Beyond the Middle East, Western democracies and many developing countries face important elections in 2024.
Given these circumstances, the chances of robust global growth in 2024 appear tenuous. Nevertheless, there are two ways to mitigate the threats posed by an increasingly fragile economic and geopolitical environment. First, policymakers need to launch major economic-policy overhauls, focusing on structural reforms aimed at cultivating the growth and productivity engines of tomorrow. Second, the international community needs to do better to end the atrocities in the Middle East before that conflict spreads even further across the region and fuels geopolitical turmoil beyond it. Without these interventions, today’s optimists will be sorely disappointed by year’s end.
Mohamed A. El-Erian, president of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse" (Random House, 2016) and a co-author (with Gordon Brown, Michael Spence, and Reid Lidow) of "Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World (Simon & Schuster, 2023)."