It is a pleasure to be here. Since this is my third appearance here, I thought it might be useful to give a brief history of the past couple of years as a prelude to making some observations about the current state of things, and about some of the issues for the year ahead.
The world economy As we all know, the year 2000 was a strong year for global growth. In that year, world GDP rose by almost 5 per cent, and growth in the major countries (the G7) ran at about 3½ per cent.