By the end of 2024, the world economy will establish an anti -record: the growth rate of world GDP in the first half of the current decade will be the lowest over the past 30 years.
This is stated in the last report of the World Bank “Prospects of the World Economy”, published on the organization’s website.
The growth of geopolitical tension in the near future can create new threats for the global economy, the bank notes.
For many countries with a developing economy, the medium -term forecast has worsened against the backdrop of a slowdown in most large economies, stagnation in world trade and the strongest tightening of lending conditions over the past decades. It is expected that the growth rate of world trade in 2024 will be only half of the average for ten years preceding the pandemic. At the same time, the cost of borrowing for countries with a developing economy, especially for countries with a low credit rating, will most likely remain high, due to the maximum over the past forty years of world interest rates (taking into account inflation).
According to forecasts, in 2024 the growth rate of the world economy will continue to slow down for the third year in a row and will drop to 2.4 percent compared to 2.6 percent last year, which is almost three quarters of the percentage below the average value for the 2010s years. According to forecasts, the rates of economic growth in countries with a developing economy will only be 3.9 percent, which is more than one percentage below the average for the previous decade.
By the end of 2024, the population of almost every fourth developing country and about 40 percent of low income countries will be still poorer than before Covid in 2019. At the same time, in countries with a developed economy this year, growth of up to 1.2 percent is expected to slow down compared to 1.5 percent in 2023.
“Without a serious adjustment of the course of the 2020s, it will go down in history as a decade of missed opportunities,” said the Indermight Gill, chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank group.
According to him, in the near future, the pace of economic growth will remain low, and many developing countries, especially the poorest, will be trapped: the high level of debt will impede the development, and almost a third of their population will face the problem of food deficiency.
To combat climate change and achieve other key global goals in the field of development by 2030, developing countries will require a significantly larger investment volume – approximately 2.4 trillion dollars.