Recession receding

That's lower than the Troika estimates, which was at 4.2% and even lower than the government's best expectations, at 4%. If you want more signs that things are slowly starting to look up, figures for the last quarter of last year show that the GDP free fall is starting to slow down too – it's at 2.6%.

That is significantly better than the 3% of the third quarter, the 3.7% of the second one and way better than the 5.5% of last year's first quarter. The trend is quite encouraging for the economy, even though the GDP keeps feeling the pressure from both the private investments drop and the limited consumer rate.

In order to get a sense of the figures, recession was running at 6.4% in 2012. That's almost a 50% drop in just a year. The expected figure for this year, according to the Finance ministry, is positive for the first time in 7 years. Growth is expected to peg in at 0.6%.

If the figures are reliable, they constitute a trend congruous with the government's estimates for a primary surplus this year, a contentious subject for Eurostat in the last few weeks.