KEPE projects growth at just 1.76 percent
Even the state-funded Center of Planning and Economic Research (KEPE) is now forecasting that growth this year will fail to meet government expectations of 2.3 percent, estimating that it will come to 1.76 percent instead.
That figure, published on Friday, is even lower than Bank of Greece’s 1.9 percent forecast (and last year’s performance, also 1.9 percent).
KEPE notes in its journal that “growth in 2019 will come to a level similar to that of 2018, showing a certain stability but at the same time a lack of any additional growth momentum. This forecast reflects the main dimensions of the recent short-term developments in the Greek economy and is in harmony with the evolution of incorporated data for the fourth quarter of 2018.”
This refers to the weakening of the growth rate of the real gross domestic product in October-December 2018 (1.6 percent compared to the same quarter in 2017 and down from 2.1 percent in Q3 of 2018) that appears to have been passed on to this year’s first quarter “in a gradual weakening of growth up to the third quarter [of 2019] and significant strengthening at the end of the year,” KEPE estimated.
It attributed this slowdown to the weak recovery in domestic demand.
