The German government said Wednesday it will bring down overall public debt in the coming years as robust economic growth and record employment enables it to keep its finances in the black.

The German finance ministry announced that Europe's biggest economy aims to cut overall debt to 61.5 percent of economic output by 2019 from 74.7 percent last year.

Nokia has struck a 15.6-billion-euro deal to buy its rival Alcatel-Lucent to create the world's biggest supplier of mobile phone network equipment, both firms said Wednesday.

The merger of two companies that were once new technology stars but have since lost some of their luster will produce a European champion able to take on Nokia's Swedish rival Ericsson or fierce Chinese competition.

Inflation in Germany, Europe's biggest economy, crept higher in March, final data showed on Wednesday.

The national consumer price index (CPI) rose by 0.3 percent year-on-year in March, up from 0.1 percent in February, the federal statistics office Destatis said in a statement.

Oil prices climbed in Asia for a fifth-straight trading day Wednesday following forecasts that U.S. shale production would likely decline and help ease a global supply glut, analysts said.

U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate for May delivery gained 35 cents to $53.64 and Brent crude for May rose 57 cents to $59.00 in afternoon trade.

A total of 57 countries have been approved as founding members of a Chinese-backed infrastructure bank, Beijing said Wednesday, and Norway is included despite frosty relations over a Chinese dissident's Nobel prize.

No nations that formally sought to become founding members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are known to have been refused. But Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing regards as part of its territory, had its application for founding membership rejected.

Europe's economic outlook is finally beginning to brighten a little. But don't expect European Central Bank head Mario Draghi to sound all that excited when he takes the stage Wednesday for his next news conference.

Draghi will sound a little cautious in order to discourage any thought that the bank might make an early exit from its 1.1 trillion euro ($1.2 trillion) monetary stimulus program slated to run through September 2016.

Britain's annual inflation rate languished at a record-low of zero in March, as falling clothing and gas prices were offset by gains for other products, official data showed Tuesday.

"The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) was unchanged in the year to March 2015, that is, a 12-month rate of 0.0 percent, the same rate as in the year to February 2015," the Office for National Statistics said in a statement.

Europe's battered financial sector is showing further signs of healing and the European Central Bank's raft of different policy measures are contributing to this, a key ECB survey showed on Tuesday.

The ECB said its quarterly bank lending survey showed that banks are easing credit standards for loans to enterprises, an encouraging sign, since the chronic weakness of credit activity in the euro area has previously been blamed for the absence of any noticeable recovery in the 19 countries that share the single currency. 

Finland's Nokia is in advanced talks to acquire the wireless infrastructure business of telecom firm Alcatel-Lucent, reports said Monday.

The announcement of a deal could come "quickly", an unnamed source told French business newspaper Les Echos, while Bloomberg News quoted sources as saying Nokia could announce an agreement "as early as this week".

East Asia's developing economies led by China will grow slightly slower this year, with higher US interest rates and an appreciating dollar posing further risks to the region, the World Bank said Monday.

In its latest forecasts for the region, the bank said China's economy should expand by 7.1 percent in 2015, slower than the 7.2 percent rate projected in October and down from last year's 7.4 percent growth.