BUSINESS is anything but usual right now, but as the shipping industry grapples with the immediate daily crises, chief executives are also nervously looking ahead to fathom just how detrimental coronavirus is going to be to the world economy.

Those of a nervous disposition would have done well to avoid the news altogether this week.

On Tuesday the IMF announced that the world faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s &mdash far worse than the Global Financial Crisis.

On Thursday economists essentially predicted a lost decade of growth for Latin America and the Caribbean.

And as we recorded this week’s edition of the podcast on Friday April 17, the latest figures from China’s national bureau of statistics revealed that China’s economy shrank for the first time since at least 1992 in the first quarter, as the coronavirus outbreak paralysed production and spending.

Joining Lloyd’s List editor Richard Meade and China editor Cichen Shen on the podcast this week to help put these figures into context and explain what the coronavirus economic fallout means for trade demand is Tom Rogers, head of macroeconomic consulting for Asia at Oxford Economics.

Tom offers his view of the global outlook but then breaks down some of his regional insights and talks us through the work that the Oxford Economics team has been looking in assessing individual economies’ vulnerability to the downturn and to benchmark economies’ ability to rebound from the shock

You can keep up to date with all our latest stories on the subject via our special coronavirus page here.

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