FALCON POWERS – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) kept its global growth forecast for 2024 unchanged at 3.2% on Tuesday, while expecting improvements in growth in China and India, and maintaining its previous estimates for advanced economies.
In the third and final update to its annual report on the global economy, the IMF said it still expects growth of 3.2% in 2024, and pointed to a slight uptick in its 2025 forecast to 3.3% (+0.1 percentage point). The IMF had revised its forecasts twice for the current year, each time citing a slight increase, since the initial release of the report in October.
Despite this, global growth remains historically low in the medium term, barely exceeding 3.2% for the past two years and the coming years on average, far from the 3.8% recorded between 2000 and 2019.
“We have two areas of concern,” said the IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, in an interview with Agence France-Presse. “The first relates to the fiscal path in a number of countries where public finances are under severe pressure…and the second relates to industrial and trade policies, and the risk of economic geographic fragmentation.”
While trends continue to vary among the world’s major economies, the Washington-based monetary institution highlights the convergence of medium-term outlooks between advanced economies, due to the gradual slowdown in the U.S. economy offset by the recovery of the European economy starting in 2025.
