ROME, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- Italy's government is increasingly confident the country's post-coronavirus recovery is in full swing, though analysts say it will not fully recover until an effective vaccine against the virus is widely available.

On Tuesday, Italy's National Statistics Institute, or ISTAT, said "extensive signals" indicated that the economy was recovering, even as the stats agency released data showing the economy contracted by a dramatic 12.8 percent in the second quarter of the year compared to the previous quarter.

In the previous days, Italian Minister of Economy and Finance Roberto Gualtieri predicted Italy's economy would shrink by less than what one source called the "psychologically important" 10-percent level for the year as a whole. Gualtieri predicted a "robust" recovery in the third quarter, which started on July 1.

Gualtieri's predictions for the full year still represent an unprecedented economic contraction, but less dire than consensus estimates from investment banks, multilateral organizations, and rating agencies, which predict the Italian economy to finish the year 11 to 12 percent smaller than at the start.

The main driver behind Italy's economic problems has been the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the government to issue Europe's first peacetime national lockdown starting in March. Before the virus arrived in Italy, ISTAT and other entities predicted the Italian economy would grow at least 0.5 percent this year.

"The second quarter will end up being the darkest hour for the Italian economy," Riccardo Puglisi, an economist working in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pavia, told Xinhua. "We were under a strict lockdown for two of the three months in the second quarter, while in the third quarter comes after the end of the strictest part of the lockdown."

Puglisi agreed with Gualtieri's prediction that for the year as a whole the economy would shrink by less than 10 percent.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see what would seem like good numbers for the full year, perhaps a negative 8 or 9 percent, or in any case below 10 percent, which is a psychologically important benchmark," Puglisi said.

Giandomenico Piluso, a professor of Economic History with the University of Siena, also predicted a relative recovery over the second half of the year, but he predicted the country would not see a sustained economic growth until the threats from the coronavirus disappeared.

"What is happening now is that some of the worst damage from the first half of the year is being reversed, but the economy is not growing compared to where it was a year earlier," Piluso said in an interview. "We won't have a chance for real, new growth until a coronavirus vaccine is available, until the risks from the pandemic are gone."

One problem, according to both Puglisi and Piluso, is that the Italian economy was among the European Union (EU)'s slowest growing even before the coronavirus first reported in China in late 2019. The Italian economy has long been saddled by high public debt, high taxes, weak employment levels, over-regulation, and a dramatic disparity between the economic health of the northern and southern parts of the country, and economists have been calling for economic reforms for years.

Though the 0.5-percent growth forecast from the start of the year is far stronger than current prognostications, it still trailed predictions for the EU as a whole. If Italy ends up trailing the EU's collective growth rate this year, it will be the 13th time in 15 years Italy failed to outpace the 27-nation bloc's overall economic growth rate.

The scenario is likely, given that the International Monetary Fund has predicted Europe's economy will shrink by 6.7 percent this year, compared to a 9.1-percent decline in Italy.