Last month, the IMF again revised upwards its forecast for world growth in both 2017 and 2018, by 0.1 percentage points in each case, to 3.6% and 3.7% respectively, up from 3.2% last year. Such upward revisions mark a welcome break from the pattern of earlier years, when forecasters regularly pushed back the timing and the scale of the global recovery.
Furthermore, this recovery is relatively broad-based, both geographically and across sectors, and it is not generating the kind of price pressures that would prompt the major central banks to aggressively tighten monetary policy and, as such, curtail that recovery.