Euro Area Industrial Production Trouble

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Industrial production, a key measure of economic health, is still poor in the 17 euro area nations. Eurostat reports that seasonally adjusted industrial production grew by 0.5% in February compared to January. However, year-over-year, industrial production dropped by 1.8% in both the euro area and the EU27. Across the region:

Among the Member States for which data are available, industrial production rose in seven and fell in fifteen. The highest increases were registered in Slovakia (+8.4%),  Latvia (+7.3%) and the  Netherlands (+6.7%), and the largest decreases in Luxembourg (-14.4%), Malta (-11.4%) and Greece (-8.5%).

The data will confirm the belief among economists that a large part of the region is either in recession or about to be. It will also raise the question again about whether austerity or stimulus is the better path to deficit reduction.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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