When figures for the October to December quarter are published, they may well show GDP falling again as England's nationwide lockdown and measures in other nations hit the economy. If the following quarter also sees a fall, then that would be a second recession, or what is sometimes called a "double-dip" recession, where two recessions happen close together. However, Bank of England forecasts expect to see growth next year. And if an effective vaccine becomes widely available, that would strongly boost the recovery.
The UK has been doing worse than other major worldwide economies. The UK economy is 9. France is 4. The UK's poor performance compared with other countries is partly down to a longer lockdown, experts believe. The world economy will shrink by 4. This is less bad than the Fund expected three months ago, as the recession was less severe than they expected. Some people may lose their jobs, or find it harder to get promotions, or a pay rise.
Graduates and school leavers could find a first job harder to get. However, the pain of a recession is typically not felt equally across society, and inequality can increase.
For instance, many UK homeowners who kept their jobs during the last recession did OK. Mortgage interest payments for many fell considerably, leaving them with more spending money. Others, such as benefit recipients or public sector workers, did less well. In the UK, the last recession, caused by the global financial crisis, lasted five quarters - from the second quarter of onwards.
GDP fell by an estimated 7. Unemployment rose sharply, but began to fall back again two years later. And there was a massive deficit - the gap between what the government raises in taxes and what it spends on public services. This resulted in a near-doubling of the national debt, and a decade-long programme of austerity.
There were steep cuts in many areas of government spending, except health, education and international aid. The recession has caused the government to run an even bigger deficit, and national debt has also grown rapidly during the period.
We have trouble measuring ideas and goods. An example is, I'm here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, I can speak to my children using different kinds of media, it costs almost nothing.
People can speak to their relatives around the world; businesses can speak to each other. There are kinds of innovations that we don't measure very well, particularly ones that relate to consumers, but also some that relate to businesses. The old way of measuring — gross domestic product — was good at measuring cars, how many houses we build, certain other things.
But it's getting farther and farther from what we really think of as economic progress. Of course, there are other issues like equality. Economic welfare depends not just on the total income the society has but how it's distributed. We can't get all this in one measure, but we could have better measures of what we have in society. We certainly should use measures of how equally it's distributed more in determining policy. There's no question that policymakers are forced to have a very short-term focus and this leaves out future generations: climate change is the big one.
I don't know what the world will be in but there's pretty clearly a risk and it gets understated in policy, and the private sector solutions are not adequate. Virtually every economist would favor having a carbon tax of some sort, much more than we do today.
That's just one example where we look short-term but not long-term, and we depend on our institutions and policymakers to try to try to be longer term. It's very tough because of course voters are here now and politicians have to care about them. So it's a very difficult balance. My children and their friends are very optimistic about technology for the future. I think that's wrong; that actually we're likely to see an acceleration in technology.
Does that make me optimistic for society? I'm not sure because society has a very difficult problem handling rapid change, handling innovation. In some ways, it might be easier if we settle down to a slower pace of technological growth. That's not what's going to happen. Mankind's innate optimism, innate curiosity is going to be producing new ideas.
Artificial intelligence is here; it's coming very rapidly. Whether it's 10, 20, 30 years, there's no question that its imprint will be very great. So, I'm impressed that technology will improve very quickly. My biggest worry is that society and politics will not progress at a similar pace and that disconnect between the fast pace of technology and the slow pace at which societies and politics change could bring many problems.
I certainly worry about the growth in populism worldwide. I strongly agree with trying to have a more egalitarian society. I don't think that simply going to back to s socialism is really the answer to that.
I would like to see more market-oriented policies to try to improve education, improve the distribution of income. I worry that that's not the direction that we're going; that we'll see a much cruder, more Neanderthal approach to trying to solve these problems.
We've seen it a little bit in the United States in recent years. I worry that that's something we may see in other countries in the not distant future. Kenneth Rogoff , Thomas D. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. US consumer prices have risen to their highest rate since , with consumer prices up 6. Inflation, though, has thwarted recoveries in the past, and recent data tell conflicting stories about the current pace.
The Fed's favorite gauge, the personal consumption expenditures price index excluding the volatile food and energy sectors, in May rose 3. But much of the price pressures have come in areas particularly germane to the economic recovery — used car prices, air fares, hotel prices and the like.
While Fed officials see those factors abating in the coming months, El-Erian said he's not so sure, even if the financial markets don't seem to care.
0コメント