Portuguese Economy Contracts for a Seventh Straight Quarter
Portugal’s economy shrank for a seventh quarter in the three months through June as the government cuts spending and raises taxes to trim its budget gap.
Gross domestic product declined 1.2 percent from the first quarter, when it fell 0.1 percent, the Lisbon-based National Statistics Institute said in a preliminary report today. Economists predicted a decline of 0.7 percent, the median of nine estimates in a Bloomberg survey showed. GDP dropped 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the biggest decline since the second quarter of 2009.
Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho is facing a recession and rising unemployment as he seeks to meet the terms of a 78 billion-euro ($96 billion) aid plan from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. As the country’s borrowing costs surged, Portugal last year followed Greece and Ireland in requesting a bailout.
To contact the reporter on this story: Joao Lima in Lisbon at jlima1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Foxwell at sfoxwell@bloomberg.net
Rate this Page
Bloomberg moderates all comments. Comments that are abusive or off-topic will not be posted to the site. Excessively long comments may be moderated as well. Bloomberg cannot facilitate requests to remove comments or explain individual moderation decisions.