(Washington) The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects a “soft landing” for the global economy this year, after growth in 2023 which was more solid than initially anticipated, the director said on Thursday. of the Fund’s communications, Julie Kozack, during a press conference.
The institution, based in Washington, is due to publish an update of its forecasts on the world economy (WEO) at the end of the month, three months after the initial report unveiled during its annual meetings in mid-October in Marrakech. (Morocco).
But already “our view on the forecast is that we should be heading towards a soft landing for the global economy. We expect resilience to persist, but there are a number of challenges that remain,” Kozack said.
In mid-October, the IMF announced that it expected growth of 3% for this year, close to that forecast for 2023, which the Fund has revised upwards regularly throughout the year, thanks to good performance of global economic activity, particularly in the United States, in a context of high inflation and rapidly rising interest rates.
The World Bank (WB), for its part, published its forecasts for the current year on Tuesday, forecasting growth of 2.4%, the weakest recorded since the 2008 financial crisis if it materialized, except for the strong recession caused in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The WB also signaled the risk of a “decade of missed opportunity” for the global economy, while average growth over the last five years was the weakest recorded since the early 1990s.
For the Fund, there is a “risk of divergence” between different countries or groups of countries “with the risk that low-income countries will find themselves further behind. They are having the greatest difficulty recovering from the series of shocks, between the pandemic and the sudden rise in energy and food prices,” underlined Ms. Kozack.
A point which echoes the alert issued by the other institution resulting from Bretton Woods, which underlined on Tuesday that if developed countries now have a GDP per capita higher than it was before the pandemic, “this ratio is 2/ 3 for emerging countries” and even “less than half” for the most fragile countries or countries affected by war.
In addition to the shocks, the ongoing fragmentation of the economy “of which we are seeing the first signs via the available data”, also complicates the situation for the poorest countries, in particular because “international investment flows are increasingly in addition to geopolitically aligned countries,” Kozack added.
“The first studies carried out by our teams show that fragmentation will have an impact on the global economy”, which could represent up to a 4.5% fall in global GDP, warned the IMF communications director.