"The global recovery has been marking time as the adverse effects of higher and more volatile oil prices worked their way through," OECD chief economist Jean-Philippe Cotis said.
"Going forward, however, the conditions are in place for the global recovery to pick up momentum, including as concerns enterprise balance sheets and profits, which have strengthened markedly," he told a news conference.
Oil prices spiked to a record $55.67 a barrel last October before falling back, though crude prices are again rising on persistent Opec talk of a cut in supplies.
Cotis welcomed the US Federal Reserve's "gradual tightening" of monetary policy and "accommodative" policies in the euro zone and Japan. He said the United States would continue to lead the global upturn with growth of about 3.5 percent in the first half of 2005.
But there was not yet enough evidence to suggest a big improvement in the US structural deficit, he said. There remained a danger of a strong rise in the euro against the dollar if Asian currencies did not play a balancing role.
Euro zone growth almost ground to a halt in the fourth quarter with gross domestic product rising 0.2 percent, while Japan's economy fell 0.1 percent in the three months to December, its third straight quarterly contraction.
But Cotis was at pains to temper gloom about Japan and Germany, the world's biggest economies after the United States.
Japan's slowdown was partly due to a new way of calculating price statistics, he said, a view apparently shared by the country's central bank which again said on Thursday that the Japanese economy was recovering.
"Based on the old way of calculating statistics, you would have had three quarters of modest growth (in Japan), so we are seeing more a stagnation of activity than a straightforward recession," Cotis said.
Economists expect Japan's GDP to rebound in January-March as consumption picks up with better income and job conditions, and cite a recent boost in machinery orders as a positive sign of future corporate investment.
Cotis said growth in the euro area had been "far less impressive" than in the United States, and unemployment had failed to retreat from comparatively high levels.
But a pick-up in German investment heralded a recovery there and while Italy's fourth quarter contraction was a "big surprise" it did not mean weak growth in the first half of 2005 was a foregone conclusion.
Euro zone exporters would, nevertheless, suffer if the euro repeated last year's rise against the dollar.
"The issue is what would happen if the euro strongly appreciated once again against the dollar, and in a context where Asian currencies were not playing a balancing role on a world-wide level," he said. "That is still a risk factor."
Cotis said current world monetary policies should be maintained and that stance of the US Federal reserve, in the euro zone and in Japan were appropriate.
But he saw no grounds at present to forecast a sharp improvement in US public sector finances despite US calls for budget discipline to reduce the deficit.
"Globally, right now we don't have the concrete elements to hand that would allow us to predict a spectacular improvement in American public finances and more specifically, its structural deficit," he said. "We will have to know more about the debates underway, but it remains a cause for concern for the OECD," he said.