Analysts don't see eye to eye on economy performance on 2011

Once everybody has agreed on the recession continuing in 2010, the ‘bets’ are now moving to the prospects of the economy in 2011. Whereas the IMF, the Government and some analysts see growth returning, as they had initially estimated for 2010, as well, ING Bank remains pessimistic and says the economy will go down again next year.
“I see a 2% economic decline in 2011. We will most likely have new tax adjustment steps taken in the first half of 2011. If there won’t be any tax adjustment steps, then we will at least see redundancies in the public sector, progressing somewhat faster than they have until now,” said Nicolae Chideșciuc, chief economist of ING Bank, who attended the ZF Expert debate on the chances of an economic rebound in 2011.
On the other hand, Raiffeisen Bank’s chief economist, Ionuț Dumitru, expects the economy to resume growth next year, going up 2%, but says that there is still the risk of that growth turning into a decline if new tax raises are applied.
Florian Libocor, BRD-SocGen’s chief economist, anticipates 0.5-1.5% economic growth for next year.
More moderately optimistic was Radu Crăciun, Eureko Pensii’s chief investment officer, who sees the economy somewhere between minus 0.5% and plus 0.5%.
The economy will remain in recession this year, contracting by 2%. It fell by 7.1% last year and some analysts are even expecting this year’s GDP to go down by as much as 3%.
The National Statistics Institute is due to announce the data on the economic performance of the second quarter today.