FRANK­FURT- Glob­al stock mar­kets opened a risk-filled new year still smart­ing from a rough 2011, as many ex­changes re­mained closed. Ger­man and French stocks rose in light vol­umes as a a read­ing of man­u­fac­tur­ing ac­tiv­i­ty in Eu­rope im­proved. Ger­many's DAX closed up three per cent yes­ter­day at 6,075 while the French CAC-40, which end­ed 2011 17 per cent low­er, climbed two per­cent to 3,222. Stocks fell in South Ko­rea and closed flat in Tai­wan.

Trad­ing was light with the New York, Lon­don and most Asian stock ex­changes closed. In­vestors ap­peared to be re­as­sured by Eu­ro­pean pur­chas­ing man­agers sur­vey in­dex num­bers that im­proved in De­cem­ber from No­vem­ber. Ac­tiv­i­ty in the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor was up, but at lev­els that still show a fifth straight month of con­trac­tion.

Many of the world's lead­ing in­dex­es are com­ing off a down year. Britain's FTSE was off 5.6 per­cent by year end, Japan's Nikkei fell 17 per cent to its low­est close since 1982, and the Stan­dard & Poor's 500 showed ze­ro gain. Da­ta re­leas­es lat­er in the week such as eu­ro­zone in­fla­tion on Wednes­day and Ger­man fac­to­ry or­ders and US non-farm pay­rolls on Fri­day will give traders more grist. The US em­ploy­ment fig­ure is ex­pect­ed to rise by some 150,000 af­ter in­creas­ing 120,000 in No­vem­ber. Mar­kets face an un­cer­tain first quar­ter as eu­ro­zone lead­ers try to get con­trol of gov­ern­ment debt woes that threat­en to harm the glob­al econ­o­my with an­oth­er fi­nan­cial melt­down. Much of the at­ten­tion in com­ing weeks will cen­ter on Italy, the eu­ro­zone's third-largest econ­o­my and the fo­cal point of the eu­ro­zone's strug­gle to deal with a cri­sis caused by heavy lev­els of gov­ern­ment debt. Fears of de­fault on those debts mean that bond in­vestors de­mand ever-high­er in­ter­est, mak­ing it a chal­lenge for the new gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Mario Mon­ti to roll over £53 bil­lion (US$69 bil­lion) in debt ma­tur­ing in the first quar­ter. If a coun­try can no longer bor­row af­ford­ably to pay off bonds that are ma­tur­ing, it faces even­tu­al de­fault or a bailout.

Debt woes may be com­pound­ed by at least a mild re­ces­sion over the last quar­ter of 2011 and the first part of 2012.

In Asia, South Ko­rea's Kospi, which lost 11 per cent of its val­ue last year, closed near­ly un­changed at 1,826.37. South Ko­rea's tech sec­tor move high­er, with Sam­sung Elec­tron­ics up 2.1 per­cent and LG Elec­tron­ics gain­ing 2.3 per cent. Steel gi­ant POSCO slid 1.1 per cent and Ko­rea Elec­tric Pow­er shed 1.8 per cent. Tai­wan's TAIEX, which was al­so open for busi­ness Mon­day, fell 1.7 per cent to 6,952.21. Fox­conn Tech­nol­o­gy, the world's biggest con­tract elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­er, which makes iPads and iPhones for Ap­ple Inc., fell 0.9 per cent. Per­son­al com­put­er mak­er Ac­er Inc. shed 2.3 per cent.

The Asian-Pa­cif­ic re­gion's ma­jor bench­marks, in­clud­ing Japan's Nikkei 225 in­dex, Hong Kong's Hang Seng In­dex and Aus­tralia's S&P ASX 200, were closed. Last year was one that traders would pre­fer to for­get: most Asian eq­ui­ty in­dex­es closed out 2011 deeply in the red. The Nikkei in Tokyo end­ed the year at 8,429.45 - its low­est clos­ing since 1982. Chi­na's bench­mark Shang­hai Com­pos­ite In­dex, closed Mon­day, en­dured a 21 per cent loss for the year as the im­pact of Bei­jing's multi­bil­lion-dol­lar stim­u­lus fad­ed and the gov­ern­ment tight­ened curbs on lend­ing and in­vest­ment to cool blis­ter­ing eco­nom­ic growth.