A stark warning from The World Bank on the 2024 outlook: The global economy is on the brink of weakest start to a decade since the 1990s. Their 2024 forecast is that global growth will slow from 2.6% in 2023 to 2.4% in 2025, before picking up to 2.7% in 2025.
The 2-page foreword to the report makes for particularly somber reading:
“The end of 2024 will mark the halfway point of what was expected to be a transformative decade for development—when extreme poverty was to be extinguished, when major communicable diseases were to be eradicated, and when greenhouse-gas emissions were to be cut nearly in half.
What looms instead is a wretched milestone: the weakest global growth performance of any half-decade since the 1990s, with people in one out of every four developing economies poorer than they were before the pandemic.”
The link to how this affect progress on the Sustainable Development Goals is critical: the 2023 UN SDG progress report shows that only 15% of the targets were on track to be met by 2030. The first of the 169 SDG targets, “By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere”, is not one of them.
Should current trends persist, about 7% of the global population (~575 million people), are projected to live in extreme poverty by 2030, the majority of which will reside in sub-Saharan Africa.
While the The World Bank predicts strong growth for sub-Saharan Africa (3.8% in 2024 and 4.1% in 2025), the bank said that “…increases in per capita incomes will remain inadequate to enable the region’s economies make significant progress in reducing extreme poverty.
Read more:
- The World Bank, Global Economic Prospects, January 2024.