adminFrankfurt. – Euro-area jobless numbers this week may lay bare a fault line scarring the region’s recovery as evidence of Germany’s employment muscle contrasts with the scourge of political quagmire destroying work in Italy.While the currency bloc’s longest-ever recession has ended, unemployment held at 12 percent in September, according to the median of 36 forecasts in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
Within that data lies a rift between two of its largest economies, with Italy’s rate seen by economists to have reached 12,3 percent, the highest since records began in 1977 – and more than double Germany’s comparable level.
Italy will “critically determine the fate of the euro area” and the region won’t prosper if that country can’t restore economic growth, European Central Bank Executive Board member Joerg Asmussen said last week.
Italian officials predict joblessness in the eurozone’s third-biggest economy will keep rising, against a backdrop of a fragmented coalition jeopardised by the legal woes of former premier Silvio Berlusconi.
“We are still in a very discouraging situation for most of the euro area,” said Anatoli Annenkov, an economist at Societe Generale SA in London. – Bloomberg.
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