- The federal statistics office Destatis
Price pressure at factories in the Europe's largest economy was weaker than it was initially expected due to lower energy costs, Germany's federal statistics office said Monday. On a monthly basis, producer prices index, which measures a total change in the price of goods sold by manufacturers, dropped 0.3% last month, larger than the 0.1% decrease logged in the previous month and in contrast to a flat reading expected by economists. However, prices for industrial products increased 1.5% from a year ago, up from a 1.4% gain in November. During the 2012, a gauge of producer prices for industrial products in Germany added only 2.1%, indicating that the rate of increase slowed sharply from 5.7% seen in 2011.
"In 2012, the German economy proved to be resistant in a difficult economic environment and withstood the European recession," the federal statistics office Destatis said.
"There shouldn't be a technical recession," said Christian Ott, an economist at Natixis Securities in Frankfurt. "We expect some level of economic growth in the first quarter as domestic demand compensates somewhat for weak foreign trade. At the same time, the recovery in global trade will be very slow. If it falls away completely, then we won't manage to avoid recession."
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