By Jaime Ortega.
The World Bank (WB) has slightly lowered its global growth forecast for 2013 to 2.2%, two tenths less than in January, followed by an increase progressively to 3% in 2014 and 3.3% in 2015.
The cited growth broke the ongoing contraction in the Euro Zone, whose forecasts for 2013 worsened to -0.1% to -0.6%, due to “high rates of unemployment and trust companies still weaken due to the global financial slow recovery “but still believes that the European economy in 2014 will grow 0.9% too timid numbers.
In its semi-annual Global Economic Prospects, the World Bank said the global economy “seems to have traveled far for a period of stable growth, but still remains slow.”
Emerging economies continue to head global expansion, with growth forecasts of 5.1% for 2013 and 5.6% and 5.7% for the next two years, with remarkable rates but below the previous years to the financial crisis in 2008.
“Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa and Turkey have been slowed by the bottleneck expansions on the supply side,” said the report, which calls for structural reforms in these growing countries.
Both China and India, have major growth engines and have reduced their forecast for 2013, to 7.7% 5.7% China and India. “The slowdown is proving unusually long,” said Kaushik Basum Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, at a press conference.
Latin America, will strengthen “marginally” to growth levels close to 3.3% this year, after 3% in 2012 due to the decline in commodity prices and the depressed global activity.
