Greece reveals hidden recession - official data

Greece has drastically downgraded its economic data to reveal that it has been in recession all of this year, even as the European Union as a whole emerged from recession in the third quarter.

The national statistics office said the country's gross domestic product shrank 0.3 per cent in the third quarter from the second quarter.

It also revised earlier data showing that the economy had escaped recession and said that instead the economy contracted on a quarterly basis by 0.5 per cent in the first quarter and by 0.1 per cent in the second quarter.

Greece's new government, which came to power last month, has already revised its growth forecast to negative for 2009, saying the economy would shrink by "around 1.5 per cent" instead of a previous estimate of 1.1 per cent growth.

Prime Minister George Papandreou warned in an inaugural address to Parliament last month that the country's finances were in a "state of emergency," adding: "The situation of our economy is explosive".

The revised economic data came on the day the EU, the world's largest trading bloc, announced that its deepest recession since World War II officially ended in the third quarter and it had returned to growth.