Boris’s Blog

In its recently-published World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has painted a slightly brighter picture of the world economy; however it has also warned again that optimism should remain tempered as “most advanced economies still face major brakes on growth”.
 
The IMF now expects the world economy to grow by 3.5% in real terms [...]

Just returning from a three-day trip to Greece where I did my best to gather fresh impressions of the heavy recession there, as well as of local retailing in the difficult period. Bluntly speaking, the whole situation is extremely far away from beautiful, but it was definitely interesting to observe how perceptions are gradually changing [...]

For the first time since records began 14 years ago, in February there were more than 17 million unemployed people in the 17 countries that today form the Euro area. This corresponded to an unemployment rate of 10.8%, up from 10.0% a year earlier. The lowest official rates have been posted by Austria (4.2%), the [...]

By Boris Planer and Tatjana Wolff
 
Having returned from our research trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, we’ve found ourselves sitting on a fairly big pile of pictures of hypermarkets, supermarkets, convenience stores, convenience foods and private label ranges etc from the modern end of grocery retailing; as well as pictures of tuck and spaza shops as well [...]

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has today announced that his government is expecting slower economic growth in China this year amid “downward pressure on economic growth” in large parts of the world, including China’s key export markets of Europe and the US.
 
Wen stated at the opening ceremony of the national Parliament that the official growth [...]

 
As always, you can click on the chart to see a larger version of it.
 
Have a good day!

Spending the afternoon on the finishing touches for a presentation I’m going to deliver at the modern retail conference of Portugal’s retail association APED next week Tuesday, 17 Jan. Will speak on economic and retail trends across Europe that may or may not affect Portugal, at a conference that will be all about how to [...]

By Tatjana Wolff and Boris Planer

A couple of weeks ago when working on a short article on retailing in the Euro area, we were sitting in front of that very simple data set of real GDP growth rates from 2005 - 2015, looking at how the troubled economies were doing of the countries that [...]

A new set of unemployment data are out from Eurostat, and if you think the UK is in trouble, which it is, still have a look at Greece or Spain or parts of Central & Eastern Europe. Just to put things in a wider perspective, as a certain tendency to see ourselves as the worst [...]

Brazil has a growing population of 195 million people. This, of course, is only an estimate that shouldn’t be taken at face value – just like the seven billion people who are reportedly living on Earth now. (The seven billionth person was apparently born very recently in the Philippines, the US, Germany, Kenya and who [...]