Official Data put Spain’s GDP up 0.2% in second quarter
Spain confirmed its timid recovery from recession on Thursday with 0.2% growth in the second quarter, final official data showed.
The figure, which confirmed provisional data issued by the National Statistics Institute (INE) on August 13, follows growth of 0.1% in the first quarter when Spain emerged from recession.
On a year-on-year basis, Spanish Gross Domestic Product shrank 0.1%, a figure slightly better than the INE’s provisional estimate of 0.2%.
The second quarter upturn is substantially less than in Germany and France, where growth for the April-to-June period was 2.2% and 0.6% respectively.
Spain’s government predicts the economy will contract 0.3% in 2010 and then expand 1.3% in 2011.
Other organisations are far more pessimistic, raising doubts over the government’s ability to rein in its massive public deficit.
The Bank of Spain expects a contraction of 0.4% this year before a return to growth of 0.8% next year while the International Monetary Fund has revised its 2011 growth forecast down from 0.9% to 0.6%.
Spain entered its worst recession in decades at the end of 2008 as the global financial meltdown compounded a crisis in the once-booming property market and then returned to growth in the first quarter of this year with a gain of just 0.1%.
The INE on Wednesday said the economy contracted 3.7% in 2009, slightly more than its initial estimate of 3.6% issued in February.
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