Sweden's GDP shrinks by 2.4% in Q2

Sweden's gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 2.4 percent in the second quarter (Q2) of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022, Statistics Sweden said on Friday, reported Xinhua.

Compared with the previous quarter and adjusted for seasonal variations, the decline was 1.5 percent, it said in a press release.

The sharpest drop in the quarter was in registered June, when GDP was down 3.6 percent compared with the same month in 2022.

"We have seen a decline in Swedish economic activity through the second quarter of 2023 with June taking one additional step downwards," Mattias Kain Wyatt, an economist at Statistics Sweden, said in the press release.

"There is more than one underlying component explaining the decrease, but one factor in the last month of the quarter was a decline in (the) exports of goods," Kain Wyatt said.

Apart from the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020, it was the first time since 2009 that the Swedish economy contracted every month in a quarter compared with the corresponding month the previous year.

The state of the Swedish economy was also reflected in a report released by the National Institute of Economic Research (NIER) on Thursday.

The government agency said that their Economic Tendency Indicator fell 2.4 percent to 87.5 in July, indicating that businesses have increasingly negative expectations for the future.

According to the European Commission's Economic Forecast released in February, Sweden's economy was deemed the worst in the European Union and predicted to shrink by 0.8 percent in 2023.