I have made this point on several other occasions but it bears repeating. Simply asking 'what’s the number?' will not be a good guide either to making policy decisions or to understanding them. For policy-makers need not only to ask their forecasters what their best guess is, but to think about how good that guess is likely to be.
A global economic downturn of the magnitude we are witnessing at the moment must necessarily have serious implications for a small open economy like Denmark. Exports have declined by almost one fifth over the last six months. And the downward trend continues. Last year, output fell by more than 1 per cent in Denmark, while it rose in most other EU member states.