Brussels foresees that the euro zone and the whole of the EU enter recession again before the economic rebound that, according to the forecast report, will resume in April.
The European Commission predicts that the euro zone will grow by 3.8% this year and next, and that the Union as a whole will do so by 3.7% in 2021 and 3.9% in 2022. However, the Community executive believes that, before continuing with the rebound, the group of countries will go through purgatory again.
After the decline in the last quarter of 2020 -of 0.7% in the euro zone and 0.5% in the EU-, the Commission expects another for the period of January and March 2021 -of 0.9% and the 0.8%, respectively.
With all the caution imposed by the current pandemic, the Commission predicts that the recession will finally draw a kind of
W
, although not perfect.
After the brutal fall of the first tranche of 2020 (3.7% and 11.7% in the first and second quarters, respectively), the comeback began in July.
The GDP of the single currency countries as a whole grew by 12.4%, but the rise was interrupted in the last part of the year.
The fragmented data of the economic forecasts indicate that Brussels now contemplates that in the first quarter of the year the euro zone recovers another 0.9%, which means that it will enter a technical recession (two consecutive quarters of falling GDP).
According to the Commission, Estonia, Ireland, France, Italy, Hungary, Holland, Austria, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia will be in this situation in March.
Not so Spain, which closed the last quarter of the year in green numbers.
If the epidemiological situation is not complicated, Europe would put an end to that fall there.
As of April, according to Brussels, no country will be negative.
These forecasts are in line with the epidemiological forecasts with which the Commission works.
The report presented on Thursday by Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni indicates that the new waves of infections of this start of 2021 will still impose restrictions, but that the vaccination of "the most vulnerable groups" will allow a "gradual relaxation of containment measures from April.
It will not be until the end of the second quarter, however, when Brussels expects the real de-escalation to begin, which will continue throughout the entire second semester, until at the end of the year the containment measures are "marginal" and already very specific for certain sectors in 2022. "This forecast assumes that the current restrictive containment measures will relax at the end of the second quarter and, more markedly, in the second part of the year," Gentiloni said on Thursday.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, reiterated this Friday that the goal is to have 70% of the European adult population vaccinated on September 21.
The Community Executive, however, emphasizes in the report the risks that Europe can run into, from the emergence of new variants of Covid-19 to a new wave in the exit phase.
Brussels also believes that Spain will have particularly strong growth in the third quarter (+ 3.8%) and in the fourth (+ 2.1%).
However, the Commission believes that some countries will heal their wounds sooner and others will heal much later.
And only Italy and Spain, according to forecasts, will reach the last quarter of 2022 without having managed to recover the size of the economy they had before the pandemic.
At the other extreme, there are countries that are already far above, such as Ireland or Poland.
