Expert: El Ni?o a risk, but not economic game changer

The onset of El Ni?o may trigger more extreme weather events and raise temperatures globally, but it isn’t a game changer for economic forecasts, said Ben May, director of the Global Macro Research, Oxford Economics.

The shift in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle increases the risk of higher average global temperatures in the coming years, perhaps new record highs, and the risk of droughts, forest fires and also flooding in a number of economies, May said.

And that would have huge humanitarian and ecological implications, he said, but whether or not it would have big enough ramifications to change the broader global economic outlook is another matter.

It’s worth noting, he said, that globally, natural disasters have annually cost just 0.2 percent of GDP over the past three years. And the impact on actual economic activity is likely to have been even smaller.

El Nino is more of a risk to our economic outlook than to actually change it, he said.

One way in which El Nino could influence the global economy is by having an impact on food prices and that could raise food price inflation, creating further headaches for central banks that are trying to return inflation back to target, said May.

Studies also suggest that whilst crop yields are typically lower for some crops during the El Nino phase, it is by no means universal. And typically, the global impact on food prices is small in comparison to general year-to-year volatility, he said.