The World Bank has significantly downgraded its global economic growth forecasts, citing escalating trade tensions and policy uncertainty as reasons.
According to the latest semi-annual Global Economic Prospects report, this chaos has led to downgrades in growth forecasts for nearly 70 % of all economies across regions and income groups.
The report lowered the global economic growth forecast for 2025 to 2.3 % from 2.7 % in January, while the estimate for 2026 was lowered to 2.4 % from 2.7 %.
Developed economies are expected to grow by 1.2 % this year, down from the earlier forecast of 1.7 %. For emerging and developing economies, the forecast has been lowered by 0.3 percentage point to 3.8 %.
Specifically, the United States is projected to grow by 1.4 % in 2025, 0.9 percentage points less than the previous estimate and only half of last year's growth of 2.8 %.
Both the euro area and Japan are expected to grow by 0.7 % this year, down 0.3 and 0.5 percentage points respectively from previous estimates. In contrast, China's growth forecasts for both 2025 and 2026 remained unchanged.
The report says the world economy is once again in turmoil, even though just six months ago it appeared to be approaching a "soft landing".
Czech 
English 
Spanish 
French 
Italian 
Russian 
Chinese 
German