PARIS: Spare a thought for the world's poor and hungry when you tune into the next episode of U.S. recession watch this week. Sky-high food prices are prompting one country after another to curtail exports in favor of domestic supply, a trend India joined Friday hard on the heels of Vietnam with a sharp increase in export prices for rice, a national staple in both countries. Cameroon, smarting from food price riots that rights groups say left as many as 100 people dead last month, announced cutbacks in official travel abroad to help finance wage rises for state employees. Another big concern for governments and financial markets is whether the United States is headed into or is already in recession and if it will be long or strong enough to seriously damage the rest of the global economy. On that point, the Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs says it believes people are not being pessimistic enough. "While we also see growth bottoming midyear, we think the bottom will be deeper and the recovery profile shallower," the bank's economists said of the United States in a weekly note to clients. So far, the news suggests that the U.S. economy more or less stopped growing in early 2008, Japan slowed to a snail's pace and Europe, the other pillar of the industrialized world, lost steam, too, though nowhere near as dramatically. Further details from March business surveys - the so-called purchasing managers indexes - may shed more light on just how weakly the first quarter of 2008 finished. Though short of surprises, the picture is the one that emerged last week. The U.S. economy slowed to an annualized growth rate of just 0.6 percent in the last three months of 2007, which means actual growth of less than 0.2 percent, and profits contracted for both financial and nonfinancial companies, U.S. Commerce Department data showed. That confirmed earlier estimates of the extent to which U.S. economic growth is hurting from the housing slump and subprime mortgage market meltdown, which has since generated a broader crisis in global financial markets and hit banks hard. The U.S. payrolls data for March, to be released Friday, could provide more of an up-to-date gauge of how the job market there is faring. In Japan, one of the most closely watched Japanese economic indicators, the central bank's "tankan" survey of business morale, should give a flavor of how things can be expected to unfold in an economy that Tokyo concedes has run out of steam. "How long a soft patch in Japan would continue will depend largely on how much the U.S. economy slows down and for how long," the Japanese economics minister, Hiroko Ota, said last week. What perhaps surprised most economists about the past week was how well Europe was doing, relatively speaking, as other pillars of the industrialized world tremble. Despite the prevailing gloom about the broader economy, business confidence improved in the two largest economies of the euro zone, Germany and France, in March. Official reports on industrial orders for January in the euro zone also came in much stronger than predicted. However, few say they believe Europe is fully immunized against a U.S. economic slowdown by demand from more rapidly growing emerging economies. In addition, fear of a lasting increase in inflation is running high, fueled by news from Germany that annual inflation there rose to 3.3 percent in March, just a touch short of the all-time record, primarily because of rising food and energy prices. Commodities prices did ease last week from recent records. That would eventually provide some relief from food inflation, if it lasted, but that is a call few are ready to make with conviction so soon.