GLOBAL ECONOMY WEEKAHEAD-Not just recession fears

By Brian Love

PARIS (Reuters) - 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 favour of domestic supply, a trend India joined on Friday hard on Vietnam's heels with a sharp increase in export prices for rice, national staples in both countries.

Cameroon, smarting from food price riots that rights groups say killed as many as 100 people 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 already in recession and if it will be long or strong enough to seriously damage the rest of the global economy too.

On that point, Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs believes people are not being pessimistic enough.

"While we also see growth bottoming mid-year, 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, news suggests the U.S. economy more or less stopped growing in early 2008, Japan slowed to snail-pace and Europe, the other pillar of the industrialised world, lost steam too, though nowhere near as dramatically.

Further details from March business surveys -- the so-called purchasing managers indices -- may shed some more light on just how weakly the first quarter of 2008 finished.