IMF on Greek Economy: 2.3% in GDP growth in 2024; 2% in 2025

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday unveiled a slightly more optimistic forecast for the Greek economy compared to the projection included in the draft budget for 2025, with the former citing a figure of 2.3% in GDP growth this year but only 2% for next year.

The corresponding forecasts by the Greek government are 2.2% for 2024 and 2.3% for 2025 – the latter being higher than the IMF’s forecast.

In terms of inflation, the D.C.-based Fund forecasts 2.9% this year for Greece and 2.1% in 2025 – the draft budget forecasts 2.7% in 2024 and 2021 in 2025.

The IMF forecasts that unemployment in Greece will ease to 10.1% in 2025, down from 10.5% this year. The latter are higher than the forecasts by the Greek government, namely, 10.3% and 9.7%.

Finally, the IMF announced that it foresees that Greece’s current accounts deficit will reach 6.5% this year and 5.3% in 2025.

The Fund forecasts that the global economy will grow by 3.2% this year.

According to an announcement on Tuesday, “…The outlook for global growth has improved, but still faces medium-term challenges …Inflation is moderating back toward target and growth stabilizing, but long-term productivity gains are still lackluster the IMF said ahead of the release of the World Economic Outlook during this week’s Annual Meetings.

“Well, we have a lot of good news that inflation is coming down as we had expected. And in most countries, we are expecting it to be back to targets. At the same time, the global economy has been quite resilient and we are expecting growth rate to be 3.2 both this year and next. The not so good news, however, is that in the medium term, we’re still expecting lackluster growth of a little bit over three,” said IMF Deputy Director of Research, Petya Koeva-Brooks.