The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised its global trade growth forecast for 2025-2026.

The IMF, in its recently published January 2025 update to their World Economic Outlook (WEO) report, which was published in October 2024, said that world trade growth in 2025 would be 3.2%, increasing to 3.3% in 2026.

In this update, key revisions were made to global trade growth, especially for advanced economies.

"Both projections were revised downwards in the latest update," Sea-Intelligence said, citing the IMF forecast.

For 2025, trade in the advanced economies is projected to grow by 2.1%, having been revised down by -0.5 percentage points, while the 2026 projection of 2.5% was marked down by -0.3 percentage points.

"While trade growth on both a global level and for advanced economies is projected to see higher growth in 2026, trade growth for the emerging economies is projected to trend downwards," Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, commented.

[Figure 1 shows the growth figures for 2020-2024, the projections for 2025-2026, and the revisions made to the latter two years relative to the October 2024 report.]

Their 2025 projection is of 5.0% growth, and the 2026 projection is of 4.6% growth, despite both figures having been revised upwards. 

"What is concerning however, is that growth from Asia into North America and Europe accounted for a sizeable part of the container growth in 2024, hence a downward revision in trade growth in 2025 and 2026 is not positive news," Murphy said.

The report noted that another potential for concern is the slowdown in economic growth in China.

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.

It added that furthermore, a lot of the major advanced economies are also projected to see a slowdown in economic growth headed into 2026, with US projected to see a sharp drop in economic growth from 2.7% in 2025 to 2.1% in 2026.