Portugal has biggest deficit from 22 EU member states

Portugal has the worst budget deficit (-2.7% of GDP) out of 22 EU member-states in the second quarter of 2018.

The data was released by Eurostat as it was also announced that Portugal’s public debt is still the third largest in the European Union (124.9% of GDP), despite falling 5.9 percentage points.

Portugal’s deficit worsened in the second quarter against the 1.5% registered for the same period in 2017 and the 0.6% for the first three months of the year, fixed at 2.7% of GDP.

On the other hand, according to the European Union’s statistics unit, the overall public deficit of the Eurozone fell to its lowest collective level since 2002.

From the 22 member-states for which data was available, Portugal had the largest budget deficit (-2.7%), followed by France (-2.5%), Romania (-2.2%) and the United Kingdom (-1.8%). Malta, however was running a surplus (+4.9%), with Estonia (+2.5%), Germany (2.4%) and Luxembourg (+2.3%).

Between April and June, Portugal maintained the third largest public debt in the European Union (124.9% of GDP) but enjoyed the fourth largest fall in percentage terms for the EU at 5.9 percentage points according to Eurostat.

The largest ratios of public debt against GDP were: Greece (179.7%), Italy (133.1%) and Portugal (124.9%) while the lowest are Estonia (8.3%), Luxembourg (22%) and Bulgaria (23.8%).