Can the global economy avoid a lost decade of expansion ahead?

Forecasts are turning gloomier as we face a polycrisis' that demands an extremely high degree of global policy coordination

- KAUSHIK BASU

The Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund usually provide a platform for various organizations, policymakers, and commentators to reflect on the state of the global economy, offer assessments of the previous year’s developments, and forecast what lies ahead. This year’s meetings, which took place in Washington in April, were accompanied by grim predictions that underscored the growing likelihood of a prolonged global recession.

While many analysts previously assumed that the confluence of crises that the world has faced over the past three years—the covid pandemic, supply-chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine and the resulting inflation crisis and financial turmoil—would have a significant but ultimately transitory effect on the global economy, new data suggest that the current economic upheaval will last longer than initially expected.