Time.news – The UPB has “positively validated” the programmatic macroeconomic framework, after also positively validating the trend macroeconomic forecasts. This was stated by Giuseppe Pisauro, the president of the Parliamentary Budget Office, in a hearing on the Def at the Budget Committees of the Chamber and Senate. The Mef’s forecasts for the period 2021-2024, he explained, are “consistent, albeit with some modest misalignment with those of the panel, albeit in the face of very strong elements of uncertainty attributable to the pandemic” and “the risks are mainly oriented to the downside both in the short and medium-long term”.
“In the three-year period 2022-24 – explained Pisauro – in the Upb scenario the trajectory of the debt-to-GDP ratio would have a trend higher than that of the Def scenario, with a difference that reaches almost 3 percentage points more in 2024 when the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 155.5 percent“.
The risk of public guarantees
“The accumulation of public guarantees can pose a risk to the sustainability of public finances”, he then warned the president of the UPB explaining that “the measures to ensure the liquidity of companies during the Covid-19 crisis have significantly increased the overall stock of guarantees granted to companies by public administrations”. Between 2019 and 2020, “the total stock went from 85.8 to 215.5 billion (from 4.8 to 13.0 per cent of GDP) and the increase due to interventions related to the health emergency was equal to 117.7 billion (7.1 per cent of GDP) “. In the event of enforcement of the guarantee, “the Public Administrations are in fact required to repay the residual capital subject to the guarantee. It will be important in the coming years to monitor the trend of these amounts and especially the values of the expected losses underlying the forecasts indicated in the Def, which they should have a separate indication, “he concluded.
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