Austria’s central bank anticipates the economic output to fall more than twice as much this year as it forecast only a month ago as the coronavirus shutdown has lasted longer than expected, Governor, Robert Holzmann has announced.
Holzmann said the central bank now predicts that Austria’s GDP will fall by 8 percent. Previously, it had forecast a 3.2 percent drop in a “moderate” pandemic scenario, estimating that each week of coronavirus lockdown cuts the annual GDP by more than $2 billion.
Austria’s government has claimed it was one of Europe’s quickest countries in reacting to the coronavirus pandemic, putting a lockdown into effect 7 weeks ago and being one of the first to loosen it on April 14, although Holzmann said the central bank still had to raise its estimation on the effects of the virus.
Holzmann told the Salzburger Nachrichten newspaper:
“This (earlier) forecast was based on the then mild scenario of a five-week lockdown and a five-week step-by-step reopening phase. The conditions have changed in the meantime,”
“Our current scenario predicts – assuming a 13-week lockdown and a 10-week loosening phase – a fall of eight percent in economic growth,”
“We hope that the truth will be somewhere between these two scenarios and that the lockdown and the loosening phase will go by more quickly,”
If those stages are shorter, they would have a lower economic impact, he claimed. When the central bank considers the start and end of the lockout are unknown.
The Panthera Post 