This Monday, November 18, the results of the Gross Domestic Product for the third quarter will be known, in the midst of a panorama in which the economy continues waiting for a concrete reactivation plan and the fall in inflation and interest rates are favoring the consumption and helping the data to reach levels higher than those initially projected.
At a point where the experts’ debate stopped focusing on whether there will be growth or not and began to review how much the various productive activities are contributing to the GDP movement, the expectations regarding the data that the Dane will show are good and Most of them suggest that the country would reach levels close to projected expectations.
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Munir Jalil, chief economist for the Andean countries at BTG Pactual, mentioned that the Brazilian bank expects a figure of 2.3% in the third quarter, thanks mainly to the good moment that agriculture is experiencing, while reiterating the call to lend pay attention to those sectors that are not having a good time.
“We will continue to see weakness in sectors such as manufacturing and securities low growth in other major drivers of growth such as trade. Primary activities will continue to stand out, as will some areas of the service sector. We hope that consumption continues to show signs of a slow recovery and that investment grows,” he said.
Economic growth
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This same projection is held by Laura Clavijo, director of Economic, Sectoral and Market Research at Bancolombia, who added that growth would have been driven to a lesser extent by the public administration, health and education sector, while private sector production would be gaining. traction.
“In the third quarter of 2024, we expect the tertiary sector (services) to have led growth, followed by progress in the primary sector (agriculture and mining), in contrast to persistent weakness in the secondary sector (manufacturing and construction) . From the demand, household consumption would have had an encouraging behavior –less deterioration- according to our Real Time Consumption Indicator,” he said.
For this economist, if it materializes, it would be a positive result for the GDP as a whole, supported by the divergence between the public and private sectors and added that the situation continues to be dominated by a progressive process of recovery of consumption and investment, while the priority is to get inflation back to desirable levels.
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Investment care
Although the projections in general are good and in the case of the Governmentor are located at a level that is around 2%, the call from analysts is to concentrate efforts on recovering investment, an indicator that has not had a good time, both from the private and public sectors, and is essential for recover the growth levels that existed before the pandemic.
In this sense, José Manuel Restrepo, rector of the EIA University and former Minister of Finance, put his projections at 2.3%, arguing that the strengthening of consumption will help activities such as commerce, which although it did not have a start to the year favorable, little by little it returns to acceptable levels.
Economic growth
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“I believe that the growth dynamics of the commerce sector will recover, they will clearly lead the agricultural sector, the public administration sector, and services, but the industrial sector will continue in negative territory. I am also seeing better performance in services and from a demand perspective a slight improvement consumption, better investment data and public spending and exports,” he said.
The most recent data that provides a projection of what could happen to the GDP is the Economic Monitoring Index for August, which showed an annual variation of 2%; reference that, although it marks a rebound compared to the 0.1% of the same period in 2023, also translates into a slight contraction compared to the 3.8% reached during July, whose good pace was apparently once again a flash in the pan.
Faced with this, if we keep in mind that market expectations pointed to records in a range of between 2.1% and 2.3% in the annual variation, it is clear that the results were below expectations, evidencing a slowdown that is once again hitting various sectors of the economy, although not completely undermines the market’s optimism regarding the end of the year.
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The lesson learned
In this sense, it must be said that Daniel Velandia, Chief Economist of Credicorp Capital, projects a figure that will move between 2.8% and 2.9% for the third quarter, highlighting that the economic recovery is maintained at a general level and that The sectors on which we must work quickly have already been identified.
“We see that the agricultural sector maintains an important pace of economic growth, to which is added that public spending also remains buoyant, despite the spending cuts that have been announced by the government for this year. In reality, throughout 2024 we have expected that public spending is one of the engines of economic growth in particular,” Velandia said.
Dane surveyors.
For this economist, we must not overlook that “this is the second full year of the Petro government and there is a substantial improvement in the learning curve of the authorities and that is what is being reflected particularly in the public administration sector. and defense.”
One last element to take into account prior to the Dane reports is the state of the industry, which according to Dane, for September of this year fell 4.2%, compared to the figures for the same period last year and reflects a contraction in the variation of real sales of 3.8% and of employed personnel of 0.5%.
According to the survey, of the 39 industrial activities represented by the survey, a total of 27 registered negative variations in their real production, subtracting 5.3 percentage points from the total annual variation. All this must be taken into account, according to analysts, to determine what will come with the GDP.
Likewise, it must be insisted that the good results of recent weeks, beyond being the product of an economic reactivation plan that continues to be insisted upon, have originated in factors such as the flexibility of monetary policy and the constant declines in the cost of living; Therefore, the pending task remains to recover and strengthen investor confidence.
