A jobless expansion, the growing role of financial wealth, and the impact of fiscal policy will widen the bifurcation of the consumer this year. The no-hire, no-fire labor market is delivering stability for most workers, but the young and underemployed are finding it increasingly difficult to gain a foothold. Lower inflation will help ease pressure, but will struggle to move the needle much, particularly for lower-income households.
Demographic trends imply emerging market savings rates are approaching multi-decade peaks and will only fall marginally over the next few decades.
The Canadian economy avoided a technical recession in 2025 and only meagre advances are likely well into early 2026. Game-changing policy shifts are prompting structural adjustments in Canada’s economy.
We expect an above-consensus increase in US consumer spending growth next year, but the state of the consumer is increasingly bifurcated.
Unemployment is rising and wage growth is declining for young adults, which could have a long-term scarring impact. Weak labor market prospects and rising housing costs are causing more young adults to live with their parents.
Diverging fortunes across age and income groups reveal both resilience and fragility in the US consumer outlook.
Large primary deficits make for a concerning fiscal outlook
In the media|17 July 2025 Barclays Sees Senegal’s Debt Burden Easing After Data is Rebased As Senegal’s debt crisis mounts, the government continues to explore its financing options. To read the full article, click here. Tags: DebtSenegal Share: Related Posts USMCA scenarios: North American trade at a crossroads The odds of our baseline view of … Read more
NATO’s commitment to spend 5% of GDP annually on defence by 2035 is broadly in line with the change to our defence-spending assumptions that we made in March, when we lifted core defence spending from 2% of GDP to 3% by 2030 and to 3.5% by 2035.
The end of student loan forbearance is expected to have minimal effect on consumer spending, though delinquencies and credit score declines may increase, particularly in the Southeast.
Wealth effects proved to be a quite reliable tailwind to consumer spending this cycle.
As consumer sentiment deteriorated, concerns about the outlook for consumer spending increased. While there’s a statistically significant relationship between sentiment and consumption, the economy has withstood shocks to sentiment without falling into a recession.
The resilience of consumption is essential to support sustained wage-driven inflation and the Bank of Japan’s rate hikes. We see little risk of spending faltering due to the projected gradual rate hikes to 1% because the ageing of society has made households’ balance sheets less vulnerable to rate increases.
For many households, tax refunds represent the biggest cash-flow event of the year. It’s early, but we think this will be a favorable tax-refund season for filers.
The EU VAT Gap 2024 report offers an extensive analysis of the value-added tax (VAT) compliance and policy gaps across the EU. As part of a larger consortium, Oxford Economics analysed the discrepancy between the theoretical VAT Total Tax Liability (VTTL) and actual revenue collected, providing insights into compliance inefficiencies and policy-induced revenue losses.
We estimate that Japan’s nominal neutral interest rate – the rate consistent with monetary policy that is neither stimulative nor restrictive – has risen somewhat since 2022, marking a striking reversal from its decades-long slide. More importantly, we project it to continue rising gradually, to around 1% by 2030 from 0% in 2023.
Lending to SMEs by Funding Circle supported a £6.9 billion contribution to UK GDP, sustained over 95,800 jobs, and was associated with activity stimulating £1.6 billion in tax revenues in 2023.
Oxford Economics were commissioned by British Gas to undertake a social return on investment analysis of the British Gas Energy Trust, a charity which funds interventions to alleviate the detrimental impact of fuel poverty.
Despite last summer’s US Supreme Court decision, the Biden administration has forgiven $153bn in student loan debt through piecemeal actions. This, combined with a new, more generous income-driven repayment plan and a yearlong grace period following the end of the pandemic-era pause on student loan payments, has reduced the amounts borrowers in the aggregate are paying back to the Department of Education.
In this presentation deck, we grappled with some of the Africa’s most pressing issues for 2024 and beyond. We explored Africa’s alternative funding strategies during challenging times, examined the continent’s growth hotspot, and unpacked South Africa’s political economy in the lead up to the general elections in 2024.
