2023-12-31 10:01:26
Published31. December 2023, 11:01
Forecast: 2024 will be a difficult year, except in Switzerland
Despite the collapse of Credit Suisse, our country is doing better than other industrialized countries: the Swiss economy is remarkably robust and the unemployment rate remains historically low.
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Switzerland is a special case that defies all crises, writes the “SonntagsZeitung”. According to experts, the Swiss economy will continue to grow much faster in 2024 than in neighboring countries and also faster than in the United States. Our country has indeed resisted the economic slowdown caused by Covid-19 surprisingly well and is once once more experiencing the growth of the pre-pandemic period. Few industrialized countries have achieved this. Lower growth rates are expected next year across the world as a whole.
In the United States and the euro zone, inflation and unemployment will also be much higher than in Switzerland in 2024. Central banks are counting on price stabilization at a maximum of 2% next year. This goal has already been achieved in Switzerland: inflation has fallen to 1.4%. Due to rising rents, electricity prices and VAT, this rate will temporarily increase slightly once more at the start of the new year, but will remain within the target range of less than 2%.
Historically low unemployment rate
In the labor market, our country’s strong economy attracts workers. Despite the slowdown in the global economy and strong immigration, most companies complain of a lack of staff. According to the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (Seco), the unemployment rate has been fluctuating around the historically low level of 2% since spring 2022. Faced with the shocks of recent years – the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the strength of the franc, the fall of the country’s second bank – the Swiss labor market has demonstrated remarkable robustness.
This contrasts sharply with many Western industrialized countries which experience particularly high unemployment rates, for example Spain at 12%, Sweden and Italy at 8%, Finland and France at 7%, the average for all the countries of the European Union are at 6%.
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