WARSAW: Poland's economy slowed faster than expected in the third quarter, achieving adjusted growth on a 12-month basis of 1.9 percent from 2.5 percent in the second quarter, official data showed on Friday.
On a quarter-to-quarter comparison, output grew by 0.4 percent in the third quarter from the second, when growth was also 0.4 percent, the Central Statistics Office (GUS) said.
Economist Marek Zuber attibuted the sharp quarterly slowdown to doldrums in Germany -- Poland's main trade partner -- spurred by the eurozone debt crisis and a downturn in large scale infrastructural investment on the domestic front.
But he insisted there was no risk of recession.
"Where year-on-year data is concerned, we won't have a recession in Poland," Zuber told Poland's leading Money.pl financial news website.
"I believe there won't be negative GDP growth in any quarter and there should be a pick-up in the second half of next year," he said.
Poland is the only member of the 27-state European Union to have avoided recession since the global economic crisis struck in 2008.
Its economy expanded by 4.3 percent in 2011. This year's budget forecast a slowdown to 2.5 percent growth, while the 2013 budget has forecast a 2.2 percent hike in 2013.
"Growth is significantly slower than we would like," Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk admitted Friday, commenting the fresh data.
His government was "doing everything possible" to keep recession at bay, he added.
"We don't have any influence on how the global economy will perform, but we can decide what we'll do here," he said, indicating his centre-right government intended to make "intelligent investments" in human capital as well as research and development.
Non-seasonally adjusted output was 1.4 percent higher in the third quarter of 2012 compared to the corresponding quarter of the previous year.
Unadjusted growth also tallied at 3.6 percent and 2.3 percent in the first and the second quarter of 2012 respectively.
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