At the global level, growth remains sluggish. Amid international trade tensions, uncertainty over how Brexit will play out and various other destabilising factors (social and political unrest in several European countries, volatility in the financial markets, emerging economies in flux, etc.), the economic climate is looking distinctly stormier than it did at the outset of 2018.

In Asia, China’s performance is failing to live up to expectations (+6.6%, the lowest level of growth in 28 years); in Europe, Italy slipped into recession in the second half of 2018 and the German economy is rapidly losing steam. GDP growth for the Eurozone as a whole came in at 1.8% in 2018, trailing far behind the 2017 figure of 2.7%. Q4 2018 was particularly lacklustre, and there are no signs that early 2019 will be much better.

Indeed, the IMF recently downgraded its growth forecasts [1] to reflect more modest expectations for global GDP growth: 3.5% for 2019 (0.2 of a percentage point lower than previously projected [2]) and 3.6% for 2020 (a markdown of 0.1 of a percentage point).

Almost every economy on the planet has been affected by faltering growth. Although the US economy is still expected to grow by 2.5% in 2019, the effects of the budgetary stimulus package are waning and in 2020 the pace of growth is set to drop to 1.8%. In China, while the economy is still growing at a rate most established economies can only dream of, the tempo is steadily slowing (the forecast predicts 6.2% growth in both 2019 and 2020).

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