Global Economic Outlook meeting ahead of IMF summit
(9 Oct 2008) SHOTLIST 1. Wide of news conference 2. Cutaway reporters 3. SOUNDBITE: (English) Olivier Blanchard, International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist: "The world economy is facing a major downturn. While there's exceptional uncertainty at this point, our best forecast is that world growth will be around 3 percent in 2009. Now that number might not sound so bad. It hides however, important differences between advanced countries on the one hand, and emerging and developing countries on the other. We project that growth in advanced countries will be very close to zero or even negative until at least the middle of 2009, with a slow recovery during the rest of the year." 4. Cutaway reporters 5. SOUNDBITE: (English) Olivier Blanchard, International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist: "World growth will be instead driven by growth in emerging and developing economies. We predict that even they will grow at the substantially lower rate than they have in the recent past - seven percent in 2008, six percent in 2009." 6. Wide of Blanchard and other IMF officials 7. SOUNDBITE: (English) Olivier Blanchard, International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist: "The crucial role of both financial and macro economic policies at this juncture, it is clearly too late for responses to avoid the slowdown but they can be used to head off the risk of even more dire outcomes. Our belief that such policies will be implemented underlies our assessment that the slowdown can be limited and that the recovery can start in the course of 2009, and strengthen in 2010." 8. Cutaway reporter 9. SOUNDBITE: (English) Olivier Blanchard, International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist: "Our position is that it is not useful to use the word recession when the world is growing at 3 percent. In the normal definition of things, a recession is a negative number and that is not the case. That being said, 3 percent is a very low number for world growth and in the past indeed this might have been defined as on the borderline of a global recession." 10. Cutaway reporters 11. SOUNDBITE: (English) Olivier Blanchard, International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist: "My sense is that the sense of urgency that markets are basically making extremely clear, is going to force governments to basically adopt fairly coherent plans in the very near future. Under that assumption I believe that the risk of a Great Depression is nearly nil." 12. Wide of news conference 13. SOUNDBITE (English) Charles Collyns, Deputy Director in Research Department of the International Monetary Fund: "The public spending has risen quite rapidly in Latin America. But as you mentioned also, tax revenues have increased. So that these economies have been able to reduce their deficits and have been able to reduce their debt. They have been able to strengthen their public sector balance sheets quite significantly. This does provide them with more room than in the past to allow the automatic stabilisers to work in the context of a downturn." 14. Mid of International Monetary Fund officials on panel STORYLINE The Chief economist for the International Monetary Fund confirmed on Wednesday that the world economy is facing a major downturn, but added that the chances of it sliding into another "Great Depression" were "nearly nill". The IMF's World Economic Outlook projected that the global economy, which grew by a hardy 5 percent last year, will lose considerable speed, slowing to 3.9 percent this year. It is forecast to weaken even further to just 3 percent next year, marking the worst showing since 2002. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: / ap_archive Facebook: / aparchives Instagram: / apnews You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...
