Thursday August 13, 10:37 AM
Eurozone economy shrinks 0.1% in quarter
BRUSSELS (AFP) - The economy of the 16 nations using the euro contracted by just 0.1 percent in the second quarter, as Germany and France unexpectedly emerged from recession, official EU data showed Thursday.
The figures, which are initial estimates, fuelled hopes that the eurozone's biggest hitters can pull the others out of the worst recession the region has known since 1945.
Germany, the biggest eurozone economy, and France both surprised on Thursday with growth of 0.3 percent in the second quarter, confounding official forecasts of continued contraction.
This switch means that they have broken a run of shrinking outout and have broken out of recession. Analysts in France, however, commented that although the French figures were a welcome surprise, a breakdown of where there growth was coming from suggested that the recovery was fragile.
But the latest overall eurozone figures, from the official Eurostat statistics agency, mark the fifth quarter running of shrinking gross domestic product for the eurozone as a whole.
However the second-quarter rate of contraction provides a much sunnier outlook than the record GDP plunge of 2.5 percent witnessed in the first quarter during the worst throes of the economic downturn.
The economy in the 27-nation European Union as a whole shrank by 0.3 percent in the second quarter, weighed down in part by a 0.8 percent drop in Britain.
However these figures too were markedly better than 2.4 percent falls seen in the first quarter.
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