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World Bank cuts global economic growth forecast

10 December 2008 10:33 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Vahab Rzayev â€“ APA-Economics. The World Bank forecasts a significant decline in global economic growth in 2009 for both developed and emerging countries.
In a report assessing economic prospects, the Bank predicted that the worldâ€™s annual economic growth will slow to 0.89%, from 2.5% this year.
That is the slowest pace since 1982, when global growth was 0.3 percent. Developing countries will grow an average of 4.5 percent next year â€” a pace that economists said constituted a recession, given the need of these countries to grow rapidly to generate enough jobs for their swelling populations.
The biggest impact to developing countries will be from slowing investment growth, which is set to decline to 3.4 percent in 2009 from more than 13 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, international trade volumes will fall by 2.1 percent next year, the first drop since 1982, the Bank said.
As the World Bankâ€™s experts struggled to find a historical analog for the slump, they said it had more in common with the Depression of the 1930s than with the severe recessions of the 1970s or 1980s.