Global resilience seems fading, despite IMF upgrade: Finmin

‘The world’s economic activity remained steady in the past few months despite trade disruptions, prompting the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to upwardly revise its 2025 global growth estimates, but this “resilience seems to be fading” as core inflation and unemployment in the US have inched up, the finance ministry said in a report released Monday.

- Rajeev Jayaswal

“A fog of uncertainty continues to shroud the global economy,” the finance ministry's Monthly Economic Review for September said. IMF revised its global growth forecast for 2025 to 3.2% in October, compared to 3% in July and 2.8% in April, but “ interpreting this growth as durable resilience may be incorrect,” itadded.

“Several transitory factors, such as a lower effective tariff rate in the US and frontloading of trade, have contributed to propping up growth. However, this resilience masks underlying structural weaknesses which are coming to the fore, leaving projections for global growth in 2026 broadly unchanged since July 2025.”

The global economy witnessed short-term resilience in the aftermath of trade policy disruptions. Following the tariff announcements in April , deals between the US and some of its trading partners significantly reduced the US's effective tariff rate.