The plunge in global trade may have bottomed and German exports should also begin to improve in coming months, the German industry body was reported to have have said, on Sunday. Separately ECB executive board member, José Manuel González-Páramo, told a Spanish newspaper that recovery in the Eurozone, will only be consolidated with reforms.
The Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported that the German employers' federation BDI, expect exports will begin to rise again from low levels, in the coming months.
"German firms are looking more positively to the future. The BDI believes that the fall in world trade has reached its lowest point," the paper said.
"The recent figures point to a stabilisation of exports at these low levels. After the positive export figures in May, we expect further consolidation," Werner Schnappauf of the BDI, told the paper.
On Wednesday, Germany reported that exports rose 0.3 percent in May, from April, and the annual fall dipped to 24.5 percent from 28.7 percent in April.
The BDI's Schnappauf warned against getting carried away by the figures.
"One swallow does not make a summer," he said."There is still a long way to go with many risks both here and abroad, one of the dangers being growing protectionism in the world."
The BDI forecast that exports in 2009 will be down 15 percent, compared to 2008.
"One can perceive a certain tiredness of action in recent months, which has important risks,"the ECB's Gonzalez-Paramo told the Sunday issue of El Pais in relation to a perceived slackening in the urgency about reform. "We should not distract ourselves with talk of green shoots, because these will only be consolidated with reforms."
Gonzalez-Paramo was reported to have said Spain's recovery would be slower than other EU members because of the burden of debt and the collapse of the construction sector. He said forecasting when a recovery might arrive in the Eurozone was difficult.
"Some countries will have positive growth from June 2010, but everything is surrounded in great uncertainty,"he said.
He said Spain's recovery would be more precarious without labour reform, in particular an end to the division between workers on temporary and fixed contracts.
"If the division ... is maintained what will happen is that those in the driving seat will be the new temporaries, many of them without adequate qualifications for this new model (for an innovative and dynamic economy)," he said.
The Wall Street Journal reports today that the French are getting thriftier, and it says that poses a problem for the European economy.
For more than a decade, consumer spending has driven growth in France and buoyed the economy of the nations -- now 16 -- that share the euro. The danger for France and for Europe is that this turns into a longer-term trend.
The Journal says France boasts one-third of Europe's camp sites, and this year more people are expected to stay in them than in either holiday apartments or hotels, according to Protourisme, a travel consultancy. Matei Liska, a security guard from Gonesse, a town north of Paris, normally rents an apartment in the country for his summer vacation. This year, he has gone camping. "It's pleasant and less expensive," he says.
In France, like most other countries, holiday spending is forecast to fall this summer. French households were planning to spend an average of €1,822 ($2,556) on their vacations this year, 6% less that last, according to market-research company Ipsos.
French consumption grew an average of 2.6% a year between 2000 and 2007, compared with just 0.6% in Germany, Europe's largest economy, where exports drive growth. French consumer spending rose in the first quarter of this year -- by 0.2% over the previous quarter -- while it fell 0.5% in the Eurozone as a whole. Economists predict the French economy will shrink about 3% this year, compared with a 6% decline for Germany, which has suffered from the collapse in export markets.
