IMF slashes global growth projection to 3% from 3.8%

Washington, October 15 

The global economy is in a “synchronised slowdown” amid growing trade barriers and heightened geopolitical tensions, the IMF warned today as it downgraded the 2019 growth rate to 3%, the slowest pace since the global financial crisis.

“This is a serious climbdown from 3.8% in 2017, when the world was in a synchronised upswing,” Indian-American Gita Gopinath, chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in the foreword to the latest World Economic Outlook.

“With a synchronised slowdown and uncertain recovery, the global outlook remains precarious. At 3% growth, there is no room for policy mistakes and an urgent need for policymakers to cooperatively deescalate trade and geopolitical tensions,” she said.

Besides supporting growth, such actions can also help catalyse needed cooperative solutions to improve the global trading system, Gopinath said.

Released ahead of the annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank, Gopinath in the World Economic Outlook said this subdued growth is a consequence of rising trade barriers; and elevated uncertainty surrounding trade and geopolitics.

Idiosyncratic factors causing macroeconomic strain in several emerging market economies and structural factors, such as low productivity growth and aging demographics in advanced economies are also responsible for this slow growth rate.

Global growth in 2020 is projected to improve modestly to 3.4%, a downward revision of 0.2% from its April projections, she said.

The growth projection for 2019 is the slowest pace since the global financial crisis in 2008.

However, unlike the synchronised slowdown, this recovery is not broad-based and is precarious, she notes. — PTI