IMF upgrades global growth forecast to 6 pct, highlights divergence in recovery

WASHINGTON. KAZINFORM The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday projected that the global economy will grow by 6 percent in 2021, 0.5 percentage point above the January forecast, according to the latest World Economic Outlook (WEO).

«Thanks to the ingenuity of the scientific community, hundreds of millions of people are being vaccinated, and this is expected to power recoveries in many countries later this year,» IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath told a virtual press briefing during the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, Xinhua reports.

She noted that economies also continue to adapt to new ways of working despite reduced mobility, and large economies, particularly the United States, have rolled out additional fiscal support, both of which have helped improve the outlook.

Nonetheless, the future presents «daunting» challenges, said the IMF chief economist. «The pandemic is yet to be defeated and virus cases are accelerating in many countries,» she said.

Noting that there's uncertainty surrounding the forecast, Petya Koeva Brooks, deputy director of the IMF's Research Department, told Xinhua in a remote interview Tuesday that the chief source of that uncertainty is the path of the pandemic and the vaccination process.

In the baseline, the IMF assumes that there's wide availability of vaccines in the second half of this year in advanced economies, as well as some emerging markets, but for the rest of the world, the wide availability would occur only in 2022 or even beyond, Brooks said.

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