Outlook for the next six months

Three difficulties - global/local macro conditions, credit stress, and uncertainty - will weigh upon the January-June period, and result in relatively sombre outcomes

What can we expect of global/local macro conditions in the first half of 2019? We got a slow and partial recovery from 2012 to end-2018. But we now face headwinds again, through a combination of stress in the credit market and increased uncertainty. These problems may hamper output in the January-March and April-June quarters. This shapes the setting for macro policy, and determines the initial conditions for next Parliament and the Cabinet.

While the official GDP data has problems, we are able to reconstruct a measure of economic activity by combining other well-measured series. This portrays a slow and partial recovery