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Economic toll grows in coronavirus-rampaged Europe
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The coronavirus pandemic, which had claimed over 60,000 lives and infected more than 700,000 people in Europe as of Wednesday, has begun to spread economic gloom in the continent.
Over the past days, noted economic think tanks, central banks and government officials in Europe had issued gloomy economic outlooks for major European economies, such as Germany, France, Italy and Britain.
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GLOOMY OUTLOOK
On Wednesday, Germany’s leading economic institutes forecast that the economic output of Germany, Europe’s main engine of growth, was likely to shrink by 4.2 percent in 2020 due to the impact of the coronavirus.
The joint forecast was prepared by the German Institute for Economic Research, the ifo Institute, the Kiel Institute, the Halle Institute for Economic Research, and RWI Essen.
According to the forecast, Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) was likely to shrink by 1.9 percent in the first quarter and would fall by 9.8 percent in the second quarter.
The institutes predicted that as a result of the pandemic, the country’s unemployment rate would rise to 5.9 percent “at its peak” in 2020.
Germany would also end up with a “record deficit” of 159 billion euros (172.8 billion U.S. dollars) this year, compared with a positive balance of 45.3 billion euros in 2019.