Welcome to The Agency Brief — a regular briefing on the main things going on in the world that agency leaders should know about.

We analyse a wide range of sources and distill it into a summary you can use in your strategic planning.

Here's your briefing.

Global fragilities and a war in Europe are leading us into a new age of economic insecurity

As pandemic healthcare protection measures have eased, demand has ballooned but supply has struggled to keep pace. Then came the war in Ukraine. Both together have cast a spotlight on a number of problems in the modern global economy.

  • Food security
  • Access to energy
  • Supply chain fragility
  • Interdependency of national economies
  • Slow response to the climate crisis

For those with eyes to see, there were warning bells already. The 9/11 atrocity that led to the protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq eventually pushed the US and the UK both into an internal breakdown. Then came the banking crisis of 2008, triggered by sub-prime mortgages in the US, that quickly spread to Europe and across the world.

There are no simple solutions, and certainly no going back to 'the way things were' before. How the world resolves these difficult issues will undoubtedly affect the global economy for years to come.

This month, April 2022, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) downgraded its world growth projections:

Global growth is projected to slow from an estimated 6.1 percent in 2021 to 3.6 percent in 2022 and 2023. This is 0.8 and 0.2 percentage points lower for 2022 and 2023 than projected in January.
Graphic of IMF global growth projections for April 2022