Growth boosts German surplus

Germany's Federal Statistics Office, Destatis, on Tuesday confirmed its previous flash estimate of 0.4 percent growth between April and June in Germany. The quarterly expansion from 0.3 percent between January and March had primarily been caused by higher exports - up 2.2 percent, Destatis said.

Domestic demand in the quarter, however, decreased slightly, knocking 0.3 percent off the overall growth rate. While private households and the public sectors spent 0.2 and 0.3 percent more respectively, investment in plant and equipment declined by 0.4 percent.

Healthy state finances

The first-quarter upswing in economic activity further improved German public finances, which showed a surplus of 1.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) for the first six months of 2015.

Destatis calculated that federal, regional, municipal and welfare budgets earned a combined 21.1 billion euros ($24.4 billion) more than they spent between January and June.

"Public finances continued to profit from the favorable employment situation and positive growth, as well as moderate spending," Destatis said in a statement.

But the statisticians warned against extrapolating the first-half figures on to the year as a whole, as the budget surpluses tended to be lower in the second half of the year.

Under EU budget rules, member states are not allowed to run up deficits in their state finances of more than 3 percent of overall GDP output. Following decades of sometimes smaller sometimes bigger annual deficits, Germany in 2014 managed to create its first budget surplus since 1969. The hope now is that this achievement could be achieved for a second straight year in 2015.

uhe/cjc (AFP, dpa, Reuters)