US companies appear to have cut far more jobs than their European rivals during the crisis, providing a possible explanation of why American groups are performing better than their competitors across the Atlantic.

Chief executives and analysts said the trend also offered a reason why economic growth in the second quarter was higher in the eurozone than in the US and UK.

They said while US corporate profitability was boosted by the jobs cuts, the economy might suffer in the short-term from the shock of them.

US companies cut about 640,000 jobs in the first five months of this year compared with 350,000 at European groups, according to research by the International Labour Organisation based on media reports.

Asian groups cut 240,000 jobs in the same period.

The figures only show the absolute numbers of job cuts reported in the media. They do not take into consideration the number of companies in each region or small job cuts that fail to make the newspapers.

Hans-Paul Bürkner, chief executive of Boston Consulting Group, said: “If you lay off people massively, you destroy confidence in the economy as a whole and inside the company.

“You see the performance of companies not picking up so dramatically in Europe because they are not so focused on the short term.”

Many equity strategists expect this underperformance to continue in third-quarter results that started this week in Europe after a second quarter in which US companies' earnings fell by only 27 per cent and Europeans' by 44 per cent, according to Thomson Reuters.