破产展望 2024 年 3 月

Atradius Economic Research – March 2024 Summary In 2023 we observed a surge in insolvencies, with our global index showing an increase of 32%. For most markets thisincrease reflected ongoing post-pandemic adjustments after three years of persistently low levels. For the other remainingmarkets insolvencies have stabilised at a level above pre-pandemic, suggesting the emergence of an adverse new normalwhere companies face higher interest rates and lower demand.Our forecast for 2024 and 2025 is driven by the degree of adjustment to pre-pandemic levels in the markets where thenormalisation is still in progress and by purely economic factors where a stabilisation to the new normal has alreadyoccurred.Overall, we expect globally in 2024 an increase of 16%, followed by a minor decrease of 1% in 2025.However, there is a wide variation in the growth rates across markets. We expect high increases in the markets where theadjustment from low levels still has to occur (such as Singapore, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States).Conversely, we forecast high decreases in markets where insolvencies already overshoot their pre-pandemic levels (suchas South Korea, Ireland, Canada and Finland).Finally, in markets where insolvencies seem to have stabilised (such as Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium, Romania,Norway, United Kingdom) we expect smaller fluctuations. During the pandemic insolvencies contracted massivelyalmost across all markets as a result of the governmentsupport. Thus, we believe that the rise in insolvencies inthe most recent data is to a large extent still due to post-pandemic related adjustment. However, for a minorityof markets we do see insolvencies stabilising at levelshigher than before the pandemic, which makes usbelieve that the current economic environment is alsocontributing to the formation of an adverse new normal. Challenging economy cloudsbusinesses’ ‘return to normal’ Global insolvencies are soaring as businesses grapplewith the double whammy of sputtering economicactivity and the phasing out of pandemic-era support.After increasing by a staggering 32% in 2023,insolvencies are virtually back to their level from 2019.But we don’t expect to see insolvencies stabilise just yet.Instead, we project another substantial rise of 16% in2024, followed by a stabilisation in 2025. The post-pandemic economic recovery has largely run itscourse and the global economy is losing steam, withgrowth slowing 0.3 percentage points to 2.4% this year.Inflation has eased but not yet confidently to target rates.As such, central banks are still cautious to loosen theirpolicies, keeping interest rates at high levels at least untillater this spring. Therefore, the pressure that businesses For most markets, the post-pandemic surge ininsolvencies is still ongoing and it is difficult to assesswhether this is a post pandemic adjustment or whether itwill lead to a stabilisation to an adverse new normal. face from higher interest rates will persist this year andmay only see relief in 2025, given the lagged effect ofmonetary policy. The latest bank lending surveys in theboth the US and eurozone for instance both showedexpectations of further tightening of lending standardsfor companies in the coming months. This adds evenmore pressure for firms as the cash buffers that manycompanies amassed during the pandemic have now beenlargely exhausted. With less capacity to mitigate theeffects of the broader economic slowdown, we anticipatehigher insolvencies in the coming years. 2023 brings an overall increase ininsolvencies, with a wide variationacross markets Out of the 29 markets that we monitor in this report, 24registered increases in insolvencies. To better visualise theinsolvencies snapshot for 2023, we classify markets acrosstwo dimensions. First, we group countries into “stable” and“deteriorating” depending on their insolvencies growth ratefor 2023. If the growth rate falls into the -15%/+15% interval,then we consider that country as “stable”, while a growthrate higher than 15% we assign as “deteriorating”. Therewere no countries with a growth rate lower than -15%, so the“stable” and “deteriorating” groups cover all the countries inour sample. The main message from figure 1 is that insolvenciesdeteriorated in 2023 mostly across the markets wheretheir level relative to pre-pandemic was still low. In otherwords, the deterioration of insolvencies that we see inthe aggregate is to a large part still related to thenormalisation to pre-pandemic levels. This is visible inour figure as most markets marked as “deteriorating” aregrouped in the north-west quadrant. Here the largestadjustments were experienced by the Netherlands,United States, Hong Kong, Japan and France, allcountries with very low insolvency numbers at the startof 2023. Figure 2 shows that in 2023 for most of thesemarkets, insolvencies remained below or slightlyovershot their pre-pandemic level. Thus, the default riskremained comparable to the pre-p