in 2020, albeit with significant gradations. While the U.S. reported
a decline in gross value added of only 3.4%, in
Canada GVA fell by 5.5 % and in the Latin American countries
by 7.4 % overall. There were also clear differences in Latin
America. Brazil, for example, surpassed the expectations for
the rest of the continent, with the IMF anticipating a decrease
of 4.5 %.
Asia was a mixed bag in 2020. While China fully recovered
from its economic slump at the beginning of the year
due to its early containment of the pandemic, finishing the
year with a growth rate of 2.3 %, gross value added in
India fell by 8.0 %. According to the IMF, the largest economies
in Southeast Asia (ASEAN-5) recorded economic
output of - 3.7 % in 2020, whereas the figure in Japan was
- 5.1 %.
Industry-Specific Framework Conditions
The American Chemistry Council (ACC) estimates that global
chemical production was - 2.6 % in the past fiscal year
(previous year: + 1.2 %). As a result, the global impact of the
pandemic on chemical production was somewhat lower
than from a macroeconomic perspective.
The changes in chemical production do not reflect the
regional development of general economic performance
in all countries. According to the ACC, Germany, Europe’s
largest chemical producer, achieved a slight increase of
0.1 % for the industry as a whole. However, excluding the
share of the pharmaceutical sector, a low single-digit
decline is expected for the past fiscal year (German Chemical
Industry Association (VCI): - 1.1 %). By contrast, other Euro-
pean countries of importance to the chemical industry, including
France (- 11.9 %) and Italy (- 6.2 %), displayed much
higher decreases in overall industry production output, according
to ACC estimates. In the United Kingdom, the
industry remained roughly at the previous year’s level (0.4 %).
In Europe as a whole, chemical production decreased by
2.2 %.
52 Business Development
Business Development
General Business Setting
Overall Economic Situation
2020 was primarily marked by the course and effects of
the coronavirus pandemic. The International Monetary Fund
(IMF) currently estimates that global economic output declined
by - 3.5 %. The recession that began in China at the
beginning of 2020 and then spread to the entire world in
the course of the second quarter led, in some cases, to double
digit negative growth rates in the middle of the year.
However, early containment of the pandemic in China and
resumption of industrial production in other regions in the
second half of the year enabled 2020 as a whole to be better
than had been projected by the IMF in its mid-year forecast.
In addition to the pandemic, the continuing tense trade
situation between the U.S. and China and the situation
regarding the terms of the United Kingdom’s exit from the
European Union, which remained unclear until shortly before
year’s end, also had an adverse effect on the overall economic
situation. Only China was able to record modest
growth for the year as a whole. For every other major economy,
the situation described above gave rise to a more or
less pronounced recession last year.
At - 7.2 %, as expected by the IMF, the Eurozone was hit
particularly hard by the pandemic-related curtailment of
economic activity, which intensified the slackening demand
that had already begun in the previous year. Government
measures and overarching support measures in the area of
employment protection, as well as further public transfer
payments, ensured a certain degree of stability in many countries.
Nevertheless, all of the major economies in Europe
reported a significant weakening of gross value added. In
Germany, the IMF estimates that economic output fell by
5.4 %, although there was a marked recovery in industrial
production at the end of the year.
According to current IMF estimates, economic development
in the countries of the Americas was also negative