By Marc Jones

LONDON (Reuters) - A tech shares bounce carried European equities higher on Thursday, following similar gains on Wall Street and Asia and helped also by a small pullback in the dollar from a 17-month high.

With U.S. markets closed for Thanksgiving, focus was trained on Europe where a surge in COVID-19 cases is raising the prospect of lockdowns going into the Christmas shopping season.

Those concerns had knocked the pan-European STOXX 600 index to a three-week low on Wednesday, but it was up almost half a percent as a 1% tech sector gain offset the eighth straight fall in travel and leisure stocks.

"We continue to treat every sell-off as the buy-the-dip opportunity," said Marija Veitmane, global markets strategist at State Street Global Markets, adding that firms' earnings were still robust and that borrowing costs were still very low.

An indicator of the bullishness underpinning equity markets can be seen in data. Year-to-date inflows into equity funds have barreled past the $1 trillion mark, more than the combined previous 19 years of flows, according to BofA strategists.

In the government bond markets, which drive those borrowing costs, there was a small dip in German yields after Social Democrat and former finance minister Olaf Scholz struck a three-way coalition deal on Wednesday that sees him replace Angela Merkel at the helm of Europe's largest economy.

It was the first fall in yields in three days. They have risen sharply again this week as traders have ramped up bets that rising inflation will see the European Central Bank join the U.S. Federal Reserve in hiking interest rates next year. [GVD/EUR]

"The inflation debate, whether is it temporary or not, is still there," said Dirk Schmacher, Head of European Macro Research at Natixis.

He also flagged the renewed lockdown in Austria and the fast rising COVID-19 case numbers in parts of Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

THANKSGIVING CALM

Emerging markets saw some relative calm after a turbulent few days that has seen Turkey's lira battered again, Russia and Ukraine tensions rise, and Mexico's president stoke worries about central bank independence by installing a virtual unknown at the helm. [EMRG/FRX]

The lira shrugged off early losses to rise 0.5%, extending Wednesday's gains which came after a brutal 11-day, 24% losing streak after President Tayyip Erdogan had backed more interest rates cuts.

Russia's rouble moved away from recent four-month lows as Moscow said it hadn't turned its back on Eastern Ukraine peace talks, while South Africa's rand recovered from a one-year trough.