Corona pandemic: DIW estimates costs at over 390 billion euros

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Closed shops (like here in Duisburg) drive up the corona costs

Photo: Fabian Strauch / dpa

The German economy has so far lost more than 212 billion euros as a result of the corona pandemic.

At the end of the crisis it will be 391 billion euros, as the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) calculated for “Welt am Sonntag”.

The DIW assumed that the number of infections would fall again in spring.

The economists compared the actual and forecast growth with the so-called potential growth for the years 2020 to 2022. This expresses how strong the economy would have grown without the pandemic.

"If we don't manage to significantly reduce the number of infections by March, that would be a disaster," DIW President Marcel Fratzscher told the newspaper.

It would then take years for Europe, and especially Germany, which is heavily dependent on exports to the euro zone, to recover.

Then a "bankruptcy tsunami" threatens;

The unemployed would find it difficult to find a new job.

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kik / dpa