Amid rising tensions over international trade, the broad global expansion that began roughly two years ago has plateaued and become less balanced. In our latest World Economic Outlook Update, we continue to project global growth rates of just about 3,9 percent for both this year and next, but judge that the risk of worse outcomes has increased, even for the near term.

Growth remains generally strong in advanced economies, but it has slowed in many of them, including countries in the euro area, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In contrast, GDP continues to grow faster than potential and job creation is still robust in the United States, driven in large part by recent tax cuts and increased government spending. Even US growth is projected to decelerate over the next few years, however, as the long cyclical recovery runs its course and the effects of temporary fiscal stimulus wane. For the advanced economies, we project 2018 growth of 2,4 percent, down 0,1 percentage point from our April World Economic Outlook projection. We maintain an unchanged forecast of 2,2 percent growth in those economies for 2019.

For emerging market and developing economies as a group, we still project growth rates of 4,9 percent for 2018 and 5,1 percent for 2019. These aggregate numbers, however, conceal diverse changes in individual country assessments.

China continues to grow in line with our earlier projections. In some large economies in Latin America, emerging Europe, and Asia, we now project growth rates below our April forecasts. Supply disruptions and geopolitical tensions have helped raise oil prices, benefiting emerging oil exporters (for example, Russia and Middle Eastern suppliers) but harming importers (for example, India). For the aggregate of emerging market economies, the upward and downward revisions largely offset each other.

Overall growth in sub-Saharan Africa will exceed that of population over the next couple of years, allowing per capita incomes to rise in many countries; but despite some recovery in commodity prices, growth will still fall short of the levels seen during the commodity boom of the 2000s. Adverse developments in Africa — civil strife or weather-related shocks, for example — could intensify outward migration pressures, especially toward Europe. —                                                                              Wires.

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