The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised its global trade growth projections downward in their January 2025 World Economic Outlook (WEO) report. According to Sea-Intelligence, the IMF projected that global trade growth is expected to reach 3.2% in 2025 and 3.3% in 2026, both of which are lower than historical average of 3.7% measured between 2000-2019.

Trade in advanced economies would see slower growth. The 2025 figure has been revised to 2.1%, dropping by -0.5 percentage points. The 2026 prediction was revised to 2.5%, dropping by -0.3 percentage points. Despite the downward revision in numbers, trade growth on both a global level and for advanced economies is expected to improve in 2026.

Conversely, a slowdown is expected for trade growth in developing economies. Growth in emerging economies is projected to reach 5% in 2025, and then dropping to 4.6% in 2026. Alan Murphy, CEO at Sea-Intelligence, said the decline is not encouraging.  “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.”

Murphy also noted China’s economic slowdown as another point of concern. “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 U.S. projected to see a sharp drop in economic growth from 2.7% in 2025 to 2.1% in 2026.”

Source: Sea-Intelligence