Word: contract
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...fragility: gas and metals account for more than three-quarters of export earnings. The boom, it turns out, was built on expensive oil and precious little else. Economic growth, which averaged more than 7% for the past five years, has tumbled, and the government now expects the economy to contract 0.2% this year. And for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the threat of large-scale unemployment looms. "Money was falling from the sky in the past two to three years," says Maxim Oreshkin, the head of research at private-sector Rosbank in Moscow...
...more evident than in Britain - long the European Union's most enthusiastic cheerleader of American-style deregulation and free trade. On Monday, U.K. unions held a repeat of last week's wildcat strikes protesting a decision by a French-owned oil plant to bring in 300 Italian and Portuguese contract laborers. British workers at the refinery in northeast England say they want jobs to go to locals, not to cheaper foreign workers. The move sparked rare oil-worker walkouts across the U.K. Workers want Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make good on his 2007 pledge that his government would impress...
...dismay over the business outlook, there are few experts anywhere who can out-gloom Jim Walker, an economist at an independent Hong Kong research firm called Asianomics. In his thick Scottish accent, Walker predicts the worst global recession since the Great Depression. GDP in the U.S., he says, could contract as much as 5% in 2009, and Europe by 2%. He is no more bullish about the economies in his area of specialty: Asia, a region where most of his colleagues foresee more buoyancy. China won't see GDP rise more than 4% in 2009, he says, and the country...
...Walker has been arguing for months that China was in trouble. As the U.S., Europe and Japan suffer through a recession in 2009, Walker expects Chinese exports to contract. In a sign of how much damage the global slowdown is causing in China, the government this week estimated that 20 million migrant laborers have lost their jobs. But just as important to Chinese growth is private investment. Corporate profitability in China was deteriorating even before the worst of the global financial crisis hit, and that will soften investment, which makes up more than 40% of GDP. In the first...
...rest of Asia, he says, leaving the region more exposed to the woes of the U.S. and Europe. Most vulnerable are Asia's smaller, trade-dependent economies. He forecasts Taiwan and Singapore could see GDP sink by 5% to 10% in 2009, while Korea's economy could contract by as much as 5%. "We're still in the very early stages of the downturn in Asia," Walker warns...