三少爷的剑

A |     Washington, Oct 14 (UNI) The global economy is "dangerously close" to a recession, as inflation remains elevated, interest rates rise, and growing debt burden hits the developing world, World Bank President David Malpass said.



"We've lowered our 2023 growth forecast from 3 per cent to 1.9 per cent for the global growth, that's dangerously close to a world recession," Malpass on Thursday said at a press conference during the IMF and World Bank annual meetings.



"All of the problems that people have taken note of, the inflation problem, the interest rate rises, and the cutoff of capital flow to developing world hit the poor hard," he said, highlighting the buildup of debt for developing countries.



"That's a world recessions could happen under certain circumstances," Malpass said.



In a study published in mid-September, the World Bank warned that as central banks across the world simultaneously hike interest rates in response to inflation, the world may be edging toward a global recession in 2023, with a growth forecast of only 0.5 per cent.



The World Bank chief noted at the press conference that world population growth is estimated at 1.1 per cent per year. "So if you get much slower in terms of world growth, that means people are going backward," Malpass said in response to a question from Xinhua.



Citing a recent World Bank report, Malpass said that Covid-19 pandemic dealt the biggest setback to global poverty-reduction efforts since 1990, pushing about 70 million people into extreme poverty in 2020, and the war in Ukraine threatens to make matters worse.



According to the Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report, global median income declined by 4 per cent in 2020, the first decline since its measurements of median income began in 1990.



"So if we have a world recession now, that would also depress median income, meaning that the people in the lower half of the income scale are going down," Malpass said.



The World Bank chief also noted that he has been concerned about the concentration of capital in the world in the top end of the advanced economies.



"So that's, I think, one of the issues that the world has to deal with to allow capital to flow to new businesses and to developing countries, that would take a change in the direction of fiscal and monetary policies in the advanced economies," said Malpass.



The world is facing very challenging environment from the advanced economies, and that has serious implications, dangers for the developing countries, he said. "My deep concern is that these conditions and trends might persist into 2023 and 2024."

UNI/XINHUA PRT。    KISKUNMAJSA, Hungary -- Two people were killed and six were injured in a car accident in Hungary early on Thursday after a vehicle suspected of transporting migrants entering the country illegally hit a tree and overturned. The accident occurred around 3 a.m. near Kiskunmajsa, in southern Hungary near the border with Serbia. Police said the driver of the vehicle, a Renault with French license plates, sped away after police attempted to perform a traffic stop and lost control in a bend in the road.As it evaded police, the car swerved and hit a tree and then overturned, police said. Jozsef Hangai, a spokesperson for the Hungarian National Ambulance Service, said that two of those in the vehicle died at the scene, while six other injured people were taken to local hospitals for treatment. Police said initial information suggested the vehicle was driven by a human smuggler who was transporting the migrants. Hungary has taken a hard stand against illegal immigration, and in 2015 erected a 320-kilometer (200-mile) border fence along its frontiers with Serbia and Croatia to fend off hundreds of thousands of migrants attempting to enter the European Union along the so-called Balkan route. Still, Hungary's neighbor to the north, Slovakia, began conducting traffic checks at its border last week amid what it says is a dramatic rise in migrants crossing onto its territory from Hungary. Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland also reintroduced controls at their own borders with Slovakia last week to curb migrants coming in from the country.。