[每日英语]IMF：全球经济可能在未来两年复苏

The global economy was more likely to enjoy a reasonable recovery over the next two years, benefiting from recent falls in energy prices and exchange rate movements, the International Monetary Fund said yesterday.

The twice-yearly forecast shows India is expected to outperform China in growth for the first time in 16 years.

The fund has recently told countries they “could do better” to improve medium-term prospects, but the World Economic Outlook is the first since 2011 to suggest economies are putting the 2009 financial crisis behind them.

Ahead of publication, Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist, told the Financial Times: “I sense the macro risks are smaller than in October — there is no reason for doom and gloom.”

The fund has documented divergent trends in economic performance across the world since October, with strength in the US and UK and greater weakness in the eurozone, China and Latin America. Inflation has fallen everywhere and the outlook for many emerging economies, with the important exception of India, has deteriorated.

Despite this uneven progress in economic data, the fund said, the fall in energy prices would boost growth in oil-importing countries. It estimated that the full effect of falling oil prices would increase global output by 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent in 2016.

The rise in the dollar and Chinese renminbi against the Japanese yen and the euro would help boost growth further, the IMF predicted. The appreciation of the US and Chinese currencies need not damage their growth prospects because these economies can keep interest rates lower for longer to offset any deterioration in their trade performance.

Translating this assessment into hard numbers, the IMF forecasts 3.5 per cent global growth in 2015, up on the 3.4 per cent recorded last year and improving further to 3.8 per cent in 2016.

The IMF expects China’s slowdown to continue, with growth of 6.8 per cent this year and 6.3 per cent in 2016, cons­iderably slower than India, which is exp­ected to expand by 7.5 per cent in both years.

The fund is more gloomy on medium-term growth prospects, noting that economies do not seem likely to return to growth rates that previously were considered normal. Ageing populations and weak productivity growth are set to lower rates of expansion.