The global economic recovery is regaining momentum despite the negative impact of high oil prices, central bank governors from the G10 group of industrial countries said yesterday.
"Most recent indicators suggest some strengthening in the beginning of the third quarter," said Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, chairman of the G10 group of central bankers and president of the European Central Bank (ECB), after a meeting in Basel, Switzerland.
Mr Trichet's upbeat comments, which analysts said were in line with those of Mr Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, followed worries in recent months about a slowdown in the pace of world economic growth.
But economists said that financial markets did not necessarily share his optimism about the growth outlook and the relatively modest effect of higher energy costs.
"It is interesting to see central bank governors wearing rose-tinted glasses," said Mr Holger Schmieding, economist at Bank of America. "Whatever they talk about ... they seem to be explicitly endorsing the optimistic version."
The Group of Ten includes the biggest European economies as well as the US and Japan.
Mr Trichet said the sentiment among the bank governors was that the global recovery was "confirmed after some slowing down in the second quarter".
Prospects for emerging economies had improved, Mr Trichet said, and "the emerging world is continuing to demonstrate a strong recovery".
In the euro zone, he said the gradual recovery detected by the ECB "months and months ago" had also been confirmed in recent statistics.
However, many economists still expect a deceleration in the pace of growth in the euro zone and US into next year.
Mr Trichet said oil prices had been driven higher largely by the strong demand that was part of the world economic upswing, rather than by supply-side factors.
"The present level is much higher than what would normally be appropriate if we want to optimise the functioning of the global economy, not only in the short term but in the medium and long term perspective," the ECB president said. - (Financial Times Service)
