World Bank cuts global growth forecast

Warns of deep harm to living standards

- ALAN RAPPEPORT

The global economy is projected to slow sharply this year as US President Donald Trump's trade policy disrupts international commerce and increases economic uncertainty, the World Bank said Tuesday in a report that underscores the toll of America's trade war.

Despite the weakening outlook, the global economy is not expected to fall into a recession, the World Bank said. However, the trade tension is setting the stage for the weakest decade of growth since the 1960s. Economic development in many of the poorest parts of the world has come to a standstill.

Expansion in global output is forecast to slow to 2.3% in 2025 from 2.8% last year, the World Bank said in its Global Economic Prospects report. That is down from the 2.7% growth that it forecast in January.

"The world economy today is once more running into turbulence," Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank, wrote in the report. "Without a swift course correction, the harm to living standards could be deep."