The Government confirms the poor prospects for the Catalan economy next year, in line with the rest of Europe. The GDP growth forecast for 2023 has been reduced by 40%, going from the 2.9% estimated in April to the 1.7% made public today.
The cut in expectations is fundamentally due to the energy crisis, inflation, the rise in mortgages and loans and the weakness of consumption. For this year, the Government has also lowered the estimates: half a point, which leaves the GDP at 4.4%.
These negative expectations occur when the Catalan economy (and also the Spanish) maintain a worse behavior than the whole of Europe. With the data for the second quarter, Catalonia's GDP was 1.2% lower than it was before the pandemic. In contrast, the euro zone has already exceeded the previous level by 2%. Spain is also below, 2.2%.
The Catalan executive anticipates that employment will continue to resist and predicts that the unemployment rate in Catalonia will drop to 9.5% in 2022 and 9.4% in 2023, "the lowest since 2008".
The diagnosis made by the department now led by Minister Natàlia Mas is that the Catalan economy has suffered a "slowdown in activity during the third quarter", with a weakening of both consumption and activity indicators, and all of this in a context of a general increase in prices and higher intermediate costs.
"The energy market constitutes the main risk to the economic outlook on a European scale", points out this department, which also warns of the "loss of real income of private agents" and that the loss of confidence may affect the recovery of internal and external demand.
All in all, the good behavior of tourist activity stands out, especially in summer, and that investment will grow by 6% this year due to European Next Generation funds.
Likewise, the Government calculates that 2022 will close with some 85,000 new jobs and that in 2023 another 41,800 could be generated. However, for 2023, it considers that household consumption will remain moderate (1.8%), that investments will grow at a slower rate, 3.6%, due to uncertainty, financing conditions and the persistence of bottlenecks, and that the consumption of public administrations will also slow down, among other factors.
A more discreet performance is also expected from exports, which would grow by 2.8%.
