The Santa Cruz de Tenerife Chamber of Commerce predicts a 20% drop in GDP in the Canary Islands this year and unemployment that can reach 35%, but sees the situation with moderate optimism if with the appropriate measures it is achieved a conjunctural setback and not structural.
The essential thing for the Canary Islands is to recover air connectivity, which requires discounts and rate discounts for companies, but it is also necessary “more firmness” with the State to authorize the use of the surplus and indebtedness and lower the prices to the Social Security for companies and the self-employed, according to the president of the Chamber, Santiago Sesé.
Sesé has presented the economic situation report for the Canary Islands from the Chamber of Commerce corresponding to the first quarter, accompanied by the entity’s general director, Lola Pérez, and by Juan Ramón Fuertes, territorial director of CaixaBank, sponsor of the study.
Juan Ramón Fuertes has advanced a data on how consumption is awakening with the de-escalation: total spending with the entity’s cards fell 28% in the third week of May in relation to the same period of 2019, but the decline was 48 % a week before and 78% three weeks ago.
Lola Pérez has mainly relied on the economic evolution of the first two months of the year aimed at stability, before the “abrupt derailment” of the second half of March, to point to the possibility that a “virtuous recovery may occur “if air connectivity is restored and the pandemic is kept under control.
“The forecasts, within the uncertainty, are that the second quarter of the year will be the worst, and that the third and fourth will be better,” said Pérez, who is confident that in this way the expected drop of 20% of GDP and the rise in unemployment to 35% is “transitory in the medium term” and not structural.
“We understand that the fall is transitory, although we will have to see the ability to recover from such a spectacular decline,” said the CEO.
The conjuncture report for the first quarter of the year indicates that only the first fifteen days of the state of sanitary alarm already reflects a drop of 6% of GDP (compared to 4.1% nationally) and falls of 2 5% in the number foreign tourists and tourist spending.
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