While the recovery here in America keeps plodding along, Europe's economy remains in recession, with no end in sight. The European Union released the latest data for the first quarter of 2013 yesterday, and it showed that the EU's economy shrunk by 0.9 percent, marking the sixth straight quarter of contraction.
Even the strongest European nations have entered recession. Spain and Italy both saw their economies shrink by about 2 percent in the first quarter; France's contracted by about 0.7 percent. Germany managed to eke out 0.3 percent growth, and the only other European nations to report any growth at all were Belgium and Slovakia.
Unemployment throughout the European Union now stands at 12.1 percent. The year and a half of economic contraction marks the longest European recession since the euro was created in 1999, even longer than the recession of 2008-09 that paralleled the Great Recession here in the U.S.
No comments:
Post a Comment