RECESSION DECLARED - after PANORAMA probe

Millions of people are out of work, financial markets have been rocked, with some supply chains still facing major disruption as factories and industries around the world have closed. Globally, everyone was braced for recession, even after governments, including our own, pumped millions of pounds into their economies.

“How bad will it be?” and “how soon will we recover?” are two questions we will be hearing a lot in the coming weeks and months for sure!

The coronavirus has thrown whole areas of the economy into brain dead coma. Businesses have been closed and slowly cricking open. Many workers are still stuck at home; shoppers and consumer confidence have obviously not fully returned or as quickly as many retail outlets would have liked.

This all means that large chunks of the local economy were, and some still are, shut down. Basically, that is what the public knows of the economic Covid effects.

Where the economy is concerned, I have found that attempting to glean any precise information regarding the economic effects on Gibraltar during the health emergency is not information that is easily accessible or available; as one thought it would or should be. I say the latter, judging by the opinions and remarks from the Chief Minister on this important national issue concerning Covid expenditure.

Mr Picardo, it seems, regarding where the issue of the ‘recession is concerned’ apparently expected everyone to work out for themselves how the economy was faring, alongside the health emergency, and without any available related financial information, to even guess, when Gibraltar had fallen into recession which as we now all know was confirmed by Mr Picardo at this week’s press briefing… ONLY after this reporter, once again, probed him regarding national GDP figures and the economy!

During this week’s government press briefing, the Chief Minister was asked by Panorama some follow up questions of a few weeks ago on how the pandemic had affected Gibraltar’s GDP, especially after most countries had already taken a downturn in the first quarter.

I had previously asked for a snapshot of the Rocks economic health, where Mr Picardo had answered that ‘Gibraltar’s GDP was calculated annually, and reported two years back and that would be dramatically impacted’. Another important point the CM also highlighted was the fact that ‘there had hardly been any national income for nearly 3 then now 4 months, and that national expenditure had tripled’.

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19-06-2020 PANORAMAdailyGIBRALTAR