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Guest Contribution: “Where is global economic growth heading?”

Today, we are pleased to present a guest contribution written by Laurent Ferrara (Banque de France, Head of the International Macro Division) and Clément Marsilli (Banque de France, Economist in the International Macro Division). The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Banque de France.

The latest update of the IMF WEO report has been released on April 12, 2016, and can be downloaded from the IMF web site (for a summary see also this Econbrowser post here). The salient fact of this report is that global GDP growth in 2016 has been revised downwards by -0.2pp years, from 3.4%, as assessed in the WEO update of January 2016, to 3.2%. Those revisions are quite homogeneous across countries (-0.2pp for both advanced and emerging/developing countries), although some commodity-exporters countries are more impacted.

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Negative interest rates

For an economy with underutilized resources or too low a rate of inflation the traditional prescription for monetary policy is to lower the interest rate. Central banks around the world tried to do that in response to stubbornly weak economies, bringing the overnight interest rate in many countries all the way to zero. But when that didn’t seem to be getting the job done, the Bank of Japan last week decided to go negative, charging banks 0.1% interest for excess reserves. With this step Japan now joins the Euro system, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden, all of whom have had negative interest rate policies in place for over a year. Here I describe how negative interest rates work, what they are intended to accomplish, and some of the limitations of using this policy to try to stimulate the economy.
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