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ECONOMY

Bank of Italy lowers country’s 2022 growth forecast

Italy's central bank revised down its forecast for the country's growth in 2022 on Friday due to the Omicron variant, which has sparked a recent surge of coronavirus cases.

Published: 22 January 2022 10:05 CET
Palazzo Koch, Rome
Bank of Italy in Rome. Photo: Szilas / WikiCommons

The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is set to grow by 3.8 percent this year, it said, lowering a projection of 4.0 percent made just one month ago.

Growth slowed “sharply” in the last quarter of 2021, due to “the resurgence of the pandemic”, the bank said in its quarterly forecasting bulletin.

Italy reported nearly 180,000 new coronavirus cases on Friday and 373 deaths. The bank said the latest wave had hurt consumer confidence.

The country is expected to see its job figures improve just slightly this year and next, with unemployment falling from 9.4 percent last year to 9.0 percent in 2022 and 8.9 percent in 2023.

Those figures remain well above the eurozone rate of 7.2 percent in November.

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PROPERTY

Italian mortgage rates fall for first time in two years

Mortgage interest rates fell in December for the first time after 24 months of increases, Italian banking association ABI said on Tuesday.

Published: 16 January 2024 15:07 CET
Italian mortgage rates fall for first time in two years

ABI said the average interest rate applied to new mortgages at the end of 2023 was 4.42 percent, down from 4.5 in November, reported financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

The small drop marked the end of two years of consecutive monthly rises to the average rate, giving some hope to prospective home buyers facing a steady rise in the cost of borrowing.

READ ALSO: What to expect from Italy’s property market in 2024

In December 2022 the average rate on a mortgage in Italy was recorded at 3.01 percent.

Mortgage rates have risen as a result of the European Central Bank’s interest rate hikes designed to combat inflation, reported Il Sole 24 Ore.

The ECB was expected to starting cutting interest rates later in 2024, further easing the pressure on borrowing, and there has already been a decrease on rates on loans between banks in anticipation.

Italy’s property market slowed down notably in 2023 after growing for the first time in years amid the pandemic, with the number of mortgages granted in the first half of 2023 down by 30 percent on the same period the year before.

The number of property sales in Italy was expected to fall again in 2024, according to the Real Estate Market Observatory from Italian data analysts Nomisma.

They also predicted average property prices will rise slightly, by 0.2 percent, though this was a predicted decrease on the growth of the last two quarters.

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