In Britain, the coming week is expected to bring evidence of continued rises in upstream inflationary pressures alongside little change in the country's trade balance.

The European Union statistics office Eurostat's flash estimate for third quarter eurozone growth is to be released on Friday, hot on the heels of growth figures for France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.

Economists expect eurozone quarterly growth to slow to 0.4 percent, from 0.5 percent in the second and 0.7 percent in the first.

Emmanuel Ferry of Exane said third-quarter figures would represent a marked slowdown from the first quarter expansion.

"We have always maintained that we are not experiencing a traditional cyclical recovery because of external constraints like the strong euro and high oil prices, and internal constraints like government deficits and corporate restructuring," he said.

The European Central Bank has already abandoned a previous forecast that growth would accelerate and broaden in the second half of this year and 2005, and is now simply projecting growth will continue at the same pace in the quarters ahead.

But even this may prove to be too optimistic.

ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet recently acknowledged the oil price rise was a "sizeable adverse shock" to the euro area economy, and said that if oil prices remain high, this could dampen the strength of the euro area recovery.

The expected third quarter growth of 0.4 percent would keep the annualised growth rate unchanged at 2.0 percent, providing some reassurance to the ECB that growth remains close to potential.

It estimates the eurozone's potential growth is towards the lower end of a 2.0-2.5 percent range.

"We expect the expansion in the euro area to continue at a close to trend pace, but higher oil prices and the associated increase in uncertainty over the economic outlook and decrease in real income do pose the risk of a weaker than expected outcome," said Ed Teather of UBS.

The provisional third quarter numbers contain no breakdown of the components of growth, but the contribution from exports is likely to have declined and there is no sign yet that this has been compensated for by a pick-up in consumer spending, economists said.

Beyond the numbers, the main focus of market interest will be the German ZEW economic expectations survey of analysts and fund managers.

The ZEW economic expectations index has been on a declining trend since the beginning of the year and is likely to ease modestly again in November after a sharp drop last month, BNP Paribas economists said.

In Britain, producer price data due out Monday is expected to reveal a 1.6 percent monthly rise in raw material costs, for a 6.6 percent yearly increase, going by the median of forecasts polled by AFP's financial news subsidiary, AFX News.

But predictions varied widely, with some saying the month-on-month gain may be as low as 0.6 percent while yet others put the figure at 2.7 percent.