The World Bank has cut nearly half a percentage point from its forecast on global growth at the start of the year, due to escalating trade tension and policy uncertainty. The new growth figures marks the slowest pace since 2008.
The Washington-based lender slashed its 2025 outlook to 2.3 percent, from 2.7 percent projected in January – the weakest in 17 years, outside of the recessions in 2009 and 2020 created by the shocks of the global financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic.
“The world economy today is once more running into turbulence. Without a swift course correction, the harm to living standards could be deep,” Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, wrote in a foreword to the report released on Tuesday.