Mark Gilbert , Columnist

Euro-Zone Growth Pessimists Will Be Proved Wrong (Again)

Economists are still playing catch-up with the bloc's improved economic outlook.

March 28, 2017 at 5:35 AM UTC

Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. A former London bureau chief for Bloomberg News, he is author of “Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable.”

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Economists have spent the past six months upgrading their forecasts for how fast the euro zone economy can grow this year. Even so, they are gloomier than they should be.

For this year, economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect euro zone growth to reach 1.6 percent, a consensus that's improved three times in the past six months. The average forecast for next year, however, has flatlined for most of that period, and was only recently nudged higher: