Macroeconomic Climate: From World Economy to National Economy

The exogenous shocks (the coronavirus pandemic and the geopolitical tensions) and their consequences have had an important impact on the macroeconomic climate in recent years. The annual growth pace of the world economy decelerated to only 3.3% in 2024, the weakest dynamics since the pandemic year 2020, according to the estimates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF, World economic outlook—A critical juncture amid policy shifts, 2025a). Furthermore, in the first months of 2025, the uncertainty increased to record high levels due to the major shifts in trade policy in the USA, the largest economy in the world. In this context, the probability of the outbreak of a new global economic crisis in the short run has significantly increased, being estimated at around 30% by the experts of the IMF in April 2025. In this paper, we analyze the recent macroeconomic developments from a perspective of the world economy, the Euroland economy, and the Romanian economy. Furthermore, we implement standard econometric tools (the Hodrick-Prescott filter) and use the IMF database (annual statistics for the period 2000–2025) in order to estimate the annual potential growth rate for the world economy, the USA, Euroland, and Romania. According to the results of our estimates, the annual potential growth rate for world economic activity in 2025 is 3.1%, below the average for the period 2000–2019 (3.6%). There is a gap between the USA and Euroland in terms of the annual potential growth rate of economic activity, with estimates for 2025 at 2.3% and 1.3%, respectively. This high level of the gap is explained by the fact that the economy of Euroland paid a higher invoice since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. In the case of Romania, the annual potential growth is estimated at only 2.7% in 2025, the weakest performance since 2000, as the country is confronted with high levels of the twin deficits.