Germany's economy may have contracted the most in more than two decades in the final quarter of 2008 as the global financial crisis hurt exports and damped spending, the Federal Statistics Office said.

The economy probably shrank between 1.5 percent and 2 percent in the fourth quarter from the third, Norbert Raeth, an economist at the statistics office, said at a press conference in Frankfurt yesterday. A 2 percent drop would be the worst quarterly contraction since German reunification in 1990 and the most for West Germany since the first quarter of 1987.

Companies are scaling back production and cutting jobs as global economic expansion slows and demand for German exports wanes. Bundesbank President Axel Weber last week indicated the economy may contract more this year than the bank's 0.8 percent forecast. A decline of more than 0.9 percent would be Germany's worst performance since records began after World War II.