Slovakia’s Finance Ministry estimates that Slovakia's GDP will grow by 2.8 percent in 2010, Finance Ministry State Secretary František Palko said in Bratislava on Wednesday, April 21. The ministry also expects the public finance deficit to reach 5.5 percent of GDP this year.
"The main reason for the changes in the prognosis was the improvement of expectations in the development of the external environment, the improvement in economic sentiment indicators and the better results in the real economy of the eurozone at the end of 2009," said Palko, as reported by the TASR newswire.
He noted that the prognosis drawn up by the Finance Ministry counts on motorway construction, funded via PPP (public-private partnership) projects, contributing significantly to GDP growth this year. Meanwhile, the ministry expects consumption by households to fall, due to the high unemployment rate (almost 13 percent) and falling real salaries. In 2009, the Slovak economy contracted by 4.7 percent, with the public finance deficit ballooning to 6.3 percent of GDP from an originally forecast 2.1 percent.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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