BERLIN (AP) — The German economy appears to have stagnated in the fourth quarter, the national statistics office said Friday, while Europe’s biggest economy managed full-year growth of 1.9% — slowing somewhat from 2021 as the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine weighed on its performance.
Germany releases a preliminary full-year gross domestic product figure before full December economic data is available, and an official fourth-quarter number isn’t due for a few weeks yet.
The head of the Federal Statistical Office, Ruth Brand, said that “according to what we know so far, gross domestic product stagnated in the fourth quarter of 2022” compared with the previous three-month period. She cautioned that there was still “a great deal of uncertainty” about that estimate.
If the estimate holds up, stagnation in the October-December period would be a better showing than expected. The economy was long expected to shrink in last year’s fourth quarter and in the current first quarter. In last year’s third quarter, the economy grew 0.4%.
Germany’s full-year growth declined from 2.6% in 2021. In 2020, when the economy took a big hit from the COVID-19 pandemic, GDP shrank by 3.7%.
Brand said the economy was 0.7% bigger last year than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.
Germany’s annual inflation rate slipped back from a peak of 10.4% in October to 8.6% in December, but galloping prices remain a major headache.