Revision of World Economic Outlook from IMF, April 2018

On April, International Monetary Fund released the new edition of its World Economic Outlook (WEO). According to the updated estimates, global economic growth in 2018 will grow to 3.94 percent from 3.76 percent in 2017. This is a upward revision relative to the previous October's estimate in which world's GDP growth was expected to rise this year.

Released twice a year, in October 2017 and April 2018, WEO contains projections of key economic and financial indicators such as GDP, inflation, unemployment, the balance of payments, government finance, trade, and major commodity prices at the global level and in many countries.

In the April edition of WEO, global economic growth was revised up mainly due to the subdued growth in advanced countries, especially in the United States and China. The growth of the U.S. GDP in 2018 will be 2.93 percentage points stronger than expected. More over, the growth of some developing economies was revised up. Thus, the growth in Russia in 2018 will be moree than it was estimated previously. The same is for the Brazilian economy, which will grow a bit more than was projected in April, and start to recover so far in 2018.

Improvement of the forecast for the emerging economies is connected with better prospects of economic growth in China in the near-term and some strengthening of energy prices. 

Energy prices firming along with the removal of sanctions on Iran resulted in the upward revision of the republic's current account balance. While in April, current account balance of Iran was estimated to be 4 percent of GDP this year, in October's edition of WEO it turned positive to 4.28 percent of GDP.