Europe's two biggest economies in France and Germany showed little sign of vibrancy in unemployment reports released today.
Germany's seasonally adjusted rate of unemployment fell to 11.7 per cent in June from 11.8 per cent, and the jobless total in adjusted terms fell 23,000 to 4.858 million, the Labour office said.
France's jobless rate remained at 10.2 per cent for a third month running, the Labour Ministry announced in a report, which coincided with news from the statistics office that household confidence slid slightly in June.
“At best we are seeing a stabilisation in the labour markets in both France and Germany,” Audrey Childe-Freeman, an economist at CIBC World Markets in London, said.
Economists said the German jobless dip was positive but not yet convincing, and some said the Social-Democrat government would hold the data up as proof that gain was now coming from the pain of labour market reforms.
More worrying perhaps was a report by French statistics office INSEE which said its barometer of consumer confidence in the euro zone's second biggest economy fell to minus 30 in June, bucking economists' expectation that it would stay at minus 29.
Euro zone gross domestic product is believed to have slowed in the second quarter of this year from a 0.5 per cent rise in the first quarter, with Italy in the jaws of recession.
But politicians and central bankers are counting on a rebound in the second part of 2005.
France's statistics office revised quarterly GDP growth in the first quarter of 2005 to 0.3 per cent from a previous estimate of 0.2 per cent.