COVID-19 immediate impacts on construction planning mixed
Dodge Data & Analytics Chief Economist Richard Branch notes the past two weeks have seen an unprecedented shuttering of the U.S. economy.
“Our expectations on the impact of the coronavirus on the U.S. economy have been significantly downgraded with a growing realization the U.S. economy is in a recession,” he said.
From Dodge’s report, first-quarter GDP is likely to decline close to -0.1% on an annualized basis. Beyond that, it gets much more dire. We are anticipating an annualized decline of 6.3% for GDP in the second quarter as the effect of a shuttered economy fully takes hold. As a point of comparison, the deepest quarterly GDP decline during the Great Recession was an annualized -8.4% in the fourth quarter of 2008.
We presently expect a softer decline in the third quarter (-1.1% annualized) under the assumption that containment of the virus is working and some aspects of life return to normal. In the fourth quarter of 2020, we expect a return to growth of 1.5%. For the full year 2020, we expect economic growth to turn negative – declining 0.5%.