EUROPE crawled out of recession in the third quarter with the 16-nation eurozone posting 0.4 per cent growth, official data confirmed today.

While confirming its initial gross domestic product estimate for the eurozone, the EU's Eurostat data agency tweaked upwards the official growth rate for the 27-nation EU as a whole to 0.3 per cent from an earlier estimate of 0.2 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, seasonally their was a sizeable GDP contraction on a 12-month basis, down 4.1 per cent in the eurozone and 4.3 per cent in the EU, though these figures too were better than the equivalent results in the second quarter.