In the first 9 months of 2022, the gross domestic product increased by 5% compared to the period 01.I-30.IX 2021, approaching 1,000 billion lei in current prices, the INS reported on Wednesday.

“We see a continuation of this slowing trend in the coming quarters. Our full-year forecast is for 4.5% economic growth in 2022, perhaps even slightly below the 4.2-4.3% in our updated estimate. And for the next year, we see the economy growing by 2.3%. All forecasts of international institutions show a more than significant slowdown of the world economy, particularly in Europe. We see forecasts for Western countries, especially Germany, which even show an imminent risk of recession”, – explained Ionuc Dumitru, Chief Economist of Raiffeisen Bank during the debate “Highlights, based on HotNews“.

“I don’t think we can discuss at the moment, we don’t have arguments or we don’t have too many arguments to say that the Romanian economy will also enter a recession. Second, you saw that even in the US, even though they had 2 quarters of contraction, nobody said it was a recession until the NBER — the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that it was a recession.

The fact is that declaring a recession after 2 quarters of decline in a row is quite risky. I think that we can talk about the deterioration of economic indicators – this is the most appropriate word,” said Dumitru.

Contribution of categories of resources and types of use to changes in gross domestic product

Resource categories

In the GDP increase in the period 01.I-30.IX 2022 compared to the period 01.I-30.IX 2021, the following industries had more significant positive contributions:

• – Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; transport and storage; hotels and restaurants (+1.4%), with a weight of +18.7% in the formation of GDP and the volume of whose activities increased to +7.6%;

• – Information and communications (+1.5%), with a weight of +6.9% in the formation of GDP and the scope of which increased with a significant growth of +22.5%;

• – Real estate operations (+0.7%), with a share in GDP formation of +6.9%, which recorded an increase in the volume of activity by +8.7%;

• – Professional, scientific and technical activities; provision of administrative services and provision of auxiliary services (+0.9%) with a share in GDP formation of +7.1%, recording an increase in the volume of activity by +14.4%.

A positive contribution was made by net taxes on the product (+0.7%), registering an increase in their volume by +6.4%.

Categories of use

In terms of GDP usage, the increase was mainly due to:

• – Expenditures on the final consumption of households, the volume of which increased by +5.8%, contributing to the growth of GDP by +3.7%;

• – gross accumulation of fixed capital, the volume of which increased by +7.3%, contribution to GDP growth +1.8%;

• – Expenditures on individual final consumption of state administrations increased in volume to +9.9% and accounted for +0.7% of GDP growth.

Net exports had a negative impact (-0.8%), the result of an increase in the volume of exports of goods and services by +11.0% correlated with a greater increase in the volume of imports of goods and services (+11.2%).