The sustained U.S. stock market boom of the 1990s fuelled private consumption in the USA to an extent that it grew at a substantially faster rate than the country's GDP (in 1999, the savings-ratio of private households actually turned negative). At the same time, the gap between the share...

The recent stock market losses have significantly heightened the uncertainties regarding the future economic development, particularly in the USA and Europe. The present forecast is based on the assumption that the stock markets will not suffer further losses: first, compared to the peak two...

With interest rates kept low and taxes strongly reduced, monetary and fiscal policies in the USA are expected to remain on an expansive course in 2004. This will strengthen the economic upswing but will also accentuate the disequilibria in the US economy: in 2004, both the budget deficit and the...

Any projection of global economic developments up to 2005 will greatly depend on an assessment of a number of problem areas: • Will the oil price, after first rising at a breakneck pace, drop again significantly, or will it stay at its high level over the medium run? • Will the imbalances...

The medium-term outlook for the world economy starts from the following assumptions: The US dollar will continue to depreciate against the euro until 2008 and will then stabilise. More specifically, the euro exchange rate is assumed to rise to 1.42 $ until 2008, primarily as a result of a...

The two biggest elements of uncertainty of a medium-term forecast of the world economy, concern exchange rates, particularly between the Euro and the dollar, as well as crude oil prices. The WIFO basic scenario makes the following assumptions: the Euro exchange rate versus the dollar will drop...