The global economy is, once again, trying to return to growth, helped by a modest pick-up of trade and an improvement in confidence. It is doing so, however, at different speeds, with the United States and Japan growing at a stronger pace than the euro area and large emerging economies enjoying a moderate cyclical upswing. Different dynamics are also developing in labour markets in the United States, where unemployment is slowly decreasing, and in the euro area, where instead it keeps rising.

The projection presented in this Economic Outlook rests on the assumption that policy actions will be sufficient to prevent destabilising euro area developments, that there will be no major disturbances affecting oil prices, and that disruptive US fiscal consolidation will be avoided.

Many countries face a long period of adjustment to erase the legacies of the crisis, particularly high unemployment, excess capacity and large fiscal imbalances. Further ahead, demographic changes, including ageing, and fundamental forces of economic convergence will bring about massive shifts in the composition of global GDP. To illustrate the nature and scale of some of the policy challenges posed by these developments, this chapter describes medium and long-term scenarios for OECD and non-OECD G20 countries using a new modelling framework to extend the short-term projections described in  . This framework focuses on the interaction between technological progress, demographic change, fiscal adjustment, current account imbalances and structural policies. The scenarios suggest that gradual but ambitious fiscal consolidation and structural reforms could bring about substantial gains in growth as well as reducing a range of risks, particularly by reducing large fiscal and current account imbalances.

This annex contains data on key economic series which provide a background to the recent economic developments in the OECD area described in the main body of this report. Data for 2011 to 2013 are OECD estimates and projections. The data in some of the tables have been adjusted to conform to internationally agreed concepts and definitions in order to make them more comparable across countries, as well as consistent with historical data shown in other OECD publications. Regional aggregates are based on weights that change each period, with the weights depending on the series considered. For details on aggregation, see OECD Economic Outlook Sources and Methods.