European Central Bank president Mario Draghi laid out the hope that the ailing eurozone economic recovery will pick up steam over the coming months.
He told delegates today at the World Economic Forum that a stream of "solid" survey data are pointing to better times ahead for a region that's grappled with a debt crisis, recession and sky-high unemployment over the past few years.
Recent surveys of purchasing managers and consumers have indicated growing buoyancy.
"The hard data are not however as uniformly good as the survey data," said Draghi, who has been widely credited for helping to douse the debt crisis fires.
"In a sense, this behaviour reflects very similar behavior that took place in the United States a year, a year and a half ago."
The US has achieved so-called escape velocity that is bearing down on unemployment and prompted the Federal Reserve to start reducing its extraordinary monetary stimulus, which has been in place, in its various guises, for around five years.
In the third quarter of 2013, the eurozone grew by a paltry quarterly rate of 0.1 per cent.
Figures for the final three months are due next month and most economists expect a modest improvement with even some of those countries bailed out financially beginning to show some improvements.
Still, Draghi cautioned that the recovery at the moment is weak, fragile and uneven.
