Low-Key Growth

We start this week's Briefing with a question. In which region or country – the US, Japan, euro area or the UK – have expectations for GDP growth remained most robust over the last year? A clue: it saw the fastest GDP growth in the first quarter of this year.

The answer is the euro area. The outlook for the US, Japanese and UK economies has deteriorated markedly in the last year while euro area growth expectations have seen only modest downgrades.

In the last four years the US and the UK economies have comfortably outpaced a stuttering euro area. But this year, with growth in the US and UK cooling, and euro area activity nudging up, GDP growth in the three regions is likely to be roughly the same, at around the 1.8% mark.