Room for improvement

摘要

"It's the economy, stupid." Although the novelty wore off Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential-campaign mantra long ago, be prepared to hear the cliche again and again in Europe in the coming months. Of the 15 European Union governments at the Barcelona summit on March 15th and 16th, no fewer than six face national elections this year, beginning with Portugal on the very next day, March 17th, and ending with Germany on September 22nd. France even has two: one for the presidency in April and May, followed by a parliamentary poll in June. Most if not all or these governments would have been far happier to face their voters in the economic circumstances of a year ago. At last year's EU summit in Stockholm, France's prime minister, Lionel Jospin, confidently predicted that GDP growth in the EU would be a healthy 3% in 2001, the same as in 2000. Since then, though, Europe's economies have stumbled. In the Netherlands, where electors go to the polls in May, GDP was flat in the last two quarters of last year. In France, growth slipped to 2% in 2001 after averaging over 3% in the three previous years (see chart 1 on next page). The French economy actually contracted in the fourth quarter, for the first time in five years. Europe's sickliest economy, though, is its biggest, Germany. In the first half of 2000, the country seemed to have at last shaken off years of torpor. Yet in the middle of that year it stalled, and it has struggled ever since, shrinking in the third and fourth quarters of 2001. Last year, German GDP grew by a measly 0.6%, the lowest rate in the EU.