Industrial Economies Appear on Track For First Time in Years, OECD Says
BERLIN -- For the first time in years, the economies of nearly all the world's industrialized regions are going in the right direction, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development said.</br></br>The agency's new semiannual world economic outlook projects that the OECD area, which consists of 29 industrialized countries, will expand by an inflation-adjusted 3% this year and next -- 1.5 percentage points higher than forecast six months ago -- before slowing to around 2.5% in 2001.</br></br>"The slowdown which occurred late in 1998 has ended," the OECD said. "For the first time in several years, output levels in all the major OECD regions might be moving toward their respective potential," that is, toward full employment, "albeit marginally so in Japan."</br></br>Japan is expected to grow at only 1.5% a year during the next couple of years, according to the report, but even that economy is showing some positive signs.</br></br>"These changes reflect mainly unexpected near-term momentum of the U.S. economy, a stronger and more rapid resumption of growth in Japan, and particularly Korea, as well as a slightly better outlook for the European Union," the report said.