Gloom lingers in Central Europe economies

While countries in western Europe have begun to snap out of recession, the economic decline has continued across much of central and eastern Europe despite some optimistic signs, analysts said.
"Eastern Europe's recovery from recession will be slow but encouraging figures are beginning to appear," said Bogdan Baltazar, a Romanian analyst.
Baltazar underlined that economic contraction in almost the whole region was less sharp in the three months to June thant it had been in the first quarter.
The only exception so far has been Lithuania, where the economy shrank by 12.3 percent in the second quarter compared to minus 10.2 percent in the first.
On the other end of the scale, the Czech Republic last week said it had emerged from recession, clocking growth of 0.3 percent in the second quarter.
"We'd already hit the bottom in the first quarter of this year," said Helena Horska, a Prague-based analyst with Austrian lender Raiffeisenbank.
Slovakia did even better, growing 2.2 percent in the quarter in large part thanks to cash-for-clunkers programmes in its main car export markets.
Juraj Valachy, an analyst with Tatra Bank in Slovakia, said the economic results had been "better than we expected."
"It's good news, in line with the good news that we hear from Germany and France," he said.
In a sign of how deep the crisis has been, however, the Czech economy still showed a drop of 4.9 percent compared to the second quarter of last year while that figure for the Slovak economy was 5.3 percent.