Series of bankruptcies of German department stores, soaring US interest rates, Chinese real estate crisis… In recent weeks, worrying signs for the health of the global economy have multiplied. “Business failures are increasing everywhere; they have already exceeded their 2019 level in the United Kingdom, Canada and Sweden”, observes Bruno de Moura Fernandes, economist at Coface.
World trade is in recession (–0.7% in the first quarter of 2023) and geopolitical risks continue to weigh on activity. “Nothing really catastrophic, reassures Charles-Henri Colombier, economist at Rexecode. But the outlook is gloomy, and the economy should show persistent weakness in the second half of the year. »
At the beginning of 2023, the strong concerns linked to the energy crisis had quickly dissipated to give way to a partly excessive optimism: Europe was able to do without Russian gas, China was finally reopening its economy, and tourism was on the rise again. wheel caps. “But both manufacturing and business climate indicators have turned out to be rather bad, and we have now returned to measured pessimism”summarizes Hélène Baudchon, economist at BNP Paribas.
This is especially true for the euro area. If the good performance of the French and Spanish economies surprised in the second quarter (with 0.5% and 0.4% growth respectively), while Germany stagnated (0%), the coming months look more delicate. “The tightening of monetary policy is starting to weigh on activity: the cost of credit is rising, especially for companies”, explains Riccardo Marcelli Fabiani, at Oxford Economics. In July, the PMI index, which reflects the sentiment of purchasing managers on the economy, fell to 47 in the monetary union, its lowest level since November 2020, raising fears of a contraction in activity.
“Rise in real wages”
In June, industrial production still progressed by 0.5%… However, if we remove the figures for Ireland (+ 13.1%), artificially inflated by the presence of multinationals on its soil, it actually fell 0.9%. “It is all the more worrying that the slowdown is starting to spread to services, which have held up quite well until now”notes Anna Titareva, economist at UBS.
The Capital Economics teams have thus calculated that tourism had inflated growth in the euro zone by 0.3 points in the first half of 2023. A contribution on which European economies will no longer be able to count on the second part of the year. , as the sector has now largely recovered to pre-Covid-19 levels.
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