The world can wave goodbye to most of the horrors of the past six years, economic experts attending the World Economic Forum this week will tell global leaders. But many will add that the recovery threatens to be patchy and may mask longer-term fragilities undermining the durability and political acceptability of any upswing.
Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, is extremely confident that even those economies often seen to be struggling, such as Brazil, France, India and Italy, are not about to descend back into crisis.
“That is a far cry from financially driven cross-border shocks or lasting balance sheet damage to households as in 2008-11,” he said. With the US, China, Japan, Germany and the UK growing strongly, he said countries representing much more than half of the world’s output “are on largely sustainable growth paths and have improving fiscal balances”.