Business Report :
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected that Bangladesh’s economy will experience a modest recovery in the current fiscal year, in its global growth forecast 2025 on Tuesday.
The IMF forecasts that Bangladesh’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth could reach 4.9 percent, up from 3.8 percent in the previous year.
The IMF’s World Economic Outlook was released in conjunction with the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, held in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States.
Before the IMF, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank also released data related to Bangladesh’s growth forecast.
The IMF said the country’s Gross Domestic Product is expected to grow by 3.8 percent in the outgoing fiscal year—lower than the provisional estimate of 3.97 percent made by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook released on Tuesday, the organization expects inflation to decline to 8.42percent in FY26 and further ease to 5.06percent in the following year.
The agency had earlier projected 5.18 percent inflation for the FY26, in the World Economic Outlook published in April.
Earlier this month, the World Bank expressed cautious optimism about Bangladesh’s recovery, noting that economic activity is gradually improving.
However, it warned that challenges in the banking sector, rising political uncertainty ahead of national elections, and delays in implementing reforms could slow the pace of recovery.
The IMF also pointed to downside risks such as continued inflationary pressure, sluggish reforms, potential global trade disruptions, and energy supply constraints Additionally, the International Monetary Fund edged up as tariff shocks and financial conditions have proven more benign than expected, but warned that a renewed US-China trade war threatened by President Donald Trump could slow output significantly.
The IMF said in its World Economic Outlook that recent trade deals between the US and some major economies have avoided the worst of Trump’s threatened tariffs with little retaliation, prompting its second growth upgrade since April.
The IMF now predicts global real GDP growth at 3.2 percent for 2025, up from a July forecast of 3.0 percent and a more severe April forecast of 2.8 percent that came after Trump imposed broad global “reciprocal” tariffs and a tit-for-tat escalation with China ensued. It sees global growth at 3.1 percent in 2026, unchanged from the July forecast.
In addition to lower-than-expected tariff rates, global output has been supported by an agile private sector that front-loaded imports and quickly rerouted supply chains, a weaker dollar, fiscal stimulus in Europe and China and an AI investment boom, said IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas.
“So bottom line: not as bad as we feared, but worse than we anticipated a year ago, and worse than we need,” he said before the start of IMF and World Bank annual meetings this week.
But Trump on Friday shattered the relative calm by threatening 100 percent duties on Chinese goods – on top of rates averaging 55 percent – in retaliation for Beijing’s dramatically expanded export controls on rare earths.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday that talks were underway to defuse a major US-China trade war escalation.
