The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published the January 2025 update to their World Economic Outlook (WEO) report, which was published in October 2024. In this update, key revisions were made to global trade growth, especially for advanced economies. Figure 1 shows the growth figures for 2020-2024, the projections for 2025-2026, and the revisions made to the latter two years relative to the October 2024 report.

IMF 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. 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. 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. 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. Furthermore, 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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 All quotes can be attributed to: Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.
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