The war in Ukraine and inflation will seriously weigh on activity in the United States, Europe and especially in low-income countries, threatened with over-indebtedness.
By
The next months will be “dark and more uncertain” warns the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its updated forecasts, published Tuesday, July 26. The financial institution tables global growth of 3.2 % in 2022, down 0.4 percentage point compared to its April forecasts, then 2.9 % in 2023, a strong slowdown after the 6.1 % recorded in 2021, the first year of exit from the Pandemic of COVID-19. The global gross domestic product (GDP) even underwent a contraction in the second quarter of 2022, just after the start of the Russian war in Ukraine.
A poor performance attributed by the IMF to “higher inflation than expected worldwide, especially in the United States and the main European economies”, to “a greater slowdown than expected in China” in The rest of the confinements linked to the health crisis and, finally, to the “negative benefits of the war in Ukraine”. “The shadow of the pandemic still hangs over the world economy, recalls Pierre-Olivier Gourchas, chief economist of the IMF. It is partly at the origin of the slowdown in China and the rise in inflation.”
Global growth suffers from a degradation of the economic situation in the three largest economies, namely China, the United States and the European Union. American growth is revised downwards to 2.3 % for 2022 (compared to 3.7 % scheduled for April), while reducing household purchasing power and the tightening of monetary policy has been much more important than anticipated, against a backdrop of galloping inflation. In June, consumer prices have soared 9.1 % over a year, unheard of in the past forty years across the Atlantic, which has led the Federal Reserve (Fed, Central Bank) to raise its Record rate rate, which are now between 1.5 % and 1.75 %, while they were approaching zero at the beginning of 2022.
“Disturbances of the supply chain”
This hardening of monetary policy should increase unemployment in the coming months, warns the American reflection group Peterson Institute for International Economics, in a note published in early July. The IMF has also revised down 1.1 percentage points its growth forecasts for China, at 3.3 %, the worst performance of the past four decades (with the exception of the first year of the pandemic, in 2020), which it justifies by “new confinements and the worsening of the real estate crisis”. This deceleration should lead to its wake that of Asian emerging countries, the growth of which is revised down 0.8 points in 2022.
You have 60.2% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.