FRANKFURT, (AFP) - Economic recovery in the 12-country eurozone is continuing, even if uncertainty rising from the oil price and from mixed economic data has increased, a top official of the European Central Bank says in a newspaper interview.
"Naturally, uncertainty has increased as a result of oil prices and of a few mixed economic signals," ECB executive board member Jose Manuel Gonzales-Paramo told the business daily Handelsblatt.
"But I don't believe so far that we have to alter our forecasts. Recovery is continuing," Gonzales-Paramo said.
In its latest updated economic forecasts published in September, the ECB said it was pencilling in growth of 1.6-2.2 percent in the single currency area in 2004, which would then pick up to 1.8-2.8 percent in 2005.
Private consumption growth will also accelerate from 1.2-1.6 percent this year to 1.5-2.7 percent next year, the guardian of the euro believes.
High energy prices would not change that scenario much, Gonzales-Paramo said.
"The effect of energy prices is important, but will remain limited," he said.
Gonzales-Paramo also rejected suggestions that the ECB was becoming increasingly worried about the negative economic effects of the runaway price of oil and had therefore set back any potential upward moves in interest rates in order to safeguard recovery.
At the bank's last policy-setting meeting in Brussels, ECB watchers had detected increased concern on the part of the bank's president Jean-Claude Trichet about the potential negative effects on growth from rising oil prices.
As a result, many economists predicted the ECB would not begin to start tightening monetary conditions in the euro area until next year, instead of at the end of this year as originally expected.
But Gonzales-Paramo insisted there had been no such shift in the ECB's monetary policy thinking.
"We made it clear in September that our policy on interest rates was neutral," he said. "And I wouldn't read anything into our October statement that might suggest that that has changed."