Europe Survey Says Growth Outlook ‘Bleak’ for 2013

Europe’s job crisis, which has left more than 25 million people without work, has stirred rising public hostility to the European Union and has severely strained the social fabric in hardest-hit members like Greece and Spain, where unemployment has soared to over 25 percent.

“The economic and employment outlook is bleak and has worsened in recent months and is not expected to improve in 2013,” the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, said in a statement accompanying the release of its Annual Growth Survey, a yearly report on Europe’s economic outlook.

“The E.U. is currently the only major region in the world where unemployment is still rising,” the statement said.

Younger workers have suffered the most, with nearly one in three young people now jobless in six European Union countries and more than half of them unemployed in two others.

Tackling the crisis, however, has been complicated by wide differences in economic performance and interests among the union’s 27 member states. In Austria and Germany, for example, unemployment stands at 4.4 percent and 5.4 percent, a fraction of the rate in Spain and Greece.

Yet Greece’s economic meltdown, according to Standard Poor’s, is more severe in “duration and scale” than the German depression that paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s.

“After several years of weak growth, the crisis is having severe social consequences,” the growth survey warned, noting that European welfare systems had “cushioned some of the effects at first but the impact is now being felt across the board.”

Greece, struggling to bring down its crippling debts, contain widening misery and curb the appeal of political extremism, has been hit in recent months by waves of strikes and street protests amid widespread anger at a program of austerity demanded by its international lenders in return for bailout funds.

Spain has also been hit by protests, as well as a surge of pro-independence sentiment in Catalonia and a bout of national soul-searching following reports of suicides by people facing eviction from their homes because of unpaid debts.

In an effort to combat a “crisis of confidence” in the European project, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and other senior officials on Wednesday announced measures aimed at reviving stalled momentum toward closer economic, monetary and ultimately political union.

Though largely a reworking of previously announced steps, the plan, called a “blueprint for a deep and genuine economic and monetary union,” includes proposals to help countries like Spain overhaul their labor markets and make other reforms deemed necessary for economic recovery.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/world/europe/europe-survey-says-growth-outlook-bleak-for-2013.html?partner=rss&emc=rss