PETALING JAYA: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised the outlook for Malaysia’s real gross domestic product (GDP) by a notch to 4.4% this year from its earlier prediction of 4.3%.
Malaysia’s economy expanded by 3.7% in 2023.
In its latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) entitled “Steady but slow, resilience amid divergence”, IMF predicted the GDP growth to remain at 4.4% in 2025.
It projected Malaysia’s current account balance at 2.4% in 2024 and 2.7% in 2025.
For global growth, the IMF estimated it to be at 3.2% for last year and to continue at the same pace in 2024 and 2025.
“The forecast for 2024 is revised up by 0.1 percentage point from the January 2024 WEO update and by 0.3 percentage point from the October 2023 WEO,” it said.
The pace of expansion is low by historical standards.
This is owing to both near-term factors, such as still-high borrowing costs and withdrawal of fiscal support, and longer-term effects from the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; weak productivity growth and increasing geoeconomic fragmentation.
The fund said risks to the global outlook are now broadly balanced. — Bernama