World Bank cuts 2025 growth forecasts for 70% of economies

HEIGHTENED trade tensions and policy uncertainty are expected to drive global growth down this year to its slowest pace since 2008 outside of outright global recessions, according to the World Bank's latest Global Economic Prospects report.

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The turmoil has resulted in growth forecasts being cut in nearly 70% of all economies—across all regions and income groups.

Global growth is projected to slow to 2.3% in 2025, nearly 0.5% lower than the rate that had been expected at the start of the year. A global recession is not expected. Nevertheless, if forecasts for the next two years materialise, average global growth in the first seven years of the 2020s will be the slowest of any decade since the 1960s.

World Bank Group Chief Economist and Senior Vice President Development Economics Indermit Gill said: “Outside of Asia, the developing world is becoming a development-free zone.

It has been advertising itself for more than a decade. Growth in developing economies has ratcheted down for three decades-from 6% annually in the 2000s to 5% in the 2010s—to less than 4% in the 2020s. That tracks the trajectory of growth in global trade, which has fallen from an average of 5% in the 2000s to about 4.5% in the 2010s to less than 3% in the 2020s.