The finance minister this Monday ruled out the scenario of a near-term recession in the Portuguese economy, recalling that the government’s indicators point to economic growth, albeit “more subdued” than in 2022.
“Our projections never coincided with this scenario, that was the scenario at the European level, not for our country. The scenario we have today for Portugal […] is that we ended the year with a growing last quarter and for now we have no indication that the first quarter of the year will have a different result”maintained Fernando Medina, at the entrance of a meeting of the Council of Finance Ministers of the European Union (ECOFIN), in Brussels.
Asked about the possibility of the country falling into a technical recession, Medina dismissed the idea, recalling the projections the socialist executive had included in the state budget for 2023 (OE2023): “In the budget proposal that we submitted and was approved in parliament, we claimed that Portugal would have economic growth in 2023, it was not a stagnation, let alone a recession..”
A technical recession is necessarily synonymous with two consecutive quarters in negative territory “and one of them will be positive,” the finance minister added.
However, the growth of the national economy will be “more moderate than in 2022”.
“In 2022, the Portuguese economy grew enormously and we have already used a lot of our installed capacity. Now economic growth would always exceed the already very high growth of 2022,” he justifies.
In the first week of January, the director general of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, warned that 2023 will be a “tougher” year than the previous one. The United States of America should escape the recession, but half of the European Union member states will not.
“A third of the world’s economies will be in recession. Even countries that are not in recession will be felt as one,” the official predicted at the time.
Source: DN
