Megatrends Scenarios
Navigate long-term uncertainty and assess key risks shaping the business environment.
Overview
Short-term volatility often dominates decision-making. Yet the most consequential risks and opportunities for organisations tend to emerge from structural forces that play out over decades.
Megatrends Scenarios is a long-term scenario planning tool designed to help you assess how structural economic forces could shape business environments over time, and position you for success. Built on Oxford Economics’ global macroeconomic modelling framework, it delivers quantified scenarios alongside our baseline, with forecasts to 2060—supporting strategic planning, stress testing, investment, and policy decisions.
What megatrends are shaping long-term growth?
Megatrends Scenarios focuses on the structural drivers set to define the global economic environment over the coming decades:
Globalisation & Geopolitics
Rising geopolitical tensions and trade wars create volatility, as fragmented supply chains and shifting alliances force businesses and policymakers to navigate a more competitive global economy. Globalisation promotes specialisation and knowledge spillovers between economies, accelerating productivity growth.
Technology
Technological progress boosts productivity and lowers costs but disrupts industries and labour markets. Policymakers must balance economic gains from innovation with investments in upskilling and managing job displacement.
Demographics
Ageing populations in developed economies strain public finances, while younger populations in emerging markets drive workforce growth and consumption. These shifts affect productivity, labour markets, and economic inequality, requiring strategic policy responses.
Institutions & Policy
Effective institutions and policies are essential for creating economic stability, managing inflation, and fostering growth. Governments must adapt fiscal and regulatory frameworks to address inequality, external shocks, and long-term sustainability.
Climate
Climate change is a pervasive force influencing the economy, environment, and investment strategies. We explore its impact in our dedicated Global Climate Service.
Unlock uncertainty and understand key risks to the global economy in the long term
Request a demoBenefits
- Inform capital-intensive and long-life investment decisions. Support planning for energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and extractive industries, where assets are exposed to long-term shifts in costs, demand, regulation, and financing conditions. Use scenarios to assess project viability, funding risk, and long-run sustainability.
- Stress-test long-term strategy. Evaluate how robust your strategy is across a range of plausible futures. Identify where business models, investment plans, or policy frameworks are resilient, and where vulnerabilities may emerge over extended horizons.
- Strengthen contingency planning and unlock resilience. Analyse long-term risks in a structured, data-driven way to design mitigation strategies and improve preparedness for adverse events.
- Identify strategic growth opportunities. Pinpoint areas for expansion, innovation, or diversification by anticipating where disruption or transformation will reshape your competitive landscape.
- Support long-horizon investment and asset analysis. Assess how different macroeconomic paths affect asset returns over extended horizons, including government bond and equity returns. This is particularly valuable for pension funds, insurers, and long-term investors managing liabilities and portfolio allocation.
What’s included?
Megatrend Scenarios translates complex megatrends into a set of structured, data-driven macroeconomic scenarios. The service features Oxford Economics’ baseline and long-term scenario forecasts to 2060, enabling consistent comparisons across countries, variables, and time horizons.
- Macroeconomic scenario databank. Baseline and Megatrends Scenario forecasts to 2060 for 87 countries, covering a wide range of macroeconomic and financial indicators, such as output, spending, employment, inflation, interest rates, and government finances.
- Dashboard. Visualise and compare scenario outcomes across countries and key economic dimensions, including GDP, demographics, prices and wages, productivity, interest rates, and asset returns.
- Megatrends Scenarios report. A dedicated report comparing baseline and scenario outcomes, outlining key assumptions and highlighting divergences, risks, and long-term economic implications.
- Research Briefings. Thematic research on the structural forces shaping the world economy, providing context and interpretation to support long-term decision-making.
- Economist support. Benefit from access to our modelling and scenario experts, who can provide guidance on methodology, assumptions, and long-term scenario results.
- Global Economic Model as the foundation. All scenarios and forecasts are generated using Oxford Economics’ Global Economic Model, ensuring consistency, transparency, and credible transmission mechanisms across countries and variables.
Clients who have access to the Global Economic Model (25-Year) can access the Megatrends database files and customise scenarios their specific needs.
Why Oxford Economics
Unmatched scenario expertise
Our tools make it easy to explore scenarios, compare trajectories, and extract insights quickly. Access data through interactive dashboards and databank, integrate it into existing workflows via Excel plugin or API, and visualise results via charts, tables, and heat maps.
A genuinely global, interconnected perspective
With more than 40 years of modelling experience, we produce rigorous, transparent, and credible macroeconomic scenarios that global institutions depend on. Our frameworks stand up to internal scrutiny, governance processes, and external challenges.
Advanced analytical tools designed for practical use
Our modelling framework spans over 87 economies and captures how megatrends interact across borders through trade, capital flows, prices, and competitiveness, elevating scenario planning beyond single-country analysis.
Latest insights
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Request a demo
Complete the form and we will contact you to set up your free trial. Please note that trials are only available for qualified users.
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