Charting the global economy: UK, Japan fell into recession at the end of 2023
recession at the end of last year, marked by two consecutive quarters of contracting activity.
While the euro area is expected to avoid a downturn, the European Commission still sees the bloc growing slower than initially forecast this year. And in Australia, the unemployment rate climbed to the highest level in two years, consistent with expectations for its economy to soften.
Meantime, US consumer prices jumped at the start of the year, though economists maintain that inflation is still broadly on a downward trend.
Here are some of the charts that appeared on Bloomberg this week on the latest developments in the global economy, geopolitics and markets:
Europe
The UK slipped into a mild recession in the second half of 2023, showing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has so far failed to meet his pledge to grow the economy. While the economy still grew 0.1% across the year as a whole, it was the slowest annual expansion the UK had seen since 2009, excluding the first year of the pandemic.
The euro-area economy is entering 2024 on a weaker footing than previously expected, according to new European Union forecasts that anticipate another year of subdued growth. Gross domestic product in the currency bloc will accelerate only slightly to 0.8% this year after 0.5% in 2023, the European Commission said.
Manufacturing output in Europe’s biggest economy has been trending downward since 2017, and the decline is accelerating as competitiveness erodes. The energy crisis in the summer of 2022 was a major catalyst. While worst-case
