Europe’s economic recovery has stalled, according to new data released yesterday, with the heavyweight German economy slowing to a halt in the fourth quarter of last year and Italy switching back to contraction.
Elsewhere in Europe, growth slowed to 0.3 percent in the Netherlands and to 0.4 percent in Austria, but the recovery sped up in France, where growth was at 0.6 percent for the fourth quarter compared to 0.3 percent in the third.
Italy’s economy, meanwhile, shrank by 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, inverting the growth it had experienced in the third quarter, national statistics agency Istat said in a preliminary forecast.
There was a mixed picture in Central and Eastern Europe too. The Czech Republic fell back into contraction following two quarters of growth, while Hungary’s prospects were brighter as the contraction slowed to 0.4 percent.
Europe in general has begun to emerge from what is in most cases record recessions, but the recovery process is expected to be slow and bumpy because business investment and consumer consumption are still weak in many cases.
CONTRACTIONS
Full-year figures showed that Germany, the biggest European economy, contracted by 5 percent last year, France by 2.2 percent, the Netherlands by 4 percent, Austria by 3.6 percent, the Czech Republic by 4.3 percent and Italy by 4.9 percent.
The latest German data showed that “the recovery of the German economy lost momentum at the end of 2009,” the Destatis office said in a statement.
The German economy is heavily dependent on exports and once again they made the only positive contribution in the final three months of the year, since consumption and business investment were both down, Destatis said.
“It is a satisfying result,” said French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde on RMC radio, commenting on the figures from state statistics institute INSEE. “I said we would be back up and running at the end of the year.”
For the 16-nation bloc using the euro single currency, economic growth slowed to 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year over the previous quarter, an official EU estimate showed yesterday.
Compared with the same quarter in 2008, seasonally adjusted GDP decreased by 2.1 percent in the eurozone, the EU’s Eurostat data agency said.
It said that GDP fell by 4 percent over the whole of last year.
In the full 27-nation EU, growth also rose by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the previous three months and decreased by 2.3 percent over the year.
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