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The eurozone economy stagnated again in the final quarter of last year, extending a miserable sequence for a bloc challenged by war, inflation and weakening export markets.
Gross domestic product was unchanged in the fourth quarter from the previous three months, and a minuscule 0.1 percent higher than a year earlier, Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, said in a preliminary estimate on Tuesday.
The poor performance was chiefly because of Germany, which confirmed earlier that gross domestic product shrank by 0.3 percent in the final three months of the year.
French GDP stagnated, although it only avoided contraction because imports fell faster than exports. Weakness in the eurozone’s two largest economies was partially offset by stronger-than-expected figures from both Spain and Italy.
The numbers mean that the eurozone has just avoided two successive quarters of negative growth, economists’ classical definition of a recession. However, the finer points of economic jargon arguably count for less than a grim reality that the bloc hasn’t had any meaningful growth since the middle of 2022.
“Babbling on with ghoulish glee about two quarters of negative growth is not helpful to anyone,” said Paul Donovan, global chief economist with UBS Wealth Management, in a morning note. “The difference between -0.1 percent growth and zero percent growth is pretty meaningless in living standard terms, or what the policy response should be.”
The euro was little changed immediately after the numbers, at $1.0825.
