- MADRID: Spain’s central bank estimates the country’s anemic economic growth ground to a halt in the third quarter of this year.
It blamed this on factors including a drop in household consumption in a country with a 21.5 percent jobless rate.
A Bank of Spain report released Monday said the stagnation compared to the second quarter of the year calls into question the government’s goal of reducing its deficit to 6 percent of GDP in 2011.
The Spanish economy grew in the first two quarters of the year but just barely.
The National Statistics Institute is scheduled to release the official third-quarter GDP figure on Nov. 11.
The central bank said that compared to the third quarter of last year, the economy grew 0.7 percent.