The President of the Economic Development Bank for Puerto Rico (NDE), Pablo Muñiz Reyes, released the Economic Activity Index (IAE) data for November 2020 on Saturday.
The report reveals a decrease of 6.8 percent from the month of the previous year.
“The cumulative mean of the IAE-NDE for 2019 was 122.6. This is evidence of a 1.6 percent increase over fiscal 2020, the second consecutive annual growth rate after five years of consecutive annual reductions. However, the accumulated average of the IAE-NDE for the previous year ended at 119.6, which translates into a 2.0 percent decline from fiscal year 2019, ”Muñiz Reyes said in written statements.
This would be the ninth consecutive decline after 20 months of year-on-year increases.
Muñiz Reyes stressed that the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused job losses and complicated the operation in the health sector, posing new challenges for the government. These include developing other strategies that encourage economic activity, investing in small and medium businesses to accelerate the recovery of displaced jobs.
The accumulated average of the IAE-NDE for the period from January to November of the year 2020 was 115.3 points, which represents a reduction of 5.9 percent.
In turn, the accumulated average for the first five months of fiscal year 2021, between July and November, is 114.2, or a decrease of 7.1 percent from the same period of fiscal year 2020.
In November 2020, one of the four components of the IAE-BDE: cement sales rose 4.3 percent. While non-agricultural salaried employment, electricity generation and gasoline consumption decreased by 7.3 percent, 2.6 percent and 9.5 percent respectively.
These results have been compared with the figures for November 2019.
Finally, compared to October 2020, non-farm paid employment increased 0.2 percent, electricity generation increased 5.4 percent, gasoline consumption increased -13.4 percent and cement sales increased 7.8 percent. . hundred.