Already on the Cusp Before Coronavirus Downturn, Germany Enters Recession

Merkel
INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images
Oliver JJ Lane

Germany is in recession, its economy having contracted by over two per cent in the first quarter of 2020, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic following years of flatlining performance.

While nations worldwide are expected to take a significant beating over sanitary lockdowns throttling economies, some entered the crisis in worse condition than others, such as Germany which teetered at the edge of recession at the start of 2020.

Now the Federal Statistics Office reveals the economy shrank 2.2 per cent in the first quarter the biggest three-month decline in over a decade. Germany officially went into lockdown in mid-March, towards the end of the first quarter, suggesting the next quarterly figures could show a much larger downturn.

The Associated Press reports other recent figures from a tighter period towards the end of the quarter showing perhaps more clearly the impact of the coronavirus shutdown. Factory orders fell 15.6 per cent in March, and industrial production fell 9.2 per cent, while exports fell 11.8 per cent.

A similar fate is befalling the wider Eurozone, Swedish Radio reports, citing new figures from the European Union’s own Eurostat body which noted a 3.8 per cent decline in the first quarter, the largest since the EU started collecting such figures in the early 1990s. The hardest hit by Eurostat’s reckoning is France, which has had a significant 5.8 per cent wiped off its GDP this past quarter.

Faring the best of the foremost nations of Europe is the United Kingdom, whose GDP was recorded by Eurostat to have fallen by two per cent.

But clearly, not all nations entered the coronavirus age from the same position, nor locked down their economies to an equal degree. Sweden has taken the bold approach of barely enacting any lockdowns at all and saw a contraction of just 0.3 per cent, but their reported death toll from the virus is 100 people per million higher than the United States according to one count, for instance.

As Breitbart London reported last year, the United Kingdom had run 13 consecutive quarters of growth since voting to leave the European Union in 2016. In the same timeframe, Germany was suffering economic stagnation and was sliding into what economists called a technical recession. By February of this year — long before the impacts of coronavirus had been felt in Europe — Germany’s economy was said to have “ground to a halt” in the emerging slump.

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