ROME, April 18 (Xinhua) -- The Bank of Italy said Thursday that Italy has pulled out of its short technical economic recession, registering slight positive growth in the first quarter of the year.
The country's central reserve bank said the economy grew modest 0.1 percent growth over the first three months of 2019. Positive growth rates in February and March were enough to balance out an economic contraction in January, the bank said in its quarterly economic bulletin.
That is enough to end the technical recession that started after data showed Italy's economy shrank over the second half of 2018.
The bank said industrial production, which grew over the first part of the year, was the main driver to the stronger gross domestic product.
The development will be good news for Italian government. Economists had feared negative economic growth up to the second half of 2019, when the most observers predicted as slight rebound.
The Bank of Italy mentioned a survey of analysts conducted by Consensus Economics, which still predicted that over all of 2019, the economy will see growth of between negative 0.1 percent and positive 0.2 percent. The same figures predicted 0.7 percent growth for the year as recently as December.
The data from the Bank of Italy is not connected to the country's National Statistics Institute, or ISTAT, which is expected to release its data on first quarter economic growth later this month. The two figures usually move in step, though the ISTAT figures are generally more detailed.
