Chicago – June 11, 2025
Global economic growth is on track for its weakest decade since the 1960s, according to a new analysis by the World Bank, which cites President Donald Trump’s trade war as a major factor weighing on economies worldwide.
The World Bank expects Trump’s barrage of new tariffs on America’s trading partners to whittle down global economic growth to its lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis when discounting worldwide recessions, according to a report released Tuesday.
While the Washington, DC-based institution does not expect another global recession due to the tariffs, it said in a press release that — should its projections for global growth come to pass this year and next — “average global growth in the first seven years of the 2020s will be the slowest of any decade since the 1960s.”
In its report, the World Bank downgraded its expectation for global GDP growth this year to 2.3% from the 2.7% it had forecast in January. That’s based on the assumption that tariffs worldwide will remain at their late-May levels.
That puts the world economy on course for its weakest pace of growth in 17 years, excluding two global recessions — the first in 2009, following the financial crisis; and the second in 2020, the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. Those years saw global economic growth contract by 1.3% and 2.9%, respectively, according to World Bank data.
“The sharp increase in tariffs and the ensuing uncertainty are contributing to a broad-based growth slowdown and deteriorating prospects in most of the world’s economies,” the institution said in the report.
