IMF sees slow, steady 2024 global growth; China, inflation poses risks

The global economy is set for another year of slow but steady growth, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said, with U.S. strength pushing world output through headwinds from lingering high inflation, weak demand in China and Europe, and spillovers from two regional wars.

The IMF forecast global real GDP growth of 3.2 percent for 2024 and 2025 - the same rate as in 2023. The 2024 forecast was revised upward by 0.1 percentage point from the previous World Economic Outlook’s estimate in January, largely due to a significant upward revision in the U.S. outlook.

“We find that the global economy remains quite resilient,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s chief economist, told reporters, adding that many countries have defied gloomy predictions of recession as central banks hiked interest rates to fight inflation.

Many countries also are showing less “scarring” from the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crises, returning to pre-pandemic levels of output more quickly than previously predicted, the IMF said in its report.

“The general trajectory still remains one where we expect inflation to come down over the year and put the Federal Reserve in a position where it will be able to start easing the policy rates,” he told Reuters. “Maybe not as quickly as what the markets had expected.”

The IMF forecast 2024 U.S. growth of 2.7 percent compared to the 2.1 percent projected in January, on stronger-than-expected employment and consumer spending at the end of 2023 and into 2024. It expects the delayed effect of tighter monetary and fiscal policy to slow U.S. growth to 1.9 percent in 2025, though that also was an upward revision from the 1.7 percent estimate in January.

But the latest IMF forecasts showed stark divergences with other countries, including in the euro zone, where the 2024 growth forecast was revised downward to 0.8 percent from 0.9 percent in January, primarily due to weak consumer sentiment in Germany and France. Britain’s 2024 growth forecast also was revised down by 0.1 percentage point to 0.5 percent as the country struggles with high interest rates and stubbornly high inflation.

The IMF left unchanged its forecast for China’s 2024 growth to fall to 4.6 percent from 5.2 percent in 2023, with a further drop to 4.1 percent for 2025. But it warned that the lack of a comprehensive restructuring package for the country’s troubled property sector could prolong a downturn in domestic demand and worsen China’s outlook.

Such a situation could also intensify deflationary pressures in China’s economy, leading to a surge in cheap exports of manufactured goods that could stoke trade retaliation by other countries - a scenario that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned about during a trip to China earlier this month.

The IMF recommended that China accelerate the exit of non-viable developers and promote the completion of unfinished housing projects, while supporting vulnerable households to help restore consumer demand.

But the global lender noted bright spots in some other big emerging market countries, raising its growth forecast for Brazil’s economy in 2024 by half a percentage point to 2.2 percent and increasing the forecast for India’s economic growth by 0.3 percentage point to 6.8 percent.