Prognosis 2012: On the brink of a global recession
Gloomy world economic prospects
Persistent high unemployment, the euro area debt crisis and premature fiscal austerity have already slowed global growth and factor into the possibility of a new recession. Now the United Nations have downgraded significantly its forecasts for the world economy in the next year, as is revealed in a pre-release of the new World Economic Situation and Prospects 2012 (WESP) report, Rainer Falk reports.
At best, the global economy will ‘muddle through’ with the growth of world gross product (WGP) reaching 2.6% in the baseline outlook for 2012 and 3.2% for 2013, down from 4.0% in 2010. This forecast is conditioned, however, on containment of the euro-zone debt crisis and a halt to further moves toward stringent fiscal austerity in the developed countries ...
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