Belgium - Europe’s sustainable innovator goes from strength to strength

GDP growth contracted by 6.3% in 2020, but it has rebounded strongly in the months since. Fitch Ratings recently revised its GDP growth forecast for Belgium to 5.8% in 2021, against 3.8% previously, reporting that a second lockdown lasting from October 2020 to April 2021 did not derail the country’s economic recovery. According to Fitch, the country’s high vaccination rate – 72% of the population was fully-vaccinated as of September 2021 – is also supporting a better-than-expected growth performance, meaning that permanent damage to the country’s growth and output will be much smaller than expected.

As Prime Minister Alexander De Croo detailed, the Belgian economy is recovering more strongly than previously forecast thanks to the effective and efficient support measures of the government, which preserved the country’s economic fabric: “We avoided ‘on/off measures’ as much as possible. Our strategy has been stable, with economic restrictions that were in place for a long time, but which were still less strict compared