that in the case of Portugal, as in the case of a considerable number of countries, tourism is an essential sector and therefore the launch of the digital green certificate […] is very important.”

In the interim winter forecasts published in February, the EU executive predicted Portuguese GDP growth of 4.1% this year, a downward revision of the previous forecast of 5.4% made in November.