OECD: ‘Moderate’ US growth in early 2013

According to the OECD, the Group of Seven (G7) countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – will grow at a 2.4 percent clip in the first quarter and 1.8 percent in the second. As a whole, the G7 economies contracted by 0.5 percent in the last three months of 2012, the OECD found.

{mosads}The OECD projections for the first half of 2013, at least when it comes to the United States, are a bit rosier than other analysts’ predictions.

OECD, which counts 34 emerging or advanced economies as its member countries, also said that the European recovery would take longer than elsewhere on the globe, and that an economic comeback from Japan was helping to boost the 2013 outlook.

Emerging economies like China, the group said, would also continue to grow at a faster clip than more established countries. China’s economy, for instance, is projected to grow at a more than 8 percent rate in the first six months of 2013.

Japan, meanwhile, is expected to grow at a similar clip to the United States in the first half of 2013, even after it saw its economy contract by 3.7 percent in 2012’s third quarter.

Germany is expected to remain the economic driver in Europe, where policymakers are still dealing with the fallout from the Cyprus financial crisis. The German economy is expected to grow moderately – 2.3 percent and 2.6 percent – in the first and second quarters.

The U.K. is expected to have more tepid, but positive growth, in both quarters. But Italy’s economy is expected to contract in both quarters, with France facing a smaller contraction in the first quarter.

“Within the euro area, there is a renewed divergence between growth in Germany, which is likely to pick up strongly over the first two quarters of 2013, and that of other countries, which will remain slow or negative,” the OECD report said.