Industrial Production: France, Denmark And Finland

France, Denmark and Finland released their June Industrial Production Indexes today. All three indexes are based on 2005=100. Finland and Denmark showed increases from May: the former rose 2.1 points from 99.7 to 101.8 and the latter 1.2 points from 92.8 to 94.0. France showed a decline of 1.6 points from 93.0 in May to 91.4 in June. The indexes for the three countries are shown in the first chart.

Industrial production in all three countries has begun to recover from the sharp declines of the recession. In Finland the decline was more than 27%, in Denmark, 25% and in France, 19%. Industrial production in France and Finland began to recover in early 2009; Denmark only began to turn up in January of this year. The recovery so far has brought industrial production in Finland to 86% of its pre recession high, in Denmark to 89% and in France to 88%.

The indexes tell us how much the value of production is above or below the base year, 2005. To get some idea of the actual value of production and how important it is in each country, we took the value of manufacturing in the breakdown of Real Gross Domestic Product by Industry as a rough indicator of the value of industrial production. To measure its importance we calculated the percent of manufacturing in total GDP. As can be seen in the second, third and fourth charts, manufacturing, our industrial production surrogate, was 19.8% of GDP in Finland in the first quarter of this year, almost twice as important as it is in France and Denmark where it is 11.6% and 12.9%, respectively