Employment is growing strongly in the euro zone

ADDRESSING THE Brussels Economic Forum in June, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, gave an upbeat assessment of the EU’s recovery. She promised that “in 18 months from now, all 27 member states will be back on track, recovered from the crisis.” But she noted that “it is not by chance. This is the result of the policy decisions we took since the very early days of the pandemic.” A sequence of recent strong output and employment figures indeed seem to vindicate this bold claim. On August 23rd the preliminary estimate of the euro-area purchasing managers index, a monthly survey of companies compiled by IHS Markit, suggested that employment in July and August will turn out to have grown at its fastest monthly rate for 21 years. That followed solid official data on output and employment the previous week.