PARIS: The French national statistics agency INSEE yesterday revised downward its figure for the country’s third quarter economic growth from 0.2 percent to 0.1 percent, which will make the government’s full-year target harder to reach.
INSEE said the third-quarter figure was revised lower following new data that showed weaker activity in the transport services sector in the three months from July through September.
Overall investment and consumption in the services sector declined somewhat in the period.
INSEE said earlier this month that it expected France’s economy, the second biggest in the eurozone, to contract by 0.2 percent in the final quarter of 2012.
It shrank by 0.1 percent on a quarterly basis in the three months from April through June.
President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government, which is struggling to reboot a stagnant economy and straighten out France’s public finances at the same time, has forecast overall economic growth of 0.3 percent in 2012, but that now looks difficult to attain.
Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici however ruled out any immediate change to the official outlook for growth of 0.8 percent in 2013. “Today, there is no reason to change the growth forecast,” Moscovici told media at Orly airport south of Paris.
AFP
