European retail sales dropped in July as the region’s deepening economic slump eroded consumer demand from Germany to Spain.
Sales slipped 0.2 percent from June, when they rose 0.1 percent, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today. Economists had forecast a decline of 0.2 percent, according to the median of 21 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. From a year earlier, sales dropped 1.7 percent.