Our financing requirements (which is the combined balance of the current account and the capital account) have decreased spectacularly, as the marked decline in gas sales in the last quarter of last year continued intensely in the first quarter of this year. The GDP ratio of 2.5% is the lowest in a year and a half.
The improvement can primarily be attributed to the improvement of the energy balance, which led to a sharp jump in the balance of goods and services. The last time there was a surplus was in the first half of 2021.
Therefore, the financing capacity may have improved due to the development of the current account balance, while the deteriorating trend may be observed in the capital account. This is due to the suspension of the EU subsidies mentioned here. As shown in the figure below, although the balance of EU remittances already reaches 60 billion euros, the new flow is slowing down. For years, there has been little support “arrival” as we’ve seen in the past four quarters.
It is worth adding some methodological comments to this: Balance of payments statistics are prepared on an accrual basis, so it does not show how much EU money enters the country as transfers, but how much receivables are made up. In other words, the above figure does not show the stagnation of cash flow-accounted resources, but the extent to which advertising and pre-financing of programs has declined.
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