Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sackett. Scottish philosopher Thomas

Carlisle once dubbed economics the dismal science, and it's not hard to see why. It addresses

bread and butter issues which matter to all of us in terms that we often find impenetrable.

It makes forecasts which sway government policy, but they often turn out to be

unreliable. And sometimes it delivers news so bleak, we simply don't want to hear it. Like now,

for example, in the UK. Bank of England economists reckon the countries facing two years of

recession. With inflation high and interest rates

rising, that means misery for millions. And the news is also pretty gloomy in many other parts of the

world. The COVID pandemic, the Ukraine war, trade tensions and climate change impacts are all

weighing on the global economy. My guest is British economist and

sometime advisor to conservative politicians Gerard Lyons. He's long been an optimistic economic

forecaster, seeing the positives of globalisation, the economic rise of Asia and of Brexit here in the UK.

But at what point does optimism begin to look like delusion? Well, Gerard Lyons joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. Great to be here.

That's great to have you here. Would you agree with me that you've tried in recent years very

hard to look on the bright side when it comes to the UK economy,

through Brexit, through all sorts of different challenges, including the pandemic.

Are you struggling right now to be optimistic?

Well, actually, I wouldn't call myself an optimist. I tend to try and be realistic and call it as it is.

Often that might mean my views are in line with the market

consensus. Sometimes it doesn't, and that's when it's more fun. But the underlying trend,

both for the global economy and the UK economy, I think is quite positive, actually. We have a major

challenge immediately ahead, both here in the UK, Western Europe, and indeed globally. But coming

...