Tracking global economic uncertainty: implications for global investment and trade
Retrieved on:
Friday, February 7, 2020
This box sheds light on the role of uncertainty in the recent slowdown of global investment and trade.
Key Points:
- This box sheds light on the role of uncertainty in the recent slowdown of global investment and trade.
- Over the past year the global economy has transitioned from a robust and synchronised expansion to a widespread slowdown.
- Global growth has weakened on the back of soft investment, which was also a key driver of the sharp fall in global trade growth in the first half of 2019 (see Chart A)[2].
- Against this backdrop, this box assesses the role of uncertainty in the recent slowdown of global investment and trade.
- Economic uncertainty can stem from different sources and is characterised by a situation in which agents cannot contemplate all the possible states of nature or characterise their probability distributions.
- define economic uncertainty as the conditional volatility of a disturbance that is unforecastable from the perspective of economic agents[6], with an increase in uncertainty generally being associated with a growing difficulty of predicting future economic outcomes.
- [7] Applying the same approach to a large selection of country trade indicators, we also derived a measure of global trade uncertainty[8].
- The estimation results suggest that while global economic uncertainty has increased gradually over the past year, global trade uncertainty has surgedmore rapidly.
- Trade-related uncertainty has risen by some two standard deviations over the past year; more than twice the increase observed in economic uncertainty (see Chart B).
- Chart B Global economic and trade uncertainty (standard deviation from mean)
- Following the global financial crisis, policy debates have increasingly focused on the macroeconomic consequences of heightened uncertainty.
- Recent ECB analysis suggests that rising uncertainty had negative effects on euro area investment during the global financial and euro area sovereign debt crises.
- [9] An often-cited channel linking uncertainty to real activity is the irreversibility of investment.
- [10] Moreover, the interplay between uncertainty shocks and financial frictions can have powerful effects on economic activity.
- [12] Economic uncertainty also appears to play an important role at the current juncture.
- Our analysis also suggests that uncertainty has been a drag on global investment and trade growth over the past year, accounting for a third of the decline in investment and for 40% of the decline in global imports (see Chart D).
Chart D Decomposition of world investment growth and world imports growth (excluding the euro area) (quarterly average percentage change between 2017Q2-2018Q2 and 2018Q2-2019Q2, deviation from trend)