Because the Italian data on the foreign balance of payments are worrying
The data published yesterday by Bank of Italy, relating to the external balance of payments updated to June, unfortunately authorize the worst concerns. The comment by Giuseppe Liturri
A few weeks ago the Financial Times , with a long and well-documented article , wondered if Europe would survive the summer and the associated expected decline in tourism.
In fact, countries like Croatia (25%), Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy (12%) draw substantial percentages of their GDP from this sector. Conversely, countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany have an incidence of tourism on GDP between 5% and 10%.
The data published yesterday by Bank of Italy , relating to the external balance of payments updated to June, unfortunately authorize the worst concerns.
Between May and June, billions of euros of foreign tourist spending in Italy literally evaporated, and the budget, including March and April, worsens further.
The balance in the four-month period March-June 2020 for travel for personal reasons (excluding reasons of care and study) was reduced to € 455 million. In the same period of the previous year it amounted to € 7,161 million. A collapse of epochal proportions: in just four months, not even the peak months of the spring-summer season, 6,706 million less net expenditure was recorded, given by the balance between Italians 'trips abroad and foreigners' trips to Italy. The overall balance, also taking into account the decline in business travel for which we are "net travelers", is only slightly better. A massacre.
An idea of the enormity of this decline is also confirmed by the comparison with the same months of the previous crisis of 2009/2010: the balance had fluctuated between 3.3 and 3.9 billion. We are now just over a tenth.
If this figure were projected from July to October (all months in which in 2019 the balance of tourism trips had fluctuated between 2 and 3 billion, for a total balance of € 10,080 million), also taking into account the recent restrictions introduced at the turn of Mid-August, another loss of about 8/9 billion is conceivable.
The sum of the loss already accrued and that assumed could reach 15/16 billion, just under 1% of GDP 2019, only of lower net expenditure for tourism travel.
On the basis of these data, it seems easy to hypothesize that the decline in GDP in the third quarter, whose preliminary data we will know on October 31, will unfortunately reserve bitter surprises and we will have full evidence of the total underestimation, on the one hand, and of the culpable delay, on the one hand. other, with which our government has moved to counter this rising tide since spring.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/perche-sono-preoccupanti-i-dati-italiani-sulla-bilancia-dei-pagamenti-con-lestero/ on Thu, 20 Aug 2020 13:00:12 +0000.