After the Bell: About 2024 — let me tell you the good news…

Wars on three continents broke out or continued during 2024, which is, of course, dreadful. Reading about these conflicts, never mind being caught up in them, was perhaps the most heartrending aspect of the year. Russia is rightly blamed for initiating the Ukraine conflict. Still, you have to be stone-hearted not to feel for ordinary Russian families, who are losing around 1,000 men and women a day now.

Rights and wrongs aside, the suffering of the people of Gaza is beyond horror. And the most frightening aspect of the changes in Sudan is that it is difficult to know what is happening, which raises the fear that when the truth finally leaks out, it is going to turn out to be much more dreadful than is appreciated.

But, but, but … we should remember that there have been at least three places on Earth where wars, or at least insurgencies, were present in most years of the past decade. These are different though. Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan are not only conflicts at a more heightened level than in previous years, with a greater number of combatants and deaths, but they are also more economically detrimental and more enduring than many of the conflicts in the past.

This year was, as we are almost tired of hearing now, the year of democracy; 76 countries went to the ballot box. Some were farcical (hello, Venezuela), some were consequential (hello, Botswana), and depending on who you support, some were disappointing (hello, US).

What is significant about the year of democratic elections is how uniformly incumbents got thumped. Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch pointed out that every political party defending their record in government in the last 12 months lost vote share, some catastrophically; the US Democratic Party’s slippage of 3.7 percentage points was mild compared to that of the British Conservatives, which declined by almost 20% from their 2019 vote.

Given a kicking

“The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.”

There were only two exceptions to this rule in major democracies: Spain and Mexico. And in each case, there were special circumstances at work. (In Mexico, you could say the incumbents took a drubbing — the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which held not just a majority but a supermajority for more than half a century, got thumped again this year. In some senses, they reflect the trouncing of an incumbent even though they were not the party in power at the time of the election). However, generally, incumbent parties got smashed, including in South Africa, where the ANC fell below a plurality of votes for the first time.

But really, speaking generally, how negative is that? Surely, this is what we as citizens want, right? It’s like that old joke: Why are politicians like nappies? They need to be changed often, otherwise they begin to smell.

I would highlight two important positives about 2024 and neither is, I suspect, widely acknowledged.

One is the magnitude of medical breakthroughs this year — two were very important for Africa. The first is lenacapavir, a long-acting HIV treatment, which requires an injection every six months and prevents transmission. Effectively, the war against Aids has been won.

The second is the R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine, which has demonstrated high efficacy and a good safety profile in African children, marking a significant milestone in the fight against malaria.

There were more. Weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy hit their stride this year, and are proving enormously popular after initially being developed for type 2 diabetes treatments. And the Covid-19 outbreak has had at least one positive spinoff: mRNA-personalised cancer treatments.

Resilient global economy

The other big, largely unrecognised aspect of 2024 is how resilient the world economy has turned out to be. For people invested in stock markets, which is most of us, 2024 will go down as a cracker — and surprisingly so. At the start of the year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — always a little on the pessimistic side — was projecting that global growth would decline to 3.2%.

By the end of the year, this had been revised upwards and inflation revised downwards — not by much, but when you are tracking the global economy, small changes end up constituting large absolute numbers. What is more, the revisions took place in both advanced and developing economies. The other thing about the IMF is that it’s developing a habit of underestimating the US and overestimating China.

The IMF pegged US growth at 1.7% this year. It now seems it will come in 50% higher than that. In addition, despite all the fears of international trade declining (the IMF predicted a big drop for this year), the UN Conference on Trade and Development is projecting that it will not only increase, but that it will increase by around $1-trillion, and that it will reach a record $33-trillion in 2024.

The increments are small, but I always enjoy seeing pessimists being proved wrong. For one thing, this gratifies my prejudice that optimism is underrated, because, broadly speaking, the miserable rule the world and dominate the media.

So what will 2025 bring? I don’t know — who does? But what I will say is this: good years easily outnumber bad years over the average lifetime, and we should celebrate that. DM