ING Bank economist Valentin Tataru said in an emailed statement Friday the bank downgrades its 2021 forecast to 5.2% from 7.1% as the economic rebound looks more gradual than expected.
While today’s GDP data was not necessarily a positive surprise, it does confirm some degree of economic resilience, Tataru noted.
There are signs however that this could just lead to a flatter “V” shaped growth, meaning that the subsequent recovery from the third and fourth quarter will be less pronounced. Reasons to believe that come from the pandemic evolution which has intensified in the third quarter – the electoral context which dampens sentiment to some extent as blurs policy visibility and the flattening of most confidence surveys in July.
Romania’s gross domestic product took an annual plunge of 10.5% in the second quarter after unexpected annual growth of 2.4% in the first quarter, a flash estimate from the country’s statistics board showed Friday. Second-quarter GDP dropped 12.3% compared with the first quarter, the data showed.
In the first six months of the year, Romania’s GDP contracted 4.9% in unadjusted data and 3.9% in real terms, the data showed.