Heena Sharma Blog

With coronavirus getting a tighter grip on the China and impacting world trade, most analysts have started lowering global growth forecasts as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP) for the first quarter of calendar year 2020 (Q1-2020). Those at UBS, for instance, expect this would be the weakest quarter for global growth since the global financial crisis (GFC) and on par with the Asian crisis in the late 1990s. Global GDP, according to Arend Kapteyn, global head of economic research at UBS, will take a serious knock and slip to 0.7 per cent in the January 2020 quarter (Q1-2020) from 3.2 per cent in the December 2019 quarter (Q4-2019). Though he expects growth to rebound in the April – June 2020 quarter, the impact could slow the overall 2020 GDP growth by 20 basis points (bps) to 2.9 per cent. The main channel of economic disruption at this stage, according to UBS, is largely via reduced tourism flows (in/out of China), reduced import demand from China — particularly o...

The number of deaths from China's new coronavirus epidemic jumped to 902 on Monday after the hardest-hit province of Hubei reported 91 new fatalities. In its daily update, Hubei's health commission also confirmed another 2,618 new cases in the central province, where the outbreak emerged in December. There are now more than 39,800 confirmed cases across China, based on previously released figures from the government. The new virus is believed to have emerged last year in a market that sells wild animals in Hubei's capital Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak, before spreading across the country. The World Health Organization (WHO) said Saturday that the number of cases being reported daily in China was "stabilising", although the health body warned it was too early to say if the virus had peaked. A WHO "international expert mission" left late Sunday for China, the agency's director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on T...