Purchasing power in Portugal fell by 1.1 percentage points in 2021 compared to 2020, to 75.1% of the European average, occupying 16th position out of 19 countries in the eurozone, the INE announced on Thursday.
“In 2021 Gross Domestic Product ‘per capita’, expressed in purchasing power parities [PPC]was 75.1% of the European Union average in 2021, a figure 1.1 percentage points lower than that of 2020 (76.2%),” says the National Institute of Statistics (INE) in a paper on purchasing power parities , which was published on Thursday .
Portugal ranks 16th out of 19 eurozone countries – just ahead of Latvia (71.9%), Slovakia (69.4%) and Greece (63.8%) – and 20th in the European Union on this indicator.
Portugal lagged behind countries such as Spain (83.3%), Estonia (88.9%) or Lithuania (89.3%).
INE also mentions that in Portugal, in nominal terms, GDP ‘per capita’ in 2021 grew by 7.1% in 2021, compared to a nominal increase in GDP (7.0%), “as the population in 2021 was slightly lower than the previous year” – with both indicators returning to the nominal level of 2019, the last year before the covid-19 pandemic.
Globally, there were significant variations in GDP per capita volume indices measured in PPP between 2020 and 2021, with 10 of the 36 countries analyzed recording declines.
Germany (-3.0 percentage point), Slovakia (-2.4) and Austria (-2.2) were the countries with the largest decreases, while Norway (+25.2), Ireland (+13.4) and Luxembourg (+7.0) showed the highest growth.
INE emphasizes that, “Given the values sorted in descending order, it is noted that the dispersion of the volume indicator ‘per capita’ GDP measured in PPP across the 27 EU Member States is very significant”.
Luxembourg has the highest percentage of the 37 countries analysed, at 268.5%, more than two and a half times higher than the average of the 27 countries of the European Union and about five times higher than that of Bulgaria (57.5) , the EU country with the lowest value.
According to the institute, individual consumption expenditure (IND) per capita, which is “a more appropriate indicator to reflect household well-being, was set at 83.6% of the European Union average, a value lower than 0.3 percentage points compared to that observed in 2020 (83.9%)”.
In this indicator, Portugal occupies the 14th position among the countries of the Eurozone and the 19th in the European Union.
Source: DN
