5-Year Global Economic Forecast

What’s the Latest Development?

At PIMCO’s annual Secular Forum, outside speakers talk about what is likely to happen in the global economy in the next 3-5 years. Here are some of their conclusions from this year: “Advanced economies will face sluggish (call it 2%) growth and persistently high, increasingly structural (and therefore protracted) unemployment. … Emerging economies will achieve higher growth (in the 6% range), and their income and wealth levels will continue to converge with those of advanced economies. … Sovereign creditworthiness will continue to diverge, with a further deterioration in advanced countries and continued improvement in emerging markets.”

What’s the Big Idea?

“The global economy overall will hobble along, continuing its gradual transition from a uni-polar to a multi-polar world.” That is the most general conclusion to come from PIMCO’s annual economic forum. “As much as we may wish for a more reassuring outlook, the world economy will remain unusually fluid in the coming years. What appears as a systemically interconnected world will also turn out to be increasingly fragmented cognitively, with weak global governance and policy coordination. This is a global economy that must be navigated carefully, lest those that seek to benefit from change find themselves falling victim to it.”