Keynote address – John Pickhaver
Keynote address John Pickhaver, Macquarie Capital, Australia and New Zealand Economic outlook and the opportunities for Infrastructure
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Despite the impact of the pandemic on global economies, the recovery is already underway. Stretched government balance sheets have provided an opportunity for record levels of unallocated private capital to support the economic recovery from COVID-19. Investment activity will be driven by the digital transformation of infrastructure assets, corporate and government efforts to decarbonise and a focus on sovereign resilience.
futurebuilding
I would like to take you on a journey through what the data is telling us about our economy and its recovery from the pandemic. Firstly, we will take a global perspective then deep dive into the Australian market and finally we will look at the opportunities that will drive investment activity in the infrastructure sector. From a global standpoint, in terms of real gross domestic product (GDP) there was a sharp drop-off courtesy of COVID-19 in 2020 before a recovery during 2021. Compared to the preCOVID trend, there has been a very sharp recovery (Figure 1), in fact, it is the strongest in history – much stronger than the recovery from the global financial crisis (GFC). Looking forward, our forecasts show very strong GDP growth before returning to more normalised levels as we travel
