BRUSSELS, Nov 28: The economic and business climate in the eurozone and the European Union as a whole warmed in November, pointing to an economic recovery in the fourth quarter, the European Commission said on Friday.

The commission’s economic sentiment indicator for the 15-member EU rose 0.6 percentage points to 96.5 points in November, marking “biggest rise of the indicator since its turnaround in summer”.

The 12-nation eurozone saw an improvement of 0.4 percentage points to 95.9 points in November.

The difference in the two rates was due to slower improvement in the eurozone’s industrial sector.

“In both the EU and the euro area, the indicator is now at its highest level since mid-2002,” the commission said in a statement.

The commission’s eurozone business climate indicator also showed improvement rising 0.23 points in November from October and “continuing the upward trend since August”.

The increase brought the index, which is based a survey of managers in industry, to a value of 0.02, the first positive reading since May 2001.

Gerassimos Thomas, spokesman for EU monetary affairs commissioner Pedro Solbes, welcomed the figures, saying: “They tend to confirm the general feeling that there is going to be a recovery in the fourth quarter, and perhaps even an acceleration of growth next year.”

“The pattern that we are seeing of positive expectations and good hard data is very satisfactory and confirms our opinion of the way the European economy is going,” he told reporters.

Separately, the EU’s statistics arm Eurostat published on Friday a provisional eurozone inflation estimate, showing an increase in November to 2.2 per cent from 2.0 per cent the previous month.

Economists had forecast inflation to remain steady at two percent, what the European Central Bank considers to be the maximum tolerable limit.

A decreasing trend in inflation has raised concerns over the past year of the possibility of deflation, when prices fall over a sustained period, hurting the overall economy.

Eurostat’s estimate was based on early price information from Belgium, Germany, Italy and oil prices.

Data from Germany, the biggest economy in the eurozone, had shown a 1.3 per cent increase in inflation in November over 12 months from 1.2 per cent the previous month.

Final inflation data are to be published on December 17.—AFP