The IMF has sharply downgraded its forecast for global economic growth to its lowest level since the great recession of 2008-09 — but fears of another contraction are overblown, most data suggest.
In private, policymakers are gloomy about the outlook. But the current slowdown— with just below 2 per cent growth per capita forecast for 2019 — would be a better performance than any of the four global recessions identified by the IMF over the past six decades, in which global gross domestic product per capita contracted.
Ben May, global economist at Oxford Economics, said the current slowdown was “more like a mini slowdown in a wider expansion”.