The PBO (Parliamentary Budget Office) “assessed the sensitivity of the policy path of the debt-to-GDP ratio presented in the DEF with respect to a scenario based on alternative assumptions regarding inflation rate and real growth that reflect the forecasts macroeconomics formulated by the PBO “. This is what the President of the Parliamentary Budget Office Giuseppe Pisauro said, heard today in a hearing by the Budget Committees of the Chamber and Senate, meeting in joint session, as part of the preliminary examination of the Economic and Finance Document (DEF) 2021. .
“With these assumptions – underlined Pisauro – the level of the debt-to-GDP ratio for the current year would be substantially similar to that estimated by the DEF, thus highlighting an increase compared to 2020. In the three-year period 2022-24, in the scenario UPB the trajectory of the debt-to-GDP ratio would have a trend higher than that of the DEF scenario, with a difference that reaches almost 3 percentage points more in 2024 when the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 155.5 per cent. The UPB macroeconomic forecasts, in fact, are characterized by a nominal growth of output that is always lower than that indicated in the programmatic framework of the DEF (with differences between 1 and 7 tenths of points per year), as a result of lower real growth in each year and less sustained price dynamics (except for 2024) “.
It should be noted that the Def shows that the new level of public debt is estimated at 159.8% of GDP in 2021, and then decreases to 156.3% in 2022, 155% in 2023 and 152.7% in 2024.