Chapter III. The World Economy

Extract

The growth of output in OECD member countries has been abruptly checked. Helped perhaps by relatively favourable weather, industrial production appears to have increased by 1-1½ per cent in the first quarter. In the second, however, there seems to have been quite a significant fall in Western Europe as well as in the United States, and a marked slowing down of growth in Japan (table 1). We no longer expect the aggregate rise for the year in member countries to be any more than ½ per cent (implying a drop of similar magnitude from the first quarter's rate), and the OECD secretariat has been forecasting a marginal fall. In terms of GDP the change of trend has been less pronounced but may well have been equally general. Though both we and OECD are expecting a rise of a little more than 1 per cent for the whole of 1980, some fall seems likely in the second half of the year.