Euro Area Growth Moderated In The First Quarter, Unemployment Continued To Fall

The Euro Area is comprised of the nineteen countries using the common currency, the euro.

It was widely expected that real growth in the Zone would slow at the start of 2018, though most economists expected that there were only temporary factors behind the Q! moderation and that the economy would continue to expand strongly for the rest of this year.

In fact, the Euro Zone's real GDP grew by 0.4% in the first quarter of 2018. Compared with the same quarter of the previous year, the Euro economy expanded a healthy 2.5%, which was slightly lower than the 2.8% growth figure for the previous period.

Nevertheless, the slight moderation in first quarter growth pushed the Euro Zone growth behind the United States, but still ahead of Britain’s 1.2% y/y growth, which registered its weakest growth rate since 2012.

As Trading Economics indicates in a recent web posting, “among countries for which data is already available, the GDP expanded at a softer pace in Germany (0.3 percent vs 0.6 percent in Q4), France (0.3 percent vs 0.7 percent), the Netherlands (0.5 percent vs 0.7 percent), Austria (0.7 percent vs 0.9 percent), Belgium (0.4 percent vs 0.5 percent), Portugal (0.4 percent vs 0.7 percent), Lithuania (0.8 percent vs 1.4 percent) and Cyprus (0.8 percent vs 1.1 percent).”

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