Rising inflation and flat investment have kept the world's economic recovery stuck in reverse, the latest Global Economic Conditions survey from ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) has shown.

Of the 2,186 ACCA members surveyed between 16 May and6 June 2011, only 26% reported increased confidence, down from 28% three months ago, with 57% saying that economic conditions are either deteriorating or stagnating, up from 51% only three months ago.

While the rocketing inflation of the first quarter of 2011 was not repeated in the second three months, a greater proportion of those surveyed, 54% - up from 51% in the last quarter - reported an increase in operating costs. This is double the number of respondents who mentioned inflation two years ago.

The survey shows that rising costs are not just confined to the fastest-growing economies.

While best performing marketsMalaysiaandPakistanare leading the inflation league table, rising costs were also cited by 45% of respondents inWestern Europe, which has been affected by the continent's debt crisis,still sits at the bottom of the ranking in terms of business confidence and economic optimism.

The survey shows that businesses are becoming increasingly unable to respond to the inflationary challenge through cost-cutting.

Around 30% of respondents expect their governments to get spending decisions right in the medium-term, but 16.5% expect dangerous levels of over- or under-spending and this group has been growing every quarter since late 2009.

Access to finance has been tightening globally for the past six months, and this appears to be the case for both growth capital and short-term liquidity. This, combined with rising costs, now appears to be leading to an increase in the number of respondents who fear that customers (31%) or suppliers (15%) might go out of business, as well as those reporting problems with late payment (31%).

Despite these worrying trends, confidence figures among finance professionals have not yet dipped to a situation where they believe there will be a renewed downturn.

For the past two years, professionals inAfricaand theAsia-Pacificregion have been consistently more optimistic than their colleagues elsewhere about the state of the economic recovery, and this resulted in high levels of confidence in their own organisations.

In this survey, however, confidence is surprisingly low in both regions, withAsia-Pacificrecording a net loss of confidence for the first time in two years.Hong KongandMalaysiaseem to be particularly affected, whileSingaporehas bucked the trend by recording further confidence gains.

While the gloom in the Far East reflects the fallout from the disaster inJapan, flagging confidence inAfricais mostly a lagged effect of the slowdown elsewhere. The GECS results show that the impact of a drop in activity in OECD countries has for the last few months been trickling down the supply chain, first to theAsia-Pacificregion and then toAfrica.

However, unlike the previous quarter, most of the pressure on access to finance appears to be concentrated onAsia-Pacificand theMiddle East.

Under these challenging conditions, profitable value-added opportunities of most types have become scarcer and the investment environment has deteriorated slightly, especially in terms of financing and business support. Still, investment itself has remained flat and the outlook for employment and investment in staff has even improved slightly. This is almost certainly related to the slow recovery in new orders.

Report author Manos Schizas, senior policy adviser with ACCA, said: "There are a number of concerns in the latest report, including that the loss of momentum inAsiaandAfricahas become particularly pronounced in the last few months. The limits of austerity are also being explored inWestern Europeand a renewed tightening of credit and cashflow conditions could be on the cards, even as new orders and employment are beginning to recover.

"If these new trends - coupled with high inflation and low investment - persist we would expect to see further instability in the near future, which will present more challenges for all sectors professional accountants whether they work in practice or industry in the second half of 2011."

Central andEastern Europebuoyed by stable fundamentals as the rest ofEuropedeteriorates

For the time being, the region appears to be riding out the storm of the European fiscal crisis, even though respondents' confidence in their own organisations and their faith in the global recovery are slowly being eroded. About 45% of respondents in the region (down from 50%) feel that global economic conditions are improving or about to do so, but only 26% reported confidence gains (virtually unchanged from 27% in the last quarter).

Business revenues, access to finance and cashflow conditions are now increasingly stable, which has prompted a rise in capital spending in the region. That said, the outlook for employment and investment in staff is still negative. Respondents are reporting more opportunities to profit from innovation and customer insights and fewer opportunities to cut costs or encourage efficiencies through the supply chain.

Respondents in the region expect government spending to grow moderately over the next five years, a prospect that now appears more sustainable than when the question was posed in previous surveys. Only about 8% expect their national governments to over-spend dangerously in the medium term, down from 14% in the previous quarter.

Here is ACCA's full report :

http://www2.accaglobal.com/pubs/general/activities/library/economy/tech-ms-gec10.pdf