World Bank plans to raise global growth forecast to 2% due to improvement in China

He World Bank (WB) He announced that he will raise the world growth forecasts for this year by three tenths, to 2%, thanks to the better prospects for China after the end of the blockades due to the pandemic, as indicated on Monday by the president of said institution, David Malpass.

“It’s an upward revision and is partly due to better prospects in China after they lifted the lockdown.”, Malpass said in a talk with the media prior to the opening of the spring meetings of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

After the end of the zero COVID policy, China is expected to grow 5.1% this year, eight tenths more than the figure estimated last January.

The rise in the global growth forecast is also due to the fact that “advanced economies are doing a little better than they seemed in January” and, for example, in the United States and Europe “consumption has held up better than expectedMalpass detailed.

However, specified the president of the WB, expected “slower activity in the second half of 2023″. The next few months could see an increase in the price of oil, he noted, and one must also watch closely “the challenge of changing the perception of banking health”, after the bankruptcies of several entities.

Malpass will inaugurate today, together with the director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, the spring meetings in which ministers and directors of financial institutions will participate to discuss the state of the world economy and the main future challenges.

These will be the last meetings as WB president for Malpass, who a few weeks ago announced his intention to leave office on June 30 to pursue new professional challenges.

In them, Malpass pointed out, one of the main issues to be dealt with is debt and the need for its restructuring and change towards “a system to make it more transparent”.

“The ultimate goal here is that if the poorest countries get into debt in commercial terms, the benefits are known and evaluated and go to the people of the country, and that hasn’t been happening.”, said the president of the WB.

In his opinion, the over-indebtedness “it is crippling many countries and investment in those countries. If we think about what is best for advanced economies and also for China is to have a restructuring that allows new investment to come into countries and therefore creates new markets”.

With information from EFE