OECD’s Gurria Says Reforms Needed to Avert ‘Mediocre’ Decade
The largest developed nations must improve education and fiscal reforms to prevent the economic malaise that followed the financial crisis from extending for a decade, said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“The greatest concern we have at the OECD is that this undesirable or mediocre scenario, it’s not just for this year and next,” Gurria said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Washington yesterday. “It looks mediocre for 2015, even for 2020, in the absence of structural policy measures.”
The recovery in advanced economies including the U.S. and Germany remains too slow to make large reductions in unemployment, the International Monetary Fund said in January. The European Central Bank last week raised its main lending rate from a record low to curb inflation, putting more pressure on the euro region’s weaker economies.
Gurria, the former Mexican finance minister who has led the Paris-based OECD since 2006 and is scheduled to begin his second five-year term in June, said Europe’s debt problems are limited to Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Portugal was the latest nation to seek a European Union-led bailout after Greece sparked a sovereign-debt crisis that threatened to splinter the euro region a year ago and forced Ireland to seek external help in November.
“I do not see that other countries will be needing these kinds of relief,” Gurria said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Eric Martin in New York at emartin21@bloomberg.net; Sara Eisen in New York at seisen2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net
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