2024-08-15 21:47:59
Only Spain is ahead of us with 2.9%
The steady growth of the Bulgarian economy, characteristic of the last quarters, continues in the second quarter as well, when goods and services for BGN 45.190 billion were produced in our country. This makes the annual growth of the economy 2%, which has not been the case since the beginning of last year. Compared to the first quarter, the growth was 0.5%, according to the NSI express data published on Wednesday.
This time, our country is in second place in the EU in terms of GDP growth, surpassed only by Spain, which has 2.9% annual growth. However, the data for all countries has not yet been published. The previous quarter, the Bulgarian economy was also among the top performers, reaching 6th place in the EU.
The Eurostat data show a deepening of the trend observed at the beginning of the year – the leading economies of the EU and the Eurozone have fallen into recession or have insignificant growth at the expense of the southern countries, whose economies are growing.
In the second quarter, the German economy, for example, saw a decline of 0.1%, and this trend continues already in the fourth quarter, i.e.
Germany is practically in a technical recession.
Economic growth in Bulgaria continues to be driven by consumption, fueled by ever-growing wages and pensions.
The other day NSI reported a second quarter wage growth of 18% – one of the largest in recent years, with 2.5% inflation.
Overall credit growth has also been quite strong at 13.24%, almost as much as mid-2022, the highest growth ever achieved, and lending to households is also fueling consumption.
There is another circumstance that weighs on the achieved economic growth – for the first time in over a year exports increased, albeit very slightly – by 0.9%.
At the expense of this, however, industrial production in our country and throughout Europe continues to report declines, and this makes forecasts for the economy, at least for the near future, quite uncertain. Bulgarian enterprises are very closely linked with Western European companies, and the industry, especially in the Eurozone, continues to stagnate and external demand for goods and services decreases, which is bad luck for our exporters.
So far, the data only partly coincide with the forecasts of banks and institutions, but far from all. According to the MoF, for example, towards the end of this year, the Bulgarian economy should report 3.2% annual growth, which seems increasingly uncertain. The forecasts of the IMF, the EC, the BNB and the commercial banks range between 1.9 and 2.2% growth for this year.
The NSI flash estimates released on Wednesday are the first data for the past period to be released 45 days after the period ended. Subsequently, they are always adjusted, for example, the initial estimate for the annual growth of the economy in the first quarter was 1.7%, but then it was increased to 1.8%.