(Reuters) – The International Monetary Fund raised its outlook for global economic growth again on Tuesday, forecasting worldwide output would rise 6% this year, a rate unseen since the 1970s, thanks largely to the unprecedented policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That upgrade, from 5.5% less than three months ago, largely reflects a rapidly brightening outlook for the U.S. economy, which the IMF now sees growing by 6.4% in 2021, the fastest since the early 1980s. That’s up 1.3 percentage points from the IMF’s 5.1% projection in late January and nearly double the rate it estimated in October.
The IMF forecast, if realized, would mark the fastest pace of global growth since 1976 but also comes off the steepest annual downturn of the post-war era last year as the pandemic brought commerce around the world to a near stand-still at times. The fund said the world economy contracted 3.3% in 2020, a modest upgrade from an estimated contraction of 3.5% in its January update.
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