Over at Brookings, Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz have been crunching the data in the IMF’s new World Economic Outlook, which came out yesterday (pdf of the WEO executive summary here).
One of the most interesting bits of their analysis is a comparison between the 2008 WEO’s forecasts of countries’ GDP in 2013, and what the new WEO forecasts for the same year – in other words, a measure of how much the financial crisis and global downturn has messed up countries’ prospects.
As the map below shows, Eastern Europe and Russia are the big losers, where “for many countries 2013 incomes will be 15 to 20 percent lower than had been previously expected”. Brazil, China and India emerge more or less unscathed. All in all, “154 economies are now anticipated to be poorer in 2013 than had been thought two years ago, while only 25 are expected to be richer”.
Africa’s mixed performance will give development analysts lots to chew on. In some of the negative cases, what went wrong is fairly clear: Madagascar’s deep shade of red is presumably due to the coup there in March 09, for instance.
But overall, Chandy and Gertz find that among the 71 economies that managed to post an increase in per capita income in 2009, despite the bitter winds howling around them, we find three quarters of the world’s low income countries “who, contrary to fears, fared relatively well through the crisis”.
