Five years after the financial meltdown, the global economic recovery is hardly worthy of the name. The International Monetary Fund has just revised its forecasts for the world economy down — again.
Growth almost everywhere should be faster. What's holding it back? The list of causes is long, and the details vary from place to place, but toward the top is a kind of self-willed institutional incapacity.
In itself, a slow recovery isn't surprising. Recessions involving financial crashes are harder to shrug off than ordinary downturns. Even so. For 2013, the IMF predicts growth of 1.2 percent in the advanced economies. The United States is expected to see output growth of 1.7 percent, which is feeble; output in the euro area is projected to fall by 0.6 percent, which is outrageous.