2024-03-22 07:21:16
“After talking about recession so many times during the year, many editorials, many columns, many articles, we can finally confirm that in 2023 that recession did not exist,” he stated.
Mario Marcel, Minister of Finance, highlighted the economic growth of 0.2%contravening the forecasts of negative figures given by the market.
The Secretary of State expressed that “unlike what had been proposed, there were talk of slightly negative figures, they were slightly positive figures (…) lThe economy has recovered the highest point it had in recent years, but with a very important differencebecause in November 2021 we had enormous fiscal and macroeconomic imbalances that put pressure on inflation, and today we have a similar level of activity, but with controlled inflation.”
After this, Mario Marcel sent a strong message: “There is an economist with a compound surname who just last week said that this was only going to happen in the year 2026 and it turns out that it actually happened in January of this year.”
This, in reference to the statements of Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel, who days ago maintained “the probability that the seasonally adjusted Imacec per inhabitant will recover the record level it had at the end of 2021 is very low until March 2026”, in addition to compare the Government of Gabriel Boric with that of Salvador Allende.
Mario Marcel projects higher growth than 2023
Along with this, Mario Marcel estimated that economic growth figures could rise above 2% in 2024.
“This leads us to review many of the projections that have been made that gave growth figures of 1.7 or 1.8 percent… if one expects the economy to grow month by month, one already has to go for figures higher than 2%. ”he declared.
The Minister of Finance reiterated that “these are figures that are positive, that tell us the situation in which the Chilean economy actually is, not perceptions, not estimates, but actually where it is. These are figures that clearly indicate to us that in 2023 there was no recession, there were neither two negative quarters nor a negative variation in the year, and that the projections for 2024 are clearly positive.
“After talking about recession so many times during the year, many editorials, many columns, many articles, we can finally confirm that in 2023 that recession did not exist,” he stated.