The latest evidence shows the global economic recovery is beginning to stall.

Improvements in the European labour market have been patchy at best. Confidence in the building market continues to falter and the financial system remains in a fragile state. These issues combined with the eurozone debt crisis means a possible double recession is in the near future.

The US Department of Labor has just shown the first month to month decline in the number of Americans working, which is a key factor in driving growth for the world’s largest economy.

A decline in the number of Americans working meant that unemployment fell from 9.7 to 9.5 per cent. This is the lowest rate since July of last year.

At a time when the US Congress is looking to reverse the extension in unemploymnet pay which was put into place at the peek of the recession, the US is concerned about the time period of a recovery. The unemployed in the US are given 26 weekis of insurance benefits and many have already seen an end to this.

Paul Dales, with the US company Capital Economics, said: "While an outright double dip recession remains unlikely, growth will slow later this year and into 2011, perhaps more markedly than we have been forecasting all along."

The UK is currently carrying a rate of 7.9 per cent unemployment. Eurozone unemployment sits at a slightly higher rate than in the US.

Howard Archer, chief economist of Global Insight said: "Despite the recent, much reduced overall rise in unemployment in the last couple of months and signs of stabilization in employment in the latest purchasing managers’ surveys, we think it is premature to sound the all-clear on the eurozone labour market front.

"We believe that eurozone growth will probably not be strong enough on a sustained basis to generate net jobs for sometime to come."

The Market / Cipes survey recently showed the sharpest fall in confidence of moving forward in the thirty year history of the survey.

David Noble of Cips said: "A stark reminder of just how hard this sector has been hit is the handful of cranes currently dotting the skyline and the half-finished construction projects.

"Recovery in the second half of the year is likely to remain fragile and we are still a long way off seeing the construction industry operate the way it did prerecession."