Angela Merkel

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by phone Wednesday. The government said Merkel praised the "enormous Turkish efforts" to take care of nearly 2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. It added that the two leaders agreed to increase cooperation on resolving the refugee crisis, with an emphasis on combatting traffickers.

Germany has taken more asylum-seekers than any other EU country and is one of only a handful of nations that has accepted significant numbers. It expects about 800,000 migrants to arrive this year; about four times the number it saw in 2014.

Merkel pressed anew for quotas to spread the migrants out among more countries in the 28-nation EU, a call that has run into stiff resistance — in particular from eastern nations including Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

In a statement Thursday, Blanchard said the world economy has "withstood the stress tests of the last two weeks fairly well."