• • The world economy will continue to expand vigorously, growing by 5.0 per cent in 2007 and by 4.8 per cent in 2008.

• • Americani GDP growth will slow to 2.9 per cent in 2007 ard 2.5 per cent in 2008.

• • Economic growth in the Euro Area will slow to 2.2 per cent in 2007 and 2. per cent in 2008.

• • Japanese growth will pick up to 2.4 per cent in 2007 and 2.5 per cent in 2008.

• • Both the Euro Area and Japan will perform better in the second half of the decade than in the first half because of supply-side impr-ovements.

Our estimates indicate that global output, measured in terms of purchasing power parities, expanded by 5.3 per cent in 2006. This is one of the fastest rates of growth recorded in the last 35 years, when global growth averaged 3.7 per cent per annum. We forecast a further expansion of 5 per cent this year, with the global economy projected to remain strong throughout our forecast horizon to 2013. Prospects for growth in both 2006 and 2007 have improved slightly over the last three months, due to a decline in oil prices, a more favourable outlook for the US and no sign of a significant slowdown in China. While growth at the global and OECD level is expected to moderate this year relative to 2006, we are projecting a modest acceleration in Japan, boosted by a small fiscal stimulus and recent gains in external competitiveness.

The US current account imbalance has stayed stubbornly high despite the fall in the dollar that we have seen since the beginning of 2003. The exchange rate has fallen by around 15 per cent on average, mainly between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2005. As we can see from figure 1, the fall has come in three steps, and each time it fell we might have expected an initial worsening of the current account for a year or so as prices change in advance of quantities (the J curve effect of the first year textbook). Hence we might have expected no sustained improvement until at least a year after the last downward step towards the end of 2004. However, as we can see from figure 2, there is no noticeable improvement in the current account during 2006, suggesting that domestic absorption was rising. At the same time inflation in the US was gradually drifting up under pressure from the weakening exchange rate.

The economy continues to expand at a robust pace (figure 1). We now expect GDP to rise by 2¾ per cent in 2007 after similar growth in 2006. This is an upward revision to our forecast for economic growth in 2006 and 2007 of approximately ¼ percentage point since October. Underlying these changes to the forecast for 2006 are upward revisions to the data for the first half of last year and stronger than expected growth for the third quarter of last year. The healthy pace of expansion forecast for this year is supported by a further acceleration in domestic demand growth after the weakness observed in 2005. This is led by a pick-up in consumer spending, supported by stronger growth in real disposable incomes and rapid accumulation of household wealth, and the continued strength of investment demand.

Economic growth in Europe has been disappointing in the past few years, especially when compared to the US, and in addition growth in the UK has looked more robust than that in the large continental economies. There could be many factors that contribute to these differences, and they are addressed in the articles by Crafts; Barrell, Guillemineau and Holland; Mc Morrow and Röger; and Bebee and Hunt in this Review. This introduction discusses some of the factors affecting growth, and draws some conclusions from these studies that help us understand why growth may differ between countries for sustained periods of time, and also why underlying, or trend growth rates may vary over time.

This paper evaluates claims that European productivity growth has been undermined by weak competition and excessive regulation and taxation. The argument has some validity in the context of the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution which has placed a greater premium on flexibility. The UK has been well-placed to benefit from ICT but experiences a productivity gap reflecting historically-low investment combined with high employment of low-productivity workers. Rapid Irish growth has benefited greatly from low corporate taxation but the massive contribution of ICT production to productivity growth suggests it is a special case not a role model.

Since the mid-1990s the growth performance of the Euro Area as a whole, despite some good individual country performances, has failed to keep pace with developments elsewhere in the EU (including the UK) and also in the US. This is especially the case for a number of the larger Euro Area economies. Despite an encouraging performance in terms of its labour input trends, there has been a significant, offsetting, deterioration in the Euro Area's underlying productivity performance. This is driven in large part, worryingly, by a marked downward shift in the growth rate of total factor productivity. Looking to the future, no significant recovery is predicted in the Euro Area's underlying economic performance over the period 2007–11. While the policy challenge is a serious one, the Euro Area as a whole can take comfort from the fact that the gains from a successful refocusing of its overall reform agenda could be considerable. For example, the progressive introduction of the five key measures linked to the Lisbon strategy (i.e. the services directive; reduction of the administrative burden; improving human capital; 3 per cent R&D target; and increases in the employment rate) could boost the Euro Area's economic and employment growth rates by more than ½ a percentage point annually for more than a decade. Such an outturn would give the Euro Area a potential growth rate of around 2½ per cent, a rate of growth which in per capita terms would be broadly comparable to that of the US over the 2007–15 time period and, on the basis of current trends and policies, slightly better than that of the UK.

This paper uses Growth Accounting and Production Function Analysis to decompose the factors behind differences in growth between the UK, France and Germany between 1992 and 2005. Most of the growth differential between the United Kingdom, Germany and France since 1993 can be explained by structural factors. The United Kingdom's higher growth has originated essentially in the finance and business sector, which is ICT-intensive. Germany's weak growth reflects in large part the aftermath of the unification shock and a continued fall in the labour input. At the same time there has been a sharp slowdown in knowledge accumulation, which seems to have restrained labour productivity growth. After EMU, the performance of German manufacturing improved relative to both France and the United Kingdom, while capital deepening became less supportive to growth because of lower investment in infrastructures and dwellings. France's higher growth relative to Germany since 1999 comes essentially from the non-tradable sectors and from a higher labour input. This may be partly related to a more significant decline in the volatility of real interest rates.

This paper uses a variant of the IMF's Global Economy Model (GEM) to examine the macroeconomic impact of the rise in energy prices since the end of 2003 in the Euro Area, the United Kingdom and the United Sates. The analysis illustrates how the impact varies across these countries based on their level of energy use and energy production. In addition, the analysis uses Euro Area simulations to consider how the macroeconomic implications depend on the factors driving higher energy prices. If labour supply or tradable sector productivity increases in emerging Asian economies are an important factor driving energy price increases, then industrial countries receive some positive terms-of-trade effects coming through non-energy tradable goods that offset some of the negative implications of permanently higher real energy prices. The stronger are the industrial countries' trade links with emerging Asia, the larger will be the offsets.