The coming week sees the release of some eagerly awaited official data which will indicate how some of the world's key economies have fared in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak during March. Early data such as initial jobless claims in the US and UK have looked like spreadsheet errors, spiking higher as the pandemic led to lockdowns and business closures. Similarly, the March PMI data showed global business contracting at the steepest rate since 2009 as efforts to contain the virus caused activity to collapse across huge swathes of the economy, often to unprecedented degrees in areas such as travel and tourism.

Some of the most important releases will come out of China, notably industrial production, retail sales, investment and trade for March. With China having locked down before other countries, these numbers will help gain some sense of the extent to which China's economy and its supply chains have managed to recover after a marked drop in activity in February,...