SPAIN'S economy is faring a little better after an end-2012 slump and growth could even return by the end of 2013, Economy Minister Luis de Guindos says, as doubts grow over the prospects for debt-laden southern European economies.
The Spanish economy had "clearly" improved from the final three months of 2012, when output plunged by 0.8 per cent, De Guindos told an economic forum.
The Spanish economic chief did not, however, predict an economic expansion in the first quarter of 2013.
"The first quarter of this year will be clearly less bad than the previous quarter," De Guindos said.
Later, on the margins of the forum, he said the government expected gross domestic product to show a decline of 0.5 or 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2013, a further slight improvement in the second quarter and nearly zero growth in the third quarter.
In the final three months of 2013, the government believed there was a "possibility" of positive economic growth for Spain on a quarterly basis, De Guindos said.
The minister stressed, however, that his first-quarter estimate was based on incomplete data with all the figures for March yet to come in.
Spain is immersed in a double-dip recession after failing to recover convincingly from the collapse of a decade-long property boom in 2008, an economic disaster that has sent the unemployment rate soaring to a record 26 per cent.
The Spanish economy, the eurozone's fourth-largest, contracted by 1.4 per cent last year, the second worst yearly slump since 1970.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's government is predicting a return to economic growth in 2014 if the country sticks to a program of cost-cutting measures and of reforms aimed at improving economic efficiency.
The government has admitted that it will have to revise its existing forecast for an economic dip of only 0.5 per cent this year.
The Bank of Spain is predicting a 1.5-per cent plunge in output this year and only a "modest rebound" in 2014.
Portugal is preparing a new battery of spending cuts after the country's constitutional court rejected a number of austerity measures aimed at respecting the terms of its international bailout.
Spain recorded an annual public deficit equal to 7.0 per cent of gross domestic product last year, missing a 6.3-per cent target it had agreed with the European Union.
Now, the Spanish government wants Brussels to agree to relax its 2013 deficit target to about 6.0 of GDP from the previously agreed 4.5 per cent, a government source said this month.
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