A return to growth in consumer spending allied with buoyant exports helped spur Germany's economy to its fastest rate of expansion since reunification in the second quarter, official data confirmed today.
Growth rose 2.2 per cent on the quarter while exports grew by 8.2 per cent from the previous three months - also the biggest quarterly increase since reunification two decades ago - as German companies profited from a rebound in many of the economy's trading partners.
But the recovery looked broadly-based, with consumer spending growing for the first time since the second quarter of last year, posting quarterly growth of 0.6 per cent.
Construction, recovering after a harsh winter, added 0.5 percentage points to GDP in the April-June period.
Foreign trade and gross capital investment both added 0.8 percentage points to gross domestic product (GDP), said the Federal Statistics Office, which gave a breakdown of quarterly growth data that it first reported on August 13th.
"It must be kept in mind, however, that gross capital investment in particular is still at a relatively low level after the double-digit falls seen at times during economic crisis of 2008/2009," the statistics office said in a statement.
The strong second-quarter performance led Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, to raise its full-year growth forecast for the economy to 3 per cent last week from 2 per cent previously.
Germany's economic strength has been reflected in the performance of its leading businesses. Of the 30 companies in the blue-chip DAX index, 23 beat market expectations with their earnings in the quarter to end-June and 12 hiked their outlooks.
Reuters