Italy needs faster growth though recovery underway: minister

ROME, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- Italy would need to boost its current growth pace, despite latest results confirmed the recovery was underway, Italian Minister of Economic Development Carlo Calenda said on Wednesday.

"I will be satisfied only when Italy's gross domestic product (GDP) reached two percent in growth," AGI news agency cited Calenda as saying.

More reforms and investments would be needed for such result, because the ongoing recovery was still "easy to ruin", according to Calenda.

"A 2-percent growth is within reach if we keep working on those factors that boost development, which means more investments, more jobs, and more income," Calenda said at a pre-electoral meeting in the northern Lombardy region.

"This must be the order of priorities, and every change in such order might make all the achieved results crumble," he warned.

On Wednesday, preliminary estimates by the national institute of statistics (ISTAT) showed Italy's GDP rose by 1.4 percent in 2017. Calendar-adjusted GDP grew by 1.5 percent last year, ISTAT added.

With respect to the fourth quarter of 2017, the preliminary estimates saw the seasonally- and calendar-adjusted Italian economy growing by 0.3 percent compared to the previous quarter, and by 1.6 percent with respect to the same period last year.

The expansion was mainly due to the good performance of the industrial and service sectors on the supply side, combined with an increase in domestic demand and an export rise, according to ISTAT. Enditem