The World Economy

The growth outlook in our forecast reported in Table 1 looks slightly more robust than it did before the summer, with noticeable upward revisions to both 2003 and 2004, as well as to the medium term outlook. Although the prospects for the European economies are largely unchanged, output prospects look better than they did in North America, Japan and in the rest of East and South Asia. There are stronger indicators in the US, along with clear signs of impacts fromr the depreciation of the dollar and the expansionary fiscal stance. Our forecast for world growth in 2003 has been revised upward by 0.6 percentage points since July to 3.5 per cent, and we are now projecting that growth will be 4.0 per cent or more from 2004 onwards. The revision to 2003 partly stems from statistical revisions in the Japanese national accounts, whereby business investment is now estimated to have risen by 6.8 per cent in the first half of 2003 relative to the previous 6 month period, compared to our July estimate of 1.7 per cent. While we do not expect growth rates of this magnitude to persist, this burst in investment has imparted a momentum to the Japanese economy that has raised the outlook for growth throughout our forecast horizon. As a consequence, our projections for world trade growth have also been revised upward to 5.7 per cent in 2003 and 8.8 per cent in 2004, compared to previous projections of 3.2 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively. However, much of this additional trade is confined to intra-Asian and NAFTA trade, and has not necessarily raised the outlook for external demand in countries such as the UK.