Inflation is a disease
that can wreck a society, Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate economist,
once said. Add rising unemployment to the diagnosis, and his profession
ascribes a rather non-technical term to the debilitating effect on people:
misery.
In Ukraine's case, war
will exact greater economic casualties. Tension with Russia-backed rebels will
prolong joblessness in the eastern-European nation, and inflation won't offer
much relief, the surveys showed. The one-two punch means Ukrainian consumers
are set to be the fourth-saddest among 51 economies (including the euro area)
based on forecasts for the misery measure.
Adding to the agony is
the relatively abysmal income growth that will fail to cushion Ukrainian
households against the still-surging prices. At $8,494 gross domestic product
per capita this year, Ukraine only edges out the Philippines among the
countries surveyed and measured with the International Monetary Fund's proxy
for resident income.
Unemployment probably
will climb to 9.5 percent in Ukraine this year from its 8.9 percent rate as of
the third quarter in 2014, the survey data show. Inflation is projected to rise
at a 17.5 percent pace in 2015, compared with the 24.9 percent December
year-over-year rate.
The depressing
expectations for Ukraine still aren't quite as bad as what the embattled nation
faced in 2014, when it finished second in the misery index. The 2015
projections, dismal as they are, would make Ukraine bright enough to jump past
South Africa and Argentina from last year's misery-index readings.
The three countries
that will probably see the most economic misery in 2015 - South Africa,
Argentina and Venezuela - haven't budged much from their 2014 rankings, when
they occupied three of the top four spots, the data showed.
At 78.5 percent, the
estimated CPI inflation rate in back-to-back, most-miserable Venezuela more
than quadruples Ukraine's inflation rate. The dire shortage of basic goods in
Venezuela last week prompted neighboring Trinidad & Tobago to offer a
tissue paper-for-oil swap.
Five years after
investors popularized the term "PIIGS" to describe a handful of
European countries with bloated budget deficits, four of those five countries
remain in dire straits, according to their projected misery indexes.
Greece is 5th, Spain
is 6th, Portugal is 10th and Italy is 11th in this year's ranking, though each
show about average projected income levels relative to survey peers. (Ireland
happily sits further down the chain at No. 16 in the misery ranking and with a
much-better-than-average GDP per capita of $48,787. The 51 economies in our
misery index average GDP per capita of $31,079.)
Enough of the sad
news. For the glass-half-full take, stay tuned for our take on the most
consumer-friendly economies in 2015.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου