At that time, I summarised our expectations by saying that I thought 1997 would prove to be a good year for economic growth, with GDP growing by about 4 per cent, that inflation would remain below 2 per cent for a while, but with a tendency to pick up as we went through 1998, and that there was a good chance that unemployment would decline.
I said very little about the current account and balance of payments, as the outlook for Asia was still very unclear. We had only two quarters’ data on economic growth in 1997 at the time of our previous meeting - now we have all four.