EU Growth Rates

Way back on March 4th Eurostat published the Quarterly Accounts for the 27 members of the EU.  This gives data on GDP and the components of GDP for the fourth quarter of 2009.  The headline figure of a QoQ growth rate of 0.1% suggested that the European recovery was continuing, albeit at a slower rate.

However, in Ireland we are still waiting for Q4 data from the CSO.  If you look at the table on page 3 of the report you will see that Eurostat are missing data for three countries: Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta.

When Eurostat are drawing up figures for the EU region the omissions of Malta and Luxembourg are not significant.  Malta makes up only 0.05% of the entire EU economy with, Luxembourg representing 0.32% of the EU area economy.  A full list of the relative sizes of EU economies for 2009 is available here.

While Ireland is only 1.39% of the EU’s economy it would be nice to think that we could get our data in along with the other 24 countries who manage to do so.  [A similar problem occurs with labour cost data as noted here.]

According to the CSO’s release calendar we will have the Q4 quarterly accounts this Thursday.  This will be important in determining if the ‘turning the corner’ hypothesis is correct.  The CSO will also issue revised Q3 figures.  The ‘turning the corner’ hypothesis was based on a 0.3% Q0Q growth rate reported for Q3.