Daily Times

Slowly but surely a bruised and battered global economy now appears to be shaking off its deep post-crisis malaise. If the International Monetary Fund’s latest forecasts are borne out – an iffy proposition, to be sure – the nearly 3.6 per cent average annual growth in world GDP expected over the 2017-2018 period would represent a modest uptick from the 3.2 per cent pace of the past two years. Fully a decade after the Great Financial Crisis, global growth is finally returning to its 3.5 per cent post-1980 trend.

But this round trip hardly signals that the world is back to normal. On the contrary, the overhyped idea of a “new normal” for the world economy overlooks an extraordinary transformation in the global growth dynamic over the past nine years. At the margin, the recent improvement has been concentrated in the advanced economies, where GDP growth is now expected to average two per cent over 2017-2018 – a meaningful pick-up from the unprecedented anaemic 1.1 per cent average growth of the preceding nine years. Relative strength in the United States (2.4 per cent) is expected to be offset by weakness in both Europe (1.7 per cent) and of course Japan (0.9 per cent). However, annual growth in the advanced economies is expected to remain considerably below the longer-term trend of 2.9 per cent recorded during the 1980-2007 period.

By contrast, the developing world keeps chugging along at a much faster pace. Although the average growth rate expected for these economies over 2017-2018, at 4.6 per cent, is about half a percentage point lower than during the preceding nine years, they would still be expanding at more than twice the pace of the developed world. Not surprisingly (at least to those of us who never bought into the Chinese hard-landing scenario), strength in the developing world is expected to be concentrated in China (6.4 per cent) and India (7.5 per cent), with growth lagging in Latin America (1.5 per cent) and Russia (1.4 per cent). This persistent divergence between developed and developing economies has now reached a critical point. From 1980 to 2007, the advanced economies accounted for an average of 59 per cent of world GDP (measured in terms of purchasing power parity), whereas the combined share of developing and emerging economies was 41 per cent. That was then. According to the IMF’s latest forecast, those shares will completely reverse by 2018: 41 per cent for the advanced economies and 59 per cent for the developing world.

The pendulum of world economic growth has swung dramatically from the so-called advanced countries to the emerging and developing economies. New? Absolutely. Normal? Not even close. It is a stunning development, one that raises at least three fundamental questions about our under-standing of macroeconomics.

First, isn’t it time to rethink the role of monetary policy?

The anaemic recovery in the developed world has occurred against the backdrop of the most dramatic monetary easing in history – eight years of policy interest rates near the zero bound and enormous liquidity injections from vastly expanded central-bank balance sheets.

Yet these unconventional policies have had only a limited impact on real economic activity, middle-class jobs, and wages. Instead, the excess liquidity spilled over into financial markets, sustaining upward pressure on asset prices and producing outsize returns for wealthy investors. Like it or not, monetary policy has become an instrument of mounting inequality. Second, has the developing world finally broken free of its long-standing dependence on the developed world?

I have long argued that claims of such a ‘decoupling’ were spurious, given the persistence of export-led growth in poorer countries, which tethers their economies to external demand in richer countries. But the facts now speak otherwise. Growth in global trade slowed to a three per cent average pace over the 2008-2016 post-crisis period – half the 6 per cent norm from 1980 to 2016. Yet, over the same period, GDP growth in the developing economies barely skipped a beat. This attests to a developing world that is now far less dependent on the global trade cycle and more reliant on internal demand. Finally, has China played a disproportionate role in reshaping the world economy? Chinese rebalancing suggests that this may well be the case, there are grounds for optimism on this front as well.