The New Zealand Treasury said it believed that the economy had contracted for the second successive quarter, satisfying the definition of a recession.
Official GDP figures for the June quarter will not be released until next month, but Treasury released its overview of July economic indicators. During the March quarter, gross domestic product shrank by 0.3 percent.
“Our view is that the economy contracted for the second consecutive quarter in June,” the Treasury said. “Annual average growth in real production GDP in the calendar 2008 year is expected to slow to 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent.”
The last time New Zealand faced successive quarters of negative growth was more than 10 years ago, between Sept. 1997 and March 1998.
