Portuguese Economy Contracts for Ninth Straight Quarter

Portugal’s economy shrank for a ninth straight quarter in the three months through December as export growth slowed with the euro area’s deepening recession.

Gross domestic product dropped 1.8 percent from the third quarter, when it slipped 0.9 percent, the National Statistics Institute in Lisbon said in a preliminary report today. Economists predicted a decline of 1 percent, the median of seven estimates in a Bloomberg survey showed. Fourth-quarter GDP fell 3.8 percent from a year earlier. It was the biggest annual and quarterly contraction since the first quarter of 2009.