The International Monetary Fund’s “World Economic Outlook” (WEO), released Tuesday in advance of this week’s semiannual meetings in Washington of the IMF and World Bank, gives a gloomy and fraught estimate of the state of the world economy, nearly eight years after the 2008 financial meltdown.
The IMF has again downwardly revised its projection for global growth, the fourth straight cut in a year. The WEO estimates that the world economy will grow by only 3.2 percent in 2016, a reduction of 0.2 percentage points from the projection the IMF made only three months ago. The new projection is 0.6 percentage points below the organization’s July 2015 estimate.
It is only a hair above last year’s 3.1 percent global growth rate and only marginally higher than the 3.0 rate the IMF once considered indicative of a global recession. The organization also downgraded its world growth estimate for 2017 from 3.6 percent to 3.5 percent.