Bank of Italy cuts growth forecast

Milan: Italy´s central bank revised down its forecast for the country´s growth in 2022 on Friday due to the Omicron variant, which has sparked a recent surge of coronavirus cases.

The country´s gross domestic product (GDP) is set to grow by 3.8 percent this year, it said, lowering a projection of 4.0 percent made just one month ago.

Growth slowed "sharply" in the last quarter of 2021, due to "the resurgence of the pandemic", the bank said in its quarterly forecasting bulletin.

Italy reported nearly 180,000 new coronavirus cases on Friday and 373 deaths.

The bank said the latest wave had hurt consumer confidence.

The country is expected to see its job figures improve just slightly this year and next, with unemployment falling from 9.4 percent last year to 9.0 percent in 2022 and 8.9 percent in 2023. Those figures remain well above the eurozone rate of 7.2 percent in November.