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Europe’s recovery sluggish compared with others
Business Digest: Wall Street Journal paints a gloomy picture for Europe with domestic trade stagnant
Second-quarter results from a string of European companies show that while demand from overseas has been growing, domestic markets are stagnating, according to research by the Wall Street Journal.
Lafarge, the French building materials company, reports sales rising in Latin America, Asia, North America, the Middle East and Africa. But demand across Europe continues to decline.
Another French company, Peugeot-Citroën, is expected to generate half of its sales outside Europe by 2015. Peugeot is among the many car manufacturers worried that the phasing-out of government car scrappage programmes will reduce sales in the coming months.
At the luxury end of the market, airlines say Europe is trailing the rest of the world in recovering passenger and freight traffic, while luxury goods manufacturers are seeing stronger sales outside Europe, but revenue stagnating at home.
"Powered only by exports, Europe's economic recovery could remain fragile and shallow, with the danger of a full relapse if demand from China, India and the US falters," say the WSJ authors Terence Roth and Steve McGrath.
"The main issue in Europe is that there is practically no market growth," says Bart Becht, chief executive of the British company Reckitt Benckiser, whose household and personal-care products include Vanish, Dettol and Nurofen.
Read a full report at the Wall Street Journal. ·
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"The main issue in Europe is that there is practically no market growth," says Bart Becht...but why is this? Is it because the EU commission elites daily spew out more and more red tape directives and regulations to tax and control the peasantry of Europe? Is it because they spend lavishly on extending their powers and want Turkey to be part of the EU, and waste the time and money of 500 million people with useless food label regulations? And more paralysing transport regulations, removing the rights of the management to manage? And letting in migrants from Africa and anywhere else to everywhere from Walsall in the UK to Calais in France to Brussels in Belgium? Is it? And a working time directive interfering in the working lives of millions in the UK alone? Is it?