Eurozone economic activity expanded by 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2022while the GDP of the whole of the European Union remained stable in the same period of time, according to data released this Tuesday by the community statistics office Eurostat and collect EFE.
The organism thus maintains its preliminary estimateswhich confirm the economic slowdown but rule out for now the contraction between October and December of last year that many institutions expected, in line with the forecasts published this Monday by the European Commission.
Brussels concluded this Monday that the bloc has “narrowly” avoided the technical recession thanks to a better-than-expected behavior of the economy in the final stretch of 2022 that derived from the decrease in energy prices and a greater dynamism in job creation, which led it to improve their projections for this year.
Even so, the increase of 0.1% in the euro zone and the stagnation in the bloc (0%) in the last three months of 2022 contrast with the economic growth of 0.3% observed in both areas in the previous quarter and represent an increase of 1.9% and 1.8%, respectively, in the interannual rate.
This derives, according to the first calculations of Eurostat, in seasonally adjusted annual growth 3.5% in the countries with the common currency and 3.6% in the Twenty-seven.
Data from the European Statistical Office also point to an increase in the number of people employed by 0.4% both in the euro area and in the European Union.
Among the countries with available data, Ireland led the economic growth of the EU in the fourth quarter of 2022 with an expansion of 3.5%, followed at a distance by Denmark, Cyprus and Romania (1.1%), Slovenia (0.8%), Netherlands (0.6%), Bulgaria (0.5%), Latvia and Slovakia (0.3%), Spain and Portugal (0.2%) and Belgium and France (0.1%).
On the contrary, declines in activity were observed in Poland (-2.4%), Lithuania (-1.7%), Austria (-0.7%), Sweden (-0.6%), Hungary (-0.4%), Czech Republic (-0.3%), Germany and Finland (-0.2%) and Italy (-0.1%).
Increase in employment in the eurozone
Data from the European Statistical Office also point to an increase in the number of people employed by 0.4% in both the euro area and the European Union in the last quarter of last year, compared to the previous quarter.
Are figures are equivalent to a slight acceleration with respect to the behavior of employment between July and September, when the increase in employed persons was 0.3% and 0.2%, respectively.
In relation to the fourth quarter of 2021, employment increased by 1.5% in the euro zone and by 1.3% in the Twenty-sevencompared to the interannual growth of 1.8% and 1.5% that had been observed in the previous quarter in each of the areas.
