The president of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), Cristina Herrero, met today with members of the association Círculo Cívico de Opinión, with whom she shared AIReF’s perception of the current economic and budgetary situation.
Pending the review to be carried out on the occasion of the report on the Stability Programme Update in May, the president recalled AIReF’s current forecasts for 2023, which put growth at 1.6%, although the institution has already revised its inflation expectations upwards.
In budgetary matters, AIReF estimates a deficit of 4.2% of GDP in 2023, after incorporating the latest measures approved to tackle the effects of the energy crisis in the Initial Budget Report published on 5 April.
The president also explained AIReF’s medium-term outlook, which points to an exhaustion of the capacity to correct the underlying imbalance in the public accounts if no additional measures are taken. Moreover, ageing is going to start to become visible in the public accounts from the 30s onwards, putting pressure on various expenditure items. These medium and long-term forecasts can be consulted in the Opinion on sustainability published last March by AIReF.
In this context, the President stressed the need to define a medium-term fiscal strategy to gradually reduce public debt. This strategy is even more necessary now that budgetary policy will have to operate from next year onwards in a context in which some kind of fiscal rules will return. In his view, the update of the Stability Programme is an opportunity to start defining it.