Ansip, the plane is aimed downwards!
13.08.2008, 12:30Äripaev’s journalist Ralf-Martin Soe
writes that the economic fall has officially reached us. The following is a
comment written by him.
“The time has come. Economic fall is officially here, which means that during
the first half of this year, Estonia has became poorer.
In the beginning of the year, the Prime Minister Andrus Ansip could still
quote the banker Indrek Neivelt and say that economy, despite cooling, is still
growing and the plane is still aimed upwards.
Unfortunately, according to official statistics the plane has stopped rising
and is, instead, turned downwards. To where and how, can’t be predicted. Which
only means that Estonia as a state is getting poorer. And has been getting
poorer during the entire 2008 so far, as the growth of Q1 was only 0.1 pct, so
the arithmetic medium of the half-year is only 0.65 pct. Optimists can only hope
that Statistics Estonia is wrong, like Hansapank claims.
By current official results we are clearly backing away from the strategic
(or rather political) goal “among 5 richest EU states in 15 years”. Authors
Claudio Zucchelli and Dag Kirsebom pointed out in their book about the hard
landing of Estonian economy that for this goal to be true, our economic growth
should be about 16 pct per year. That sort of growth would be questionable even
if Estonia suddenly discovered oil resources. Which doesn’t seem to be too
likely.
Whereas to the Centre Party, that started to call the cooling economy a
falling economy already in the beginning of the year (even though rightfully
that could be said only starting from today), they don’t have any other option
but to foresee an economic crisis. So most likely they will exchange economic
fall with economic crisis, even though for crisis the economic fall has to
continue for at least two quarters in a row.”