Presenting South Africa's budget vote in Parliament on 26 February, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni forecast that the country would grow by 0.9% in 2020 and at an average of just over 1% for the next three years. Global economic growth would come in at 3.3% for 2020, in line with the October 2019 International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast. Mboweni only briefly mentioned the coronavirus, noting that its impact on Asia was uncertain.
Today all of this seems impossibly optimistic and the world has, by all indications, already entered into a recession. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) expects that the global economy will contract to -2.2% in 2020, a difference of more than five percentage points compared to the IMF's forecast quoted by Mboweni. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs expects a more modest contraction to -0.9%.
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