Brussels, 25 January 2023
“Predictions for 2023” is a paper prepared by the Analysis and Research Team of the EU Council. This is a compilation of how other organisations and commentators see the coming twelve months, and is a complement to “Forward Look” paper which issued recently.
At the beginning of each year, journalists, analysts and commentators of current affairs like to take a
moment to reflect on the year ahead and try to predict what risks and opportunities the year could bring. With our annual Forward Look, we at the Analysis and Research Team want to offer a tool to help colleagues across the GSC to understand the world in which the Council and the European Council will operate in the coming year. But just like any other attempt to predict the future, our work can never be exhaustive, or cover all possible views. This document is therefore meant to serve as a companion piece to the Forward look 2023 and bring you an overview of how other experts predict key trends will develop, what they expect in terms of economic development and which risks and opportunities should be watched. This document summarises 20 different outlook reports published by newspapers, think tanks, insurance companies, and research institutes. A complete list of sources can be found in the annex. For ease of reading, the predictions have been sorted into five different categories: society, technology, environment, economy and (geo-)politics. Each of the predictions summarised here have been made by at least two different sources, unless otherwise indicated.
The events of 2022 showed us the power of narratives in shaping perceptions and demonstrated that our perspective may not be shared by everyone else across the globe. As a way to broaden our horizon, we therefore decided to include a different perspective. Consequently, each category also provides a Chinese view, compiled from newspaper interviews with Chinese academics and other forward looking articles. In addition, this document includes an overview of the ten conflicts to watch in 2023, according to the International Crisis Group and of the red herrings of 2023, as defined by Eurasia Group. Finally, to show that the discipline of foresight is much older than we think, we have included a collection of newspaper headlines from 1923, which make a number of fascinating predictions about life in 2023.
Source – EU Council