Faced with a drop in GDP of almost 9 per cent, public transfers limited the fall in households’ disposable income in 2020 to 2.6 per cent in real terms (Figure 4).
Government guarantees on new loans, moratoriums on outstanding debts, and more favourable financing conditions for banks within the Eurosystem, enabled the liquidity needs of businesses to be met: loans increased by more than 8 per cent, compared with a contraction of 2 per cent in the years of the global financial crisis and of 7 per cent during the European sovereign debt crisis.