like to have a warm start to the year, i ll tell you what, it s looking pretty bleak for the global economy. the pressing issues of 2022 didn t go away at the stroke of midnight on december the 31st. in a few minutes, we re going to be hearing from the managing director of the imf, the international monetary fund, kristalina georgieva. she s going to talk about the challenges the world s finances face and what needs to be done to get the global economy back on track. here s where their predictions stand right now. in 2021, while the pandemic continued to rage, the global economy grew byjust over 6%. this year, the imf is expecting it to be less than half of that. that would be the worst performance in two decades. a third of the world is forecast to be in recession this year, driven by slowdowns in china, the united states and the european union. and prices, boy, they are rising. we all know that. but here s the official imf forecast this year. it s predicting inflation to rise by six
in a few minutes, we re going to be hearing from the managing director of the imf, the international monetary fund, kristalina georgieva. she s going to talk about the challenges the world s finances face and what needs to be done to get the global economy back on track. here s where their predictions stand right now. in 2021, while the pandemic continued to rage, the global economy grew byjust over 6%. this year, the imf is expecting it to be less than half of that. that would be the worst performance in two decades. a third of the world is forecast to be in recession this year, driven by slowdowns in china, the united states and the european union. and prices, boy, they are rising. we all know that. but here s the official imf forecast this year. it s predicting inflation to rise by six and a half percent. that s a bit lower than last year and it should fall to around 4% in 202a. so while that growth in prices is slowing,
are lower, and sub saharan africa, europe, where this is not yet happening. and if the deal that was struck on exporting ukrainian grain breaks down, for those that are most dependent on importing food from ukraine, and you rightly pointed out to north africa, it s going to be very, very difficult. i would move the attention today to fertilisers, because this is where we see particular threat for food production and therefore food prices in 2023. fertiliser prices remain very high. production of ammonia in the european union, for example, shrank dramatically. all of this is connected, of course, to the impact of russia s war on gas prices and gas availability. but on a more positive note, what we do see is a stronger
we ve recovered now, but our business has completely been transformed from a historically uk being part of europe business i.e. 25%, only being bought from uk sellers to now 75%, 80% being uk to uk business. so, it s been a dramatic impact. and for us as a business itself, this is mainly the impact on on uk buyers and sellers suffering from not being part of the bigger supply and demand market. but for us as a business, the complexity of shipping the products. but the main thing was that we used to have our products authenticated outside of paris, so we had to build a new logistics operation, a new authentication hub in crawley. here in the uk? so, south west of london, and had to rebuild our presence basically, so we had to completely rethink the uk not being part of the european union any more.
being part of europe business ie 25%, only being bought from uk sellers to now 75%, 80% being uk to uk business. so it s been a dramatic impact. and, for us as a business itself, this is mainly the impact on on uk buyers and sellers suffering from not being part of the bigger supply and demand market. but for us as a business, the complexity of shipping the products. but the main thing was that we used to have our products authenticated outside of paris, so we had to build a new logistics operation, a new authentication hub in crawley, so southwest of london, and had to rebuild our presence basically. so we had to completely rethink. the uk has not been part of the european union any more. max, let me end on this. on the 29th of december last year, the queen of british fashion, dame vivienne westwood, iconic fashion designer, unfortunately passed away at the age of 81. how does the death of a designer