Pasaulio ekonomikos apžvalga „Nordic Outlook“ (anglų kalba)

Challenging times ahead

World economy decelerating, but recession still looks set to be relatively mild

So far, the global economy has shown unexpected resilience, but households are under mounting pressure from interest rates, inflation and energy shortages. We have thus lowered our growth outlook for 2023 and 2024. Some businesses have good potential to cope fairly well, which suggests a mild downturn from a historical perspective. But risks are on the downside, linked to the Ukraine war and the possibility that central banks may underestimate the sensitivity of their economies to interest rates.

In recent months, most economies have shown unexpectedly high resilience to rising interest rates and inflation. Households continue to spend money on types of consumption that were blocked during the COVID-19 pandemic, partly by using savings buffers. Businesses have benefited from the easing of global supply disruptions as well as continued relatively healthy demand in many areas. It is positive in many ways that economic activity is being sustained in the short term. This may help ensure that the period of abnormally high
unemployment due to the crisis will be brief. It will also allow more time to prepare for the various challenges that the world economy is now facing. The risks of a deep downturn caused by a “perfect storm” − where multiple stresses occur at the same time − have thus been reduced. In the past couple of weeks, we have published updates of our forecasts for various countries. Overall, we have revised our GDP forecasts for 2022 upward. We expect GDP growth in advanced economies (the 38 OECD countries) to reach 2.7 per cent this year, compared to 2.4 per cent in our August forecast.