Reality Is Rearing It's head In Davos

At Davos, Recognition of Global Slowdown

Peter S. Goodman

DAVOS, Switzerland -- Among the less helpful ideas that has managed to endure despite a reappraisal of economic wisdom is the notion that faster-growing countries -- principally, China and India -- would prove so robust that they alone could propel the planet. They could spare the globe a synchronized economic downturn, even as Europe, the United States and Japan remained mired in stagnation.

Economists came up with an appropriately silly name for this idea: decoupling, as if the former union between the rich and developing worlds had yielded an amicable divorce. But here at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, this concept seems to have been finally laid to rest. A common-sense view prevails among the economists, government officials and international business executives gathered here, albeit one that can only be described as dispiriting: When things are bad in many places, pain spreads without respect to national boundaries. The world's economy is indeed global. There is no getting off this ride.

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