Wifo boss Gabriel Felbermayr made that clear in the Ö1 “Mittagsjournal”. Of course, any restrictions on oil imports from Russia mean further pressure on the oil market. This will be passed on to the fuel market, “but not one to one,” said Felbermayr.
It is assumed that the oil embargo will dampen growth by 0.3 percentage points, on the other hand, domestic economic growth in the first quarter was better than thought until recently. It is therefore not clear how the revision of the forecast, which assumed a GDP increase of 3.9 percent for this year at the end of March, will turn out. “The embargo will dampen the economy slightly,” said the head of the economic research institute.
The oil embargo will increase inflation “by half a percentage point, maybe three quarters of a percentage point”. However, the market has been preparing for a possible embargo for months. In the Wifo one counts on an increase in the price, but not enormously, but perhaps of half a percentage point or a little more.
The managing director of the mineral oil trade association in the Chamber of Commerce, Hedwig Doloszeski, warned of the possibility that Russia could react by trying to interrupt oil imports from Kazakhstan to Austria via Russian territory. In the previous year, Austria received almost 40 percent of the oil from Kazakhstan, which came via a pipeline running through southern Russia and was loaded via a Russian port.
Source: Nachrichten
