国际英语资讯:European economy devastated by pandemic as COVID-19 cases well pass 500,000_时事

国际英语资讯:European economy devastated by pandemic as COVID-19 cases well pass 500,000

GERMANY

The German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE), the advisory council of the German government, predicted that the country's GDP would shrink to minus 2.8 percent in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

GCEE considered a normalization of the economic situation over the summer to be the most likely development. It also predicted that in 2021, catch-up effects and a large carry-over effect could drive GDP growth back to 3.7 percent.

The ifo Institute and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) both announced on March 19 that the German economy is set to experience a severe economic downturn as a result of the global coronavirus pandemic.

Lowering its economic forecast by almost three percentage points in a "highly positive" scenario, ifo is expecting the German economy to be pushed into recession and shrink by 1.5 percent in 2020.

While Germany's GDP would still increase slightly during the first quarter of 2020, ifo believed that the crisis would take full effect in the second quarter and lead to a 4.5-percentage-point fall in GDP.

Production of goods and services would only "gradually return to a normal level" by the first half of 2021. Excluding long-term effects like company bankruptcies, ifo is expecting the overall damage of the pandemic to German economy to be at a total of around 115 billion euros (123.7 billion U.S. dollars) by 2021.

Ifo warned that the pandemic, given its magnitude, would also have "substantial effects" on the labor market. The number of people in employment would fall for the first time in 15 years, it warned.