If we looked at most investment bank outlook reports for 2021, one of the main consensus themes was a strong conviction on a rapid and robust eurozone recovery. They were wrong.
This week, Capital Economics joined other analysts and downgraded the eurozone growth, highlighting “We now think that the euro-zone economy will recover more slowly than we previously anticipated, growing by about 3% this year and 4.5% in 2022. Meanwhile, euro-zone government bond yields seem unlikely to fall much further, and with Treasury yields set to increase significantly, we expect the widening yield gap to cause the euro to weaken against the US dollar”.
This wave of downgrades, which includes the OECD and European Central Bank estimates, comes with the same-old and tired upgrade of next year’s expectations, which will likely be downgraded again further down the line.
Most politicians blame the eurozone weakness on the pandemic and the slow vaccine roll out. It is partially true. None of those two factors are detached from one of the main traits that makes the eurozone consistently disappoint in growth and crisis periods: massive bureaucracy.
The slow vaccine roll-out of the eurozone is evident in Bloomberg Economics’ Covid-19 resilience ranking and Our World In Data vaccines administered per 100 people falling significantly below Israel, Chile, the United States or the United Kingdom, despite the eurozone economies having the highest levels of public healthcare spending in the world. The reason why the eurozone lags in vaccinations comes from a bureaucratic and slow process in the approval and purchase of vaccines.
