Despite a difficult struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Union will hit its economic stride later this year, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told CNBC on Friday.
Multiple parts of the euro zone have been hit by a renewed wave of coronavirus cases, leading officials to institute another round of shutdowns just as other developed economies are looking to rev up.
She added that in the second half of the year “that will be [a] recovery that will be moving fast, actually.”
The latest International Monetary Fund projections see EU growth running at 4.4% in 2021, about right on pace with the average of advanced economies but well behind the 6.4% estimate for the U.S. That comes off a year when GDP in the EU contracted at a 6.6% pace compared with -3.5% in the U.S.
