Jiawen Cui 
China heads into 2024 with relatively loose policy settings, but private sector sentiment constrained by property pessimism. Policy efforts will reduce left tail risks but we don’t expect it will be sufficient to prevent the growth downtrend persisting. Recognizing an upside risk that authorities could instead stimulate their way to a high growth target in 2024.
The Indian economy has been more resilient than expected in 2023, but we believe the slowdown has only been postponed rather than called off.
The Bank of Japan left both short-term and long-term policy rates unchanged at Tuesday’s meeting. Amid a decline in global yields, pressures on the Yield Curve Control (YCC) policy framework from bond and foreign exchange rate markets have eased.
Our latest report delves into the transport challenges limiting women’s economic participation in the Sri Lankan economy and explores the role that ride-hailing can play in overcoming the mobility barriers that are holding women back.
We forecast that Tokyo Prefecture will remain Asia Pacific’s largest city in GDP terms until
2034, before being overtaken by Shanghai, and then by other Chinese majors. Greater Tokyo will
remain the world’s largest city economy until at least 2050.
Our latest report explores the transport challenges limiting women’s economic participation in the Indian economy and the role that ride-hailing can play in overcoming them.
Oxford Economics partnered with Airbnb to assess the economic impact of Airbnb in Asia-Pacific. We found that Airbnb contributed US$ 22.5 billion to Asia-Pacific GDP and supported more than 650,000 jobs.
While we believe interest rate hikes are mostly over, interest-sensitive sectors are being weighed down by the cumulative impact of past hikes, which combined with a weaker global economy is creating headwinds for industry.
Indonesia’s domestic demand has proved surprisingly resilient to monetary tightening in 2023, prompting multiple upgrades to our growth forecast this year. However, we still expect the impact of monetary tightening will feed through to growth eventually.
Over a third of London’s greenhouse gases arise from heating and lighting the capital’s residential buildings. Removing those emissions by 2050, let alone 2030, looks challenging.
We are unconvinced that recent measures mark a turning point in China’s housing downturn, just as we were cautious of the efficacy of the “16-point” property support package a year ago.
Looking at the commercial real estate sector in 2024, we see five key themes that are likely to dominate the conversation across various sectors and regions.
After a difficult 2023, we think five key themes will shape the outlook for commercial real estate next year.
Inflation will likely decelerate in 2024 as the impact of imported inflation wanes. We expect the Bank of Japan will end its negative interest rate policy in April after confirming a high wage settlement. But our medium-term projection is that a zero-interest rate policy will take its place and last for years.
In 2024, the main influence on Asia is likely to be a global slowdown, particularly in China and the US. Moreover, governments have limited policy space to deal with these headwinds. Other negative influences, however, are set to ease further, including domestic inflation, external pressure on interest rates, and softening semiconductor prices. Overall, we expect a bumpy year as issues become more country-specific and policy responses and economic outcomes diverge.
More market participants appear to have become confident that the wage-driven inflation is real, which will encourage the Bank of Japan to start normalizing its super-accommodative monetary policy in 2024. We revised up our projection for the spring wage settlement in 2024 to match the strength of the settlement in 2023. We believe that wage increase will continue after 2025, but achieving wage-led 2% inflation is still a long way off.
This 5-page report identifies five key themes that will shape our Industry Climate Service research agenda over the course of 2024. The energy transition will have a significant impact on industrial activity this decade across several dimensions. Alongside the need for industry to urgently decarbonise its own activities, it will also play an instrumental role in the production of the low-carbon technologies necessary for decarbonisation in other sectors of the economy.
With the US Fed expected to remain on hold for a prolonged period, rate decisions in Asia are likely to become more idiosyncratic. We discuss the actions of three central banks, namely Bank Indonesia (BI), Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), and the Bank of Thailand (BOT).
Much of the recent industrial underperformance in advanced economies is consistent with a slowdown triggered by the monetary policy shock that started in December 2021, our analysis shows. This reinforces our view that interest-sensitive sectors that have been struggling will continue to perform particularly poorly in the coming quarters.
While we expect that sector selection will still be an important component to generating alpha in commercial real estate investment, we think the thematic drivers that are likely to support outperformance over the next decade will require more emphasis on selecting for geography.
