Recovery seen for rich nations

Upbeat economy to happen at end year

MEXICO CITY: Economic recovery in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) group of rich countries will begin at around the end of the year, the organization’s head said Tuesday, adding that the worst of Mexico’s recession was over.

“There will be recuperation at the end of 2009 or the start of 2010,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said to reporters here. “We’re going to change color from red to black.”

The United States would be one of the first countries to climb out of the recession due its enor­mouse­conomic stimulus packages, which would in turn impact on its close dependents, like Mexico, Gurria said.

Mexico’s economy shrank 8.2 percent in the first quarter as the recession in the United States hit exports hard, reduced the flow of money sent home by migrants, and dealt a blow to tourism, even before the impact of A(H1N1) flu was felt.

In Mexico, “the most negative shrinking of the economy, of exports, industrial production, of employment . . . we saw the worst in the first quarter,” said Gurria.

In response to a question on whether GDP in OECD countries would shrink by 4.6 percent in 2009, Gurria said it would be around that figure.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned in March that the economies of leading industrialized nations would likely contract 4.3 percent this year, in the worst recession in 50 years.

GDP in the 30-member OECD group already plunged by 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008.

“There has never been an economic crisis in which all the countries of the OECD are in recession at the same time,” Gurria said. “This is happening at the moment.”  — AFP