Global growth will be stronger in 2024: IMF

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has forecast that the global growth will be stronger in 2024.

In its latest outlook on Tuesday, the 190-country lending agency said the two biggest economies in the world, China and the United States, have improved economic prospects. It also noted that inflation has been declining more quickly than anticipated.

It now expects the global economy to grow 3.1% this year, unchanged from 2023 but better than the 2.9% it had predicted for 2024 in its previous estimate in October.

Worldwide, the IMF thinks inflation will ease from 6.8% in 2023 to 5.8% in 2024 and 4.4% in 2025.

In the most advanced economies, the agency expects inflation to drop this year to 2.6% and next year to the 2% level that the Federal Reserve and some other central banks have set as a target.

The combination of steady growth and falling inflation has raised hopes for a so-called soft landing for the global economy – a slowdown sufficient to contain inflation without causing a recession.

“We are now in the final descent toward a soft landing,’’ Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF's chief economist, told reporters ahead of the report’s release.