The impact of the Coronavirus pandemic that has been upsetting the whole world for months now has had negative consequences on many sectors, certainly among the first the automotive sector, as we have seen especially in the first half of 2020.
Sales of the sector in the first part of the year they reached -98%, but this unprecedented situationi also had an impact on the consumption of diesel and petrol. The quantities of fuel sold at the pump in the first nine months of 2020 suffered a drop of 18.9% over the same period last year. The contraction in expenditure was even stronger, in fact it decreased by 26.4% or 11.5 billion; it went from 43.6 billion in the period January-September 2019 to 32.1 billion in 2020, and this is due to the fact that the drop in consumption was also accompanied by substantial price reductions weighted averages.
In particular, we are talking about gasoline prices went from 1,572 euros per liter in the first nine months of 2019 to 1,443 euros per liter in the same period of this year. As for diesel, it went from 1,481 to 1,340 euros per liter. The contraction in tax revenues was also severe. Revenues for the tax authorities deriving from VAT and excise duties on petrol and diesel for cars fell by 5.6 billion, going from 26.5 billion in January-September 2019 to 20.9 billion in the same period of 2020.
We have this information in hand thanks to Promotor Study Center, which elaborated the data on the prices and consumption of petrol and diesel for motor vehicles released by the Ministry of Economic Development. If we analyze the monthly trend in consumption of the two types of fuel in 2020, it emerges that they were substantially stable in the first two months, and then underwent a sharp contraction in March (equal to -43.7%) and a fall even stronger in April (-63.3%), followed by increasingly contained drops in the following months and by one first growth, albeit modest, in September (+ 0.8%).
According to the President of the Promotor Studies Center Gian Primo Quagliano, the rekindling of the Coronavirus emergency (and the new DCPM) will determine one more contraction of mobility and therefore in the consumption of petrol and diesel which could produce a drop of 15.1 billion in total expenditure in 2020 and a decrease in tax revenues of 7.3 billion euros.
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