CEOs upbeat about global growth prospects

GLOBAL chief executives are brimming with optimism. Having shrugged off worries posed by, say, a Donald Trump presidency or Brexit, they are the most confident they have been in years about global growth prospects.

Expectations that global growth would improve over the next 12 months among nearly 1 300 CEOs interviewed by PwC between October and November 2017 was at the highest level since 2012.

“We have only to look past frantic geopolitical headlines to current economic indicators to understand the reason why. When all the data is in, 2017 will almost certainly turn out to be the best year the global economy has seen since 2010,” PwC finds in its 21st annual global CEO survey, launched this week at the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The irony of releasing these findings at the WEF is that this year’s theme – Creating a shared future in a fractured world – recognises that large parts of the world’s population care not for positive economic data or, indeed, the outlook of C-suite executives.

“Economic prosperity and social cohesion are not one and the same,” the WEF says of the theme of its 48th annual meeting, which seeks “to improve the state of the world”.

Then again, the meeting is being held at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, so make of that what you will.

The 41 South African CEOs interviewed for the survey were, unsurprisingly, far less optimistic about the global economy and their organisations’ short-term growth prospects (down 12 percentage points on the previous year) than the average.

You can’t help but wonder whether the results would have been slightly more positive had the survey been done post the ANC elective conference.

“It would be interesting to assess whether sentiment has changed,” says PwC Southern Africa chief executive Dion Shango.

Interestingly, most CEOs are less optimistic about their own organisation’s growth prospects than they are about overall economic growth.