The world’s richest economies, led by the United States, will cool down for the remainder of this year but there is only a slim chance they will fall back into recession, the latest Reuters poll of 250 economists showed.

The findings, collected after data on Friday showed the U.S. economy once again shed jobs last month, are surprisingly upbeat given expectations the Federal Reserve may announce later on Tuesday new measures to stimulate the economy.

Most analysts and investors remain confident that robust growth in emerging economies like India and China, even as policymakers there attempt to engineer a slowdown, will cushion the global economy from any U.S. relapse.

There is also a palpable sense of relief that the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone, spawned in Athens earlier this year, has not become the beast that many had feared and other smaller countries appear to have escaped Greece’s fate.

The Reuters poll put the odds of a U.S. double-dip recession at just 15 percent, unchanged from a month ago, even though two thirds of analysts downgraded their U.S. growth forecasts for the second half of this year.

For the full year 2010, the median forecast is now for U.S. growth of 2.9 percent, down from 3.0 percent. Growth in 2011 is pegged at 2.7 percent, down from 2.8 in the prior poll.

"The risk of a double-dip recession is material, but ultimately the more likely outcome is that we will manage to avoid it," said Goldman Sachs’ chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius in a note to clients.

In the euro zone, where recent data have been stronger and have propelled the euro to three-month highs, the chances of a double-dip recession fell to 15 percent from the 20 percent flagged in last month’s poll.

For Britain, which faces the most aggressive government spending cutbacks in generations, the poll showed the median probability of a double-dip recession holding steady at 20 percent.

Even the Japanese economy is expected to chug along at a modest pace of growth into next year, although a deflationary choke-hold is not expected to loosen any time soon.

The prospects of an interest rate rise any time soon are remote. The Fed is not expected to raise rates until well into next year, and neither is the European Central Bank, Bank of England, or Bank of Japan.

What remains the biggest challenge for these economies is persistently high unemployment. The rebound from the deep 2008-09 recession has not been strong enough to make companies confident enough to hire back the workers they shed.

With the growth outlook dimming and governments and central banks left with their last remaining tools to re-stimulate, it appears clear that joblessness will remain a major economic challenge for many months to come.

That in turn is expected to keep a lid on consumer spending, the key cornerstone of economic growth, particularly in the world’s largest economy.

"With the boost from stimulus funds fading and the possibility of an extra fiscal stimulus from Congress becoming less likely, the question now is whether private demand can take over where the government has left off," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s.

"We expect the recovery to continue, though at a sluggish pace, and it won’t feel like one to most."

Inflation is set to remain subdued in the euro zone and the U.S., giving policymakers ample room to leave rates at record lows, while deflation is expected to persist in Japan.

The outlier remains the U.K., where inflation is running well above the BoE’s 2.0 percent target and is not expected to average below it at any point in the forecast horizon.