• • The world economy will grow by 4.9 per cent this year and 4.5 per cent in 2011.

• • Chinese growth will remain rapid, with GDP expanding by 10.7 per cent this year and 9.4 per cent in 2011.

• • Despite fears of a double-dip recession in the United States, its GDP will grow by 2.8 per cent a year in both 2010 and 2011.

• • Following in the slipstream of China, the Japanese economy will expand by 3.2 per cent in 2010 and 2 per cent in 2011.

• • The Euro Area will grow by 1.8 per cent in 2010 and 2.1 per cent in 2011.

• • The recovery will continue but it will be sluggish, with GDP growing by 1.6 per cent a year in both 2010 and 2011.

• • Consumer price inflation will remain surprisingly high in 2011 given the amount of spare capacity, averaging 2.8 per cent during the year.

• • The squeeze on household budgets will cause consumer spending to stagnate in 2011.

• • Public-sector net borrowing will fall less than the official forecast, reaching 3.6 per cent of GDP in 2014–15 rather than 2.1 per cent.

The pace of global expansion moderated somewhat in the second quarter of 2010. According to NIESR estimates, world GDP increased by 1.4 per cent in the first quarter of the year and growth slowed to 1 per cent in the second quarter. The slowdown was widespread across Asia and America. Many of the lagging economies in Europe, on the other hand, accelerated in the second quarter of 2010, allowing some convergence in the global recovery. The slowdown in Asia and America was largely a reflection of a shift in the global balance of trade. Domestic demand growth in both the US and China accelerated in the second quarter, pulling in higher levels of imports and drawing with it an export-driven recovery in Europe. We forecast global growth of 4.9 per cent this year and 4½ per cent in 2011.

The pace of economic recovery in the US eased in the second quarter of 2010, with quarter-on-quarter GDP growth moderating from 0.9 per cent in the first quarter of the year to 0.4 per cent. The source of the slowdown stemmed from a negative contribution to growth from net trade, as import volumes rose by 7.5 per cent on the back of a sharp acceleration in domestic demand. This allowed the US current account balance to widen to 3.4 per cent of GDP. Our forecast sees the current account balance hovering between 2½–3½ per cent of GDP over the forecast horizon, well below the 6½ per cent of GDP deficits seen at the height of the housing market bubble in 2005–6. NIESR's index of global imbalances, illustrated in appendix chart B3, clearly shows that global current account imbalances have receded from the unsustainable levels reached in 2007.

The forecasts for the world and the UK economy reported in this Review are produced using NIESR's model, NiGEM. The NiGEM model has been in use at the National Institute for forecasting and policy analysis since 1987, and is also used by a group of about fifty model subscribers, mainly in the policy community. Most countries in the OECD are modelled separately, and there are also separate models of China, India, Russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brazil, South Africa, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria. The rest of the world is modelled through regional blocks so that the model is global in scope. All models contain the determinants of domestic demand, export and import volumes, prices, current accounts and net assets. Output is tied down in the long run by factor inputs and technical progress interacting through production functions, but is driven by demand in the short to medium term. Economies are linked through trade, competitiveness and financial markets and are fully simultaneous. Further details on the NiGEM model are available on http://nimodel.niesr.ac.uk/.

While the global economic recovery remains fragile, output in most of the major advanced economies has been rising since mid-2009. Employment, however, tends to lag production, and unemployment continued to rise well into 2010 in many countries. The ILO estimates that the level of unemployment remains elevated by 30 million worldwide relative to 2007 (ILO-IMF, 2010). After taking into account global population developments, this points to a rise in the global unemployment rate of about ¾ percentage point. As the advanced economies have been faced with the brunt of the global downturn, unemployment rates have risen far more significantly within the OECD area. The unemployment rate in this region remains 2.9 percentage points higher than at the beginning of 2008.

The UK economy has now enjoyed four consecutive quarters of expansion. Indeed GDP growth reached 1.2 per cent in the second quarter of this year, the fastest rate of growth in over a decade. The National Institute's estimate of monthly GDP suggests that the economy continued to expand in the third quarter of this year, but at a more modest pace of 0.5 per cent (see figure 1). Such a slowdown should not have come as a surprise. Persistently strong growth is unlikely in an economy where household balance sheets are still undergoing repair, funding channels to business remain impaired and the public sector is embarking on a significant programme of fiscal consolidation. However, we continue to think the chances of negative output growth in 2011 are about one in five and hence a double dip recession is unlikely.

In June the Coalition Government produced a budget that aimed to reduce the government deficit quickly. The plan was based mainly on cuts in current expenditure and reductions in transfers to individuals. There are four possible reasons for reducing the deficit, and all have been used to justify the policy. The first reason might be that the cost of borrowing is currently too high, and the second could be that if deficits persist the markets could lose confidence and the cost of borrowing would rise. The third reason might be that we have to reduce the debt stock in order that we prepare for the next crisis, whilst the fourth, and perhaps most persuasive in the long run, is that it is unfair to borrow so much and therefore reduce the consumption of future generations. If either of the first two had merit there would be a case for swift consolidation, whilst if the third or fourth predominate, we should not be in any rush to act until output is nearer full capacity.

The financial crisis that emerged during 2007 and overwhelmed the financial system in late 2008 also brought to the fore some of the obvious failings of the style of modelling that had been fashionable in central banks in the previous decade. The shift to Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models (DSGE) of whatever sort left no real scope for money and financial markets to have an impact on the real economy. This was in part because equilibrium models based on theory are unlikely to be designed to cope with a period of disequilibrium, which is when the financial system becomes important in macroeconomics. DSGE models come in various guises, and it was common to operate with a three-equation model with demand, supply and the interest rate as the equations. It is hard to see how the financial sector could fit into this, or what use it would be even if it were included. Larger DSGE models that respect the national income identity are easier to augment with a financial sector; but even that developed by the US Federal Reserve (see Edge, Kiley and Laforte, 2010) tends to return to equilibrium rather more rapidly than seems reasonable.

The standard approach, in teaching and textbooks, to explaining the determination of both the supply of money, and the provision of bank credit to the private sector, has been the money multiplier approach, whereby the Central Bank sets the high-powered monetary base, and then the stock of money is a multiple of that. The greatest book on Monetary History ever written, Friedman and Schwartz (1963), Monetary History of the United States, was constructed around this same analytical framework of the money multiplier, whereby M, the money supply, would increase by a large multiple of the change in the high-powered monetary base, H.

$M=H\cdot \frac{(1+C/D)}{(R/D+C/D)}$

This paper considers some of the implications of the increase in UK unemployment since the beginning of the Great Recession. The major finding is that the sharp increase in unemployment and decrease in employment is largely concentrated on the young. This has occurred at a time when the size of the youth cohort is large. As a response to a lack of jobs there has been a substantial increase in applications to university, although there has only been a small rise in the number of places available. Further we find evidence that the unemployed have particularly low levels of well-being, are depressed, have low levels of life satisfaction, have difficulties paying their bills and are especially likely to be in financial difficulties.

The increase in unemployment in the United Kingdom that accompanied the Great Recession has been conspicuous by its moderation. The rise in joblessness is dwarfed by the recent experience of the United States, by past recessionary episodes in the UK and by the contraction in GDP in the UK. Increased rates of job loss have played a dominant role in shaping the rise in British unemployment. Unemployment duration has not increased to the levels seen in previous recessions, in contrast to the US where duration substantially exceeds previous peaks. Looking forward, the UK labour market appears to have adjusted fully to the shocks that prompted the recession. Signs of reductions in match efficiency witnessed recently in the US are not mirrored in the UK. In contrast, while long-term unemployment currently remains well below historical levels, recent estimates of job finding rates suggest that it has the potential to rise much further. Thus, a timely recovery in aggregate demand will play an important role in averting persistently high unemployment in the future.

This paper lays out the various reasons for the exceptional performance of the German labour market during and after the Great Recession of 2008/9. The reference point of our analysis is provided by an empirical model of both total hours worked and employment. We conduct dynamic simulations of the crisis period to assess how surprising the reaction of the labour market really was. We argue that the most important precondition for the minor reaction of employment during this crisis was the pronounced wage moderation observed in the years before, which constitutes a distinct difference to all other recessions in Germany. Beyond that, the flexibility of adjusting working time, which has increased considerably during the past ten years, facilitated a tendency to labour hoarding. In contrast, short-time work plays a minor role in explaining the difference from previous recessions, since this instrument has always been available to firms in Germany and its use has not been extraordinary compared with earlier recessions.

This article uses a dataset covering ten advanced economies (Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States) to explore the role of real wages as an influence on employment and unemployment in the Great Depression and more generally in the 1920s and 1930s. The distinction between employment and unemployment movements during the Great Depression helps to clarify the role of supply side influences on the national heterogeneity of unemployment increases during the Great Depression. We find little general econometric evidence for the idea that movements in product wages had strong influences on employment either during the period of rising unemployment associated with the depression of the 1930s or more generally with the data which exist for the 1920s and 1930s.