The World Economy

here are a number of forces driving developments in the world economy, chief among them demographic change, technological innovation, international trade and financial lib-eralisation, and domestic reforms in both OECD and other economies. With the aim of providing a framework for long-term policy planning in OECD economies, the OECD’s ‘Linkages Project’1 has designed two contrasting visions of the world economy – one based on the premise of high growth in all countries, the other much less optimistic – to capture how these forces might interact over the next 25 years. Using a comput-able ‘general equilibrium ’ model (the ‘Linkages