The International Monetary Fund (IMF) revised its projections for world trade growth, lowering the expected 3.2% growth for 2025 and 3.3% for 2026 in its latest update, reports Sea-Intelligence.
World trade growth revised down for 2025-26
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently released the January 2025 update to its World Economic Outlook (WEO) report, initially published in October 2024, which includes key revisions to global trade growth, particularly for advanced economies.
IMF had projected that world trade growth in 2025 would be 3.2%, increasing to 3.3% in 2026. However, both projections were revised downwards in the latest update.
Moreover, for 2025, trade in the advanced economies is projected to grow by 2.1%, having been revised down by -0.5 percentage points, while the 2026 projection of 2.5% was marked down by -0.3 percentage points.
Sea-Intelligence noted that while trade growth on both a global level and for advanced economies is projected to see higher growth in 2026, trade growth for the emerging economies is projected to trend downwards. Their 2025 projection is of 5.0% growth, and the 2026 projection is of 4.6% growth, despite both figures having been revised upwards.
“What is concerning however, is that growth from Asia into North America and Europe accounted for a sizeable part of the container growth in 2024, hence a downwards revision in trade growth in 2025 and 2026 is not positive news,” said Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.
Another potential for concern is the slowdown in economic growth in China. In 2023, China’s economic output was 5.2%, dropping to 4.8% in 2024, and is projected to drop to 4.5% by 2026.
A lot of the major advanced economies are also projected to see a slowdown in economic growth headed into 2026, with US projected to see a sharp drop in economic growth from 2.7% in 2025 to 2.1% in 2026.
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Source: Sea-Intelligence
