Following its sixth consecutive downgrade of global economic performance, the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook again projects a recovery around the corner. The government shutdown aside, news from the US has been encouraging; despair on the eurozone is abating; and the Chinese slowdown has been orderly. Green shoots have appeared before, only to disappoint. Might this time be different?

World trade is a helpful lens through which to monitor global economic health. The collapse of 2008-09 was triggered by a financial earthquake but transmitted across the world by a precipitous fall in trade. Early in the crisis, industrial production fell at the same pace as at the start of the Great Depression in 1929-30 – but the trade collapse was unprecedented. Looking into the abyss, world leaders mustered a co-ordinated stimulus to limit the fall. Yet the rebound was powered by the Chinese appetite for imports that accelerated global trade in 2010.

That was misread as the end of the crisis. In early 2010, the recovery was expected to propel world gross domestic product to more than 4 per cent annual growth over the next five years, higher than in the boom years of 2003-07. But GDP growth in 2013 will be less than 3 per cent. Private deleveraging, the shift from fiscal stimulus to austerity, and structural deficiencies – now more manifest – are to blame.