Daily news on Covid 19, the car industry, special EU funds and fiscal reserves

HUNGARY - In Brief 20 Mar 2020 by Istvan Racz

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The number of confirmed and active Covid-19 case rose from 70 to 75 over the last 24 hours. This would sound enviable for many countries, but the authorities keep stressing that the country is at the doorstep of mass infections, most probably with a view to avoiding that people take the situation lightly. The current order of life more or less matches the new European standard, except that no curfew is enforced and the government has emphasised a number of times that it is not even planning to introduce one for the time being.The more unhappy part of the story is that all four big car manufacturing factories (Audi, Mercedes, Opel and Suzuki) will stop production fully from next week. Stoppages are planned to hold for two to three weeks, during which time most employees will be sent on paid holidays, typically for two weeks' time. The car industry represents one third of industrial output and, taking into account the domestic supply chain, about 10-12% of GDP. Asked about the current state of the economy, finance minister Varga said: "We are in a free-fall", and then, somewhat contradicting what he had just said, he added that the best possible scenario for this year can be "a positive zero change of real GDP". Bruxinfo.hu has reported that in an effort to help governments to fight Covid-19, the EU is preparing to redirect the unused amounts from approved cohesion funds to this area, and that Hungary could get EUR 5.6bn out of these funds. Being asked about this, cabinet minister Gulyás could not confirm this news, saying that so far Hungary has received "zero euros" in support from the EU for the purposes of Covid-19-related spending. However, he confirmed that Hungary...