The euro zone economy contracted by just 0.1% in the second quarter of the year, as Germany and France unexpectedly emerged from recession, official EU data show today.
The figures, which are initial estimates, fuelled hopes that the euro zone's biggest hitters can pull the others out of the worst recession the region has known since 1945.
Germany, France edge out of recession
Germany, the biggest euro zone economy, and France both surprised today with growth of 0.3% in the second quarter, confounding official forecasts of continued contraction. This switch means that they have broken a run of shrinking output 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 euro zone 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% 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% in the second quarter, weighed down in part by a 0.8% drop in Britain. However these figures too were markedly better than 2.4% falls seen in the first quarter of 2009.
