In this special report Cees looks forward at both the global and local economic situation
"After a great fall (2008), success in arresting the fall and stabilizing the economy on a low level of capacity utilization (2009), growth prospects tend to be very promising as slack resources as well as new inputs will be available to be put to work. Demand needs to grow in order to put such available resources to work.
Potentially this will be so for years to come (2010-2020) as any new supply imbalances eventually ending the next growth expansion (balance of payments, inflation) could remain manageable for the time being.
This, in a nutshell, is the case for growth.
It then gets better, but it also gets worse. For the global environment looks even better than this simple base case, offering piggyback opportunities for small open economies like ourselves. This very favourable global environment, however, may also prove to offer a too rich diet of windfalls, something we may have difficulty in digesting. If simultaneously we create a few headwinds of our own making domestically, there may yet be major hurdles to get the growth engine fully back on the road.
Thus the base case for growth is a simple one (picking yourself up after a great fall), and the global outlook potentially further underwrites this by promising to be very accommodating. Yet one places footnotes, externally and domestically, as to the hurdles we may face in fully realising our growth potential...
Read Full Report: Economic Prospects for 2010 and beyond