European Industrial Production, July 2023: Eurostat has also released the output data for the EU although they use Industrial production (IP) as the top aggregate; while this is dominated by manufacturing, it also includes energy and utilities (but not construction) and the breakdown of the total by sector misses out having a figure for manufacturing.
Total IP in July was -1.1% lower than in June for both the EU and the Euro-zone, leaving output -2.4% lower than in July 2022 for the EU and -2.2% smaller in the Euro-zone. Calculating the 3-month rolling trends from the monthly indices published by Eurostat shows that IP in the latest 3 months (May, June & July) was -0.8% smaller than in the previous period (February, March & April) for the EU and down by -0.7% for the Euro-zone.
The month-on-month figures were driven by the capital goods sub-sector where output declined by -2.4% in the EU and -2.7% in the Euro-zone (July 2023 compared to June 2023); this was the weakest of the IP sub-sectors. In contrast, looking back to July last year, capital goods output leads the way with output increasing by +1.0% in the EU and +0.4% in the Euro-zone.
Staying with the 12-month trends, of the 26 Member States who have published the data (Cyprus is missing), output increased in only 3 (6 in June) – Denmark (+5.7%), France (+2.8%) and Malta (+2.3%) – and declined in the other 26 countries; of these, the largest reductions in IP were Bulgaria (-11.5%), Estonia (-9.5%) and Latvia (-8.6%). Among the other large EU economies, total IP reduced by -6.3% in the Netherlands, -2.5% in Germany, -2.1% in Italy and -1.9% in Spain. You can get the full details from the Eurostat News Release which can be downloaded from their website at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/news/euro-indicators (13 September) or requested from MTA.