December data show that eurozone business activity and consumers’ confidence rose in the last days of the last year. The EU Commission announced that its Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) rose 1.6 points to 100 for the eurozone, which is the best result since July 2011. When accounting for the entire European Union, ESI did slightly worse – it went up by 1.4 points to 103.5.
Brussels said that the sentiment in the eurozone is back to its long-term average and the EU leadership described the improvements in ESI ratings as “marked”. The enhancement included a number of areas, such as retail, construction, consumers, services, and to limited extent also industry.
Spain logged the biggest increase at 4.0 points in ESI, and is being followed by Italy (2.3 points) and the Netherland (1.5 points). In contrast, the eurozone’s strongest economies – France and Germany – increased its scores only up 0.3 points.
The latest figures for the eighteen euro countries have been ambiguous following the positive forecasts which came after the currency block embarked on a hopefully full-fledged recovery in the second quarter of 2013 with growth rate of 0.3 percentage points. Yet, the situation deteriorated slightly when the last quarter of 2014 was marked by growth of only 0.1 percent. All in all, experts say that the data seem to suggest an ongoing, though fragile, recovery with high joblessness to lag behind for some time.
