BERLIN- The German economy contracted by a record 9.7 percent in the second quarter as consumer spending, company investments and exports all collapsed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the statistics office said on Tuesday.
The economic slump was much stronger than during the financial crisis more than a decade ago, and it represented the sharpest decline since Germany began to record quarterly GDP calculations in 1970, the office said.
Still, the reading marked a minor upward revision from an earlier GDP estimate for the April-June period of -10.1 percent quarter-on-quarter that the office had published last month.
Consumer spending shrank by 10.9 percent on the quarter, capital investments by 19.6 percent and exports by 20.3 percent, the seasonally adjusted GDP data showed. – Reuters
