Industrial output plunges in eurozone

Bloomberg

Production in the euro region plunged 20.2 percent from a year earlier, the biggest drop since the data series started in 1986, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said yesterday.

The March decline, which followed a 19.1 percent drop inFebruary, was steeper than the 17.6 percent fall economists expected, according to the median of 17 estimates in a Bloomberg survey.

From the previous month, output declined 2 percent.European factories are cutting production and firing workers as the EU forecasts a 4 percent contraction in the region’s economy this year.

The global economic slump may have crimped European growth more in first quarter than in the prior three months, economists estimate."In the U.S. and Europe, we’ve seen a substantial decrease in stocks in the first quarter," said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Groep in Brussels. "That goes alongside the contraction of industrial production."

Output in France, the region’s second-largest economy, fell 1.4 percent in March from the previous month. In Italy, production contracted 4.6 percent from February. Industrial production in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, unexpectedly held steady in March.