Portugal comes third among economies that most grew in Q2

Portugal is among the Euro Zone economies that enjoyed the best performance in the second quarter of the year.

Between April and June the economy saw a like-for-like GDP growth rate of 2.3% according to the EU’s statistics office Eurostat. Portugal’s economic performance places it in third place, on a par with Cyprus; but when compared with the previous quarter, when the Portuguese economy grew 2.5% on 2022, the economy has cooled.
Portugal did much better than the nine countries whose economy suffered in the last quarter compared to 2022, three of them actually falling into recession – Estonia, Hungary and the Netherlands. Germany narrowly escaped recession with zero growth.
Ireland had the best economic growth at 2.7% in Q2, followed by Romania at 2.9%. Spain, which is Portugal’s biggest trading partner, saw its growth fall from 4.8% in Q1 to just 1.8% in Q2. Italy’s GDP fell from 2% to 0.6% while Austria fell from 1.8% to 0.3%.
Growth for the European Union as a whole stood at 1.3% like for like and 0.2% quarter-on-quarter. In Q1 EU growth had averaged 1.6% like-for-like and 0.5% quarter-on-quarter.