Orsolya Nyeste, leading macroeconomic analyst of the Hungarian subsidiary of the Erste Bank Group, won the award for the best macroeconomic and interest rate forecast in the country at the 2020 Analyst Forecast Awards of Barcelona-based international economic forecast firm Focus Economics.
Asked by financial portal napi.hu about the 2021 budget submitted to Parliament on Tuesday by Finance Minister Mihály Varga, the country’s certified best analyst said that while the government was in a particularly difficult position when devising the budget due to the major uncertainties regarding the current coronavirus crisis, she found the budget’s cornerstone 4.8 percent GDP growth assumption “realistic, taking into account existing information and largely in line with market expectations”.
The one point where she differed from the government’s official position was the economic decline for this year.
While Varga’s latest forecast was of a 3-percent contraction, Nyeste’s own forecast is 4.2 percent — but even that is significantly more optimistic than the European Commission’s official 7-percent figure.
Nyeste also considers the government’s 2.8 percent budget deficit for 2021 realistic, adding, however, that the risk factors all without exception are downward ones, so in a sense, the country will only meet that target if the optimistic scenario of a fast, V-shaped recovery materializes.
Asked about when she expected the Hungarian economy to fully recover from the effects of the pandemic, she declined to give a forecast.
Incidentally, Nyeste is not the only bright star among Hungary’s financial analysts: Gergely Suppan, lead analyst of Takarékbank last year won the award for the most accurate macroeconomic forecast in the Central European group of Consensus Economics, beating several hundred of his peers.
Title image: Orsolya Nyeste, leading macroeconomic analyst of Erste Bank Hungary. (source: Erste Bank Zrt.)
