IMAGINE the world economy as a video game, one observer said. You have to complete a number of stages before you win, and the idea is to dodge all the bad stuff that can come at you at any moment. If you really get it wrong, you are zapped and you have to start all over again.

The game played by the policymakers who assembled in Davos last week should be called 'Global Apocalypse'. It now even has its own Super Mario figure in the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi.

Sad to say, it is taking those in charge of the global economy a long time to master the controls. After four and a half years they have made it to the first level but are now stuck there. Missiles rained down on them in 2011 and by the year's end there was a very real fear of a wipeout as the euro crisis deepened. Financial Times

A bit of clever footwork from Super Mario has averted the immediate danger. The ECB has flooded Europe's financial system with cheap money and that has prevented banks from going to the wall. Mark Carney, Canada's central bank governor and chairman of the financial stability board, said on Saturday that the long-term refinancing arrangements meant there was no longer the risk of a repeat of the chaos that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. But as Churchill said after Dunkirk, wars are not won by retreats, however brilliantly executed, and getting beyond level one is still proving challenging, at least for the developed countries in the West, where it has taken unprecedented intervention from central banks to prevent it from being game over. Martin Wolf, of the , aptly describes it as a contained depression.

It should come as no surprise that victory has so far proved elusive. The British chancellor George Osborne is right when he says that recoveries from recessions are always more difficult when the downturns are caused by excessive debt, but this slump has been accompanied by two other shocks: a big technological shift from an analogue to a digital world and a big geographical shift that has seen the centre of gravity move from Europe and North America to Asia. Companies such as Nokia that were world-beaters only a few years ago are finding out exactly what the economist Joseph Schumpeter meant by creative destruction, but that process also seems to be at work between countries and regions. n

Even so, there is a way through the labyrinth provided policymakers avoid obvious pitfalls and work methodically. One problem has been that they have tried to find short cuts over the past few years rather than work their way through the levels in the right sequence. —The Guardian, London