The French finance minister Christine Lagarde oozed delicately-perfumed pride on Newsnight last night, as she explained why La France had not fallen into the Anglo-Saxon economic trap.

This was because earlier in the day it had been announced that French and German GDP had rebounded into positive territory in the second quarter. The French figure was up some 0.3% after a 1.3% fall in the first quarter. Germany was also up 0.3%, bucking the consensus estimate of a 0.3% fall.

This compares to the UK's second-quarter contraction of 5.6%. While in the United Kingdom the media has paused to bask in this continental economic miracle, it is pleasing to note that the French press has granted their markets no such succour, with Le Monde today leading with '74,100 destructions d'emploi en France au deuxième trimestre'. But even this would look impressive to us considering the 244,000 we shed over the same period.

While our business secretary Lord Mandelson plays up the advantage for the UK in a European recovery, it is worth pausing for breath and asking whether this new data really proves that Europe will recover ahead of the rest of the developed world.

At a recent meeting of Citywire Cabinet, Invesco Perpetual's European income manager Katharina Hoyland argued that Europe would recover ahead of at least the UK, which prompted Citywire's economics columnist Roger Nightingale to point out that it never has before.

So what do the bears on Europe make of yesterday's numbers? This from economic consultancy GaveKal: 'Yesterday's surprisingly strong GDP numbers from Germany and France have prompted some analysts to point out that Europe's economy is more solid than the US one. Now we fully realise we have a bearish bias on Europe. Nevertheless, looking at the statistics as objectively as possible, the idea that Europe – particularly Germany – is in better economic shape than America remains absurd.'

For GaveKal, the key point of context on yesterday's numbers is that German production fell off a massive 13.4% on an annualised basis in the first quarter, after a decline of 9.4% in the last quarter of 2008. In other words, such savage and unsustainable de-stocking must surely require some kind of correction, whether the underlying economy is improving or not.

Putting aside what GaveKal is dismissing as a short-term inventory correction and looking at the underlying state of the French and German economies is a somewhat more dizzying experience. German production is now at the same level it was in 1992 – when it was still dealing with the burden of re-unification – while France's production levels are 3% lower than it was then.

Capital Economics yesterday also made the point that the improved picture for these two countries is, in part, attributable to a fall in imports, even though exports are still almost static. Jennifer McKeown, a European economist at the firm, said: 'The majority of the improvement in these two economies was due to stronger net trade. This reflected very sharp falls in imports, rather than any pick-up in exports.'

Howard Wheeldon, a senior strategist at BGC Partners, adds: 'Given that the swing between first- and second-quarter periods has been so violent and that there are, apart from a 7% increase in exports, few real signs in these latest figures to suggest sustainable signs of increased demand and consumption, we are left to view the turn round to apparent ‘growth’ at this stage as being little more than a seasonal adjustment on the first quarter.'

GaveKal finds it straightforward to argue that the continentals will rebound more slowly than the United States. This would make this recession, in effect, like every other. (On a trip to America earlier in the year, I actually heard an economic strategist describe the possibility of an elongated American recession as a 'European-style recession', without any shred of irony.)

But what about the UK, will this be the recession when Britain finally recovers more slowly than Europe, burdened as we are by our fiscal crisis?

Perhaps not, after all one thing is clear from the figures released yesterday, and that is that unemployment in Europe has not followed the fall in production. In other words, French and German businesses are massively overstaffed, while in the UK we have already cut costs. This is partly a result of the enormous public sectors in Europe – particularly France – which do not see job cuts in the same way as the private sector. Ultimately, the economies will pay the price for carrying this flab.

The UK can only turn this to our advantage if our own public sector is cut and our cost of borrowing can be maintained at a low level.

So it is entirely possible that European and German unemployment will peak long after the UK's.