Paolo Gentiloni – Photo EC
(BRUSSELS) – Despite EU and national efforts, Europe’s economy will experience a recession of historic proportions this year, according to the EU’s spring economic forecast, presented Wednesday by the Commission.
The coronavirus pandemic represents a major shock for the global and EU economies, with very severe socio-economic consequences, the Commission said in its Spring 2020 Economic Forecast.
This projects that the euro area economy will contract by a record 7¾% in 2020 and grow by 6¼% in 2021. The EU economy is forecast to contract by 7½% in 2020 and grow by around 6% in 2021. Growth projections for the EU and euro area have been revised down by around nine percentage points compared to the Autumn 2019 Economic Forecast.
The shock to the EU economy is symmetric in that the pandemic has hit all Member States, but both the drop in output in 2020 (from -4¼% in Poland to -9¾% in Greece) and the strength of the rebound in 2021 are set to differ markedly. Each Member State’s economic recovery will depend not only on the evolution of the pandemic in that country, but also on the structure of their economies and their capacity to respond with stabilising policies. Given the interdependence of EU economies, the dynamics of the recovery in each Member State will also affect the strength of the recovery of other Member States.
“Europe is experiencing an economic shock without precedent since the Great Depression,” said the EU’s Commissioner for the Economy Paolo Gentiloni: “Both the depth of the recession and the strength of recovery will be uneven, conditioned by the speed at which lockdowns can be lifted, the importance of services like tourism in each economy and by each country’s financial resources.”
The coronavirus pandemic has severely affected consumer spending, industrial output, investment, trade, capital flows and supply chains, says the forecast. The expected progressive easing of containment measures should set the stage for a recovery. However, the EU economy is not expected to have fully made up for this year’s losses by the end of 2021. Investment will remain subdued and the labour market will not have completely recovered.
The continued effectiveness of EU and national policy measures to respond to the crisis will be crucial to limit the economic damage and facilitate a swift, robust recovery to set the economies on the path of sustainable and inclusive growth.
The coronavirus pandemic will have a severe impact on the labour market, says the forecast. While short-time work schemes, wage subsidies and support for businesses should help to limit job losses, the coronavirus pandemic will have a severe impact on the labour market.
The unemployment rate in the euro area is forecast to rise from 7.5% in 2019 to 9½% in 2020 before declining again to 8½% in 2021. In the EU, the unemployment rate is forecast to rise from 6.7% in 2019 to 9% in 2020 and then fall to around 8% in 2021.
Regarding inflation, consumer prices are expected to fall significantly this year due to the drop in demand and the steep fall in oil prices, which together should more than offset isolated price increases caused by pandemic-related supply disruptions.
Inflation in the euro area, as measured by the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), is now forecast at 0.2% in 2020 and 1.1% in 2021. For the EU, inflation is forecast at 0.6% in 2020 and 1.3% in 2021.
The EU executive acknowledges that EU Member States have reacted decisively with fiscal measures to limit the economic damage caused by the pandemic. ‘Automatic stabilisers’, such as social security benefit payments compounded by fiscal discretionary measures are set to cause spending to rise. As a result, the aggregate government deficit of the euro area and the EU is expected to surge from just 0.6% of GDP in 2019 to around 8½% in 2020, before falling back to around 3½% in 2021.
After having been on a declining trend since 2014, the public debt-to-GDP ratio is also set to rise. In the euro area, it is forecast to increase from 86% in 2019 to 102¾% in 2020 and to decrease to 98¾% in 2021. In the EU, it is forecast to rise from 79.4% in 2019 to around 95% this year before decreasing to 92% next year.
The Spring Forecast is clouded by a higher than usual degree of uncertainty. It is based on a set of assumptions about the evolution of the coronavirus pandemic and associated containment measures. The forecast baseline assumes that lockdowns will be gradually lifted from May onwards.
The risks surrounding this forecast are also exceptionally large and concentrated on the downside.
A more severe and longer lasting pandemic than currently envisaged could cause a far larger fall in GDP than assumed in the baseline scenario of this forecast. In the absence of a strong and timely common recovery strategy at EU level, there is a risk that the crisis could lead to severe distortions within the Single Market and to entrenched economic, financial and social divergences between euro area Member States. There is also a risk that the pandemic could trigger more drastic and permanent changes in attitudes towards global value chains and international cooperation, which would weigh on the highly open and interconnected European economy. The pandemic could also leave permanent scars through bankruptcies and long-lasting damage to the labour market.
The threat of tariffs following the end of the transition period between the EU and United Kingdom could also dampen growth, albeit to a lesser extent in the EU than in the UK.
