Economic growth in Germany and across the eurozone continued at a crawling pace in the final three months of last year, as Italy fell short of expectations and Greece fell into recession, according to official figures released Friday. Eurostat reported 0.3 percent eurozone growth in the fourth quarter, the same as in the preceding three months. Compared to the same period in 2014, GDP expanded by 1.5 percent and 1.8 percent for the eurozone and EU respectively. The largest economy in the eurozone, Germany, saw output grow by 0.3 percent in the final quarter, which was unchanged on the previous quarter, and 1.3 percent year-on-year. Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING-Diba in Frankfurt, attributed the “decent” German growth to “government consumption, a bit of private consumption and another surge in the construction sector.” However, he warned that 2016 could be more challenging due to the refugee crisis, a slow down in China and emerging markets, low oil prices and possible weakness in the U.S. economy. Greece officially entered recession after GDP fell 0.6 percent in the fourth quarter, after shrinking 1.4 percent in the third quarter. The result, which was better than the 0.8 decline forecast in a Bloomberg survey, came on the same day as violent clashes between farmers and police in Athens over government plans to raise pension contributions and taxes. Elsewhere, for the whole of 2015 Italy’s calendar-adjusted GDP growth of 0.6 percent came in below the 0.9 percent that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had counted on in his economic forecast last year. Italy’s GDP grew a meagre 0.1 percent in the final quarter of 2015, lower than the expected 0.3 percent. In France, the eurozone’s second-largest economy, growth slowed slightly to 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter, down from 0.2 in the preceding quarter, though still a 1.3 percent improvement on the same period in 2014.
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