By Helene Fouquet and Gregory Viscusi
Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- France’s 2010 economic growth may exceed the government’s 1.4 percent forecast, President Nicolas Sarkozy said, helping spur hiring.
“We’ve doubled our economic growth forecast for this year, it will be 1.4 percent and maybe more,” Sarkozy said on French television channel TF1 late yesterday. “And you’ll see unemployment will fall starting this year.”
France’s economy emerged from recession last year, growing 0.3 percent in the second and third quarters, and prompting the government to double its economic forecast. Sarkozy was more confident than his finance minister on employment, pledging an end to job losses in the “coming weeks, months.”
Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said Jan. 20 that Europe’s second-largest economy was likely to lose a further 71,000 jobs this year after 373,000 were lost in 2009. Insee, the national statistics office, said Dec. 18 unemployment will continue to rise through the middle of the year to 10.2 percent. Unemployment stood at a three-year high of 9.5 percent at the end of the third quarter.
Sarkozy, who participated in a live television show with French voters for the first time since his May 2007 election, has said he’d consider that France has “exited the crisis only when unemployment starts falling.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net; Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@Bloomberg.net.
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