Hello, and welcome to the Global Forecast from the Economist Intelligence Unit. My name's Tony McMahon and, as ever, I am joined by Robin Bew.

And I guess if you look at things that are going on with unemployment. If you look at things that's going on with industrial production, the export data, all that kind of stuff, there is a sense that actually a lot of the momentum in the US has been a little bit artificial, perhaps not really got the legs that you would have hoped. And as a result, we think as we go through this year, the tenor of press coverage and the tenor of discussion in the policy meetings is going to be one about economic weakness and the need to continue to support the economy in the absence of a lot of fiscal stimulus. And that means, we think, that interest rates are going to be on hold for even longer than we'd assumed.

But if you look at the big economies which are very much plugged into the international trading system - so Europe, America, Japan - what you see there is that the growth that we've seen, and we have seen growth pretty much everywhere, has not been as robust as people have thought. In Europe, for example, Germany, ostensibly the engine of growth but it seems to be going sideways at the moment.

And there's a real sense that it's really only governments are keeping the show on the road, and governments can't afford to do this for very much longer. And actually the recovery's going to be a harder grind even that we'd assumed, and we were relatively pessimistic in comparison to most other forecasters.

So again, interest rates in Europe and Japan being pushed now in towards the end of 2011 and a pretty lacklustre picture for growth, at least in those developed markets.

So our sense is that you will continue to see a lot more strength in the emerging markets. And, in fact, over the course of the last month or so, in fact, we've been revising up some of the forecasts that we've got for growth in the developing world.

So this story, which has been around for a long time now, that the emerging world is really the hub of this recovery, and the richer countries are going to be the laggards, that story's becoming even more intensified as we go into the future, with strong growth in Asia, strong growth in Latin America, and a pretty depressing picture in the OECD.

Everyone knew that Brazil had done a lot better than many other emerging market economies, but we've just been revising up there again. Things look pretty strong. The domestic demand, dynamic there is quite strong. Policy has been pretty good.

And actually other places where you might have been a little bit more negative. Mexico is a better than we had assumed, so we've pushed growth up there, too.

So certainly Latin America is looking more robust than we'd thought. Asia probably still quite a bit stronger than that, but Latin America doing quite nicely, and I guess that sets this tone more broadly that the emerging markets, not just the ones in Asia everyone's talking about, but actually more broadly than that, are doing pretty well at a time when Europe and America simply are not.

Greece is clearly in the headlines. Lots of questions about whether Europe will manage to set up a European Monetary Fund or not, or will they need to rely on the IMF if Greece is unable to roll over its own debt. And that's still a very open question. It's not clear that they've cut out the capital markets yet. But there's a strong sense that there's a major problem there which is going to persist for a long time.

And then similar issues likely to float to the surface in places like Portugal over the next few years, and Ireland acting as an example of what domestic steps you have to take if you want to avoid those things. But most countries simply don't have a robust enough political settlement to force through the kinds of cuts that the Irish government are forcing through. So Greece, massive strikes. And you could imagine you'd see something similar in Portugal if they were forced to go down the same road.

So I think quite a lot of pessimism about the fiscal outlook and as a result, the economic growth outlook in those peripheral European countries.

And that is constantly floating to the surface, this question mark about the sustainability of the eurozone in general.

Now, we don't think that the eurozone is going to disintegrate, but what we do think is that the price of keeping it together will be a lot more fixed fiscal lassitude than we've seen over the past decade or so, and Germany and France, maybe not directly transferring funds to these peripheral countries, but certainly being prepared to offer some guarantees that previously would have been unthinkable.

So you've almost got some kind of fiscal settlement by the back door here, because fiscal conditions in those peripheral countries are so bad, and if you don't want to let the eurozone break up, the price of that may be biting the bullet and allowing a bit more money to slosh around the eurozone more broadly. It's going to be very difficult for voters, though, in those richer European countries to stomach.