Worldwide trade seen to expand sluggishly
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GLOBAL goods trade will grow by 3.3 percent this year and by 4 percent in 2016, less than previously forecast, due to sluggish economic growth, the World Trade Organization said yesterday.
“We expect trade to continue its slow recovery but with economic growth still fragile and continued geopolitical tensions, this trend could easily be undermined,” WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo said.
The WTO figures are based on economic growth estimates from organizations including the International Monetary Fund.
Although the forecasts do suggest modest growth in world goods trade, they follow repeated downward revisions of trade projections as the economic outlook worsened.
Trade grew by 2.8 percent in 2014, far less than an original forecast of 4.7 percent and also below the revised forecast of 3.1 percent that the WTO predicted last September.
The new expectation of 3.3 percent growth this year — already revised down twice — is a small acceleration but far below the long term trend.
Growth averaged 2.4 percent over each of the last three years, compared with an annual average of 6 percent between 1990 and the global financial crisis that began in 2007-2008.
The long-standing trend of trade growing about twice as fast as GDP appears to have broken, making forecasting particularly difficult, the WTO said.
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