By RTE
As coronavirus pandemic deepens in France, the central bank has reported a dip in economic activity by 32 per cent.
France reported that the situation is the worst performance since 1945 as the economy shrank by 6 per cent in the first quarter of this year.
The pandemic has decimated business activity, the Bank of France, putting figures previously that the economy shrank 0.1% in the last three months of 2019.
This means that with two consecutive quarters of negative growth, the country is now technically in recession.
The French central bank said that in the last two weeks of March, as the coronavirus crisis deepened, economic activity plunged 32%.
“You have to go back to the second quarter of 1968, hit by the May (political upheaval), to find a similar fall in activity,” it said, noting that even that year the downturn was 5.3%, still less than the latest figures.
For every two weeks the country is locked down by the virus, the Bank of France expects the economy to shrink by 1.5%.
At the same time it cautioned against a simple, straight-line extrapolation of the estimates since the situation is developing.
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