The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s January 2025 update to its World Economic Outlook (WEO) report has highlighted revisions to global trade growth, especially for advanced economies.
Sea-Intelligence has released 2020-2024 growth figures (Figure 1), along with updated 2025-2026 forecasts and revisions since the October 2024 report.
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According to Sea-Intelligence, the IMF predicted that global trade growth will be 3.2 per cent in 2025, rising to 3.3 per cent in 2026. However, both estimates were reduced in the most recent report.
Trade in advanced economies is expected to expand by 2.1 per cent in 2025, down 0.5 percentage points from the previous year, while the 2026 prediction of 2.5 per cent has been reduced by 0.3 percentage points.
While global and advanced economies’ trade growth is expected to accelerate in 2026, developing economies’ trade growth is expected to slow.
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Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, said: “Their projections for 2025 and 2026 are 5.0 per cent and 4.6 per cent, respectively, despite being 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 downwards revision in trade growth in 2025 and 2026 is not positive news.”
Additionally, Sea-Intelligence noted that another potential for concern is the slowdown in economic growth in China. China’s economic production was 5.2 per cent in 2023, 4.8 per cent in 2024, and is expected to fall to 4.5 per cent in 2026.
Furthermore, several of the main advanced economies are expected to witness a slowdown in economic growth by 2026, with the United States anticipated to have a steep decline in economic growth from 2.7 per cent in 2025 to 2.1 per cent in 2026.
