EU’s longest-ever recession comes to an end

MADRID (AP) — Minube, a travel startup on the outskirts of Madrid, is doing something that many Spanish companies haven’t thought about for years: It’s hiring.

The company, which sells bookings as it helps travelers share their experiences using social media, has nearly doubled its headcount from 17 at the end of last year to 30. Business is booming as customers come in from across Europe — including some places hardest hit by Europe’s economic crisis.

“We’re finally starting to see a bigger growth curve in Spain, and the strong growth in Italy has been a surprise,” Minube’s co-founder, Pedro Jareno said. “The improvements we are starting to see in the market are constant.”

That brighter — or less gloomy — backdrop was confirmed in figures Wednesday, which showed that the longest-ever recession to afflict the eurozone came to an end in the second quarter of the year.

Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office, said the 17 EU countries that use the euro saw their collective economic output increase by 0.3 percent in the April to June period from the previous quarter.

That’s the first quarterly growth since the eurozone slipped into recession in the last three months of 2011. The ensuing recession of six quarters was the longest since the euro currency was launched in 1999.

The improvement made up for the previous quarter’s equivalent decline and was moderately better than the 0.2 percent anticipated in the markets. Growth, however anemic, had been predicted by many economists following an easing in market concerns over Europe’s debt crisis over the past year and record low interest rates from the European Central Bank.

The eurozone’s growth, which translates to an annualized rate of about 1.2 percent, is still well below the 1.7 percent the U. enjoyed during the second quarter. The wider 27-country EU, which includes non-euro countries such as Britain and Poland, also emerged from its own, milder recession, and like the eurozone is also growing at an annualized rate of around 1.2 percent.

Growth in Europe provides a boon to the global economy. The EU, which now totals 28 following Croatia’s accession in July, has a population of around 550 million and its annual gross domestic product stands at around $17.3 trillion — both more than the US, which has GDP of $16.6 billion for 315 million people.

The EU’s recovery marks the first time since a brief period in 2011 that the four major pillars of the world economy — the US, China, Japan and Europe — are growing at the same time.