The International Monetary Fund (IMF) maintains its forecast for Vietnam’s GDP growth at 2.7% in 2020, the highest in Asia, and the pace is expected to speed up to 7% in 2021.

Vietnam’s consumer price index is set at 3.2%, lower than the estimation of 4% this year. The economy could be subject to a strong rebound of 7% GDP growth rate in 2021.

Notably, in the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook update, Thailand’s economic growth forecast has been revised down to -7.7%, one percentage point lower than the organization’s previous forecast in April, the largest contraction among Asian economies.

Global growth is projected at -4.9% in 2020, 1.9 percentage points below IMF’s previous forecast.

The average growth forecast for ASEAN–5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam) would record a contraction of 2% in 2020, before rebounding to 6.2% in 2021.

As the Covid-19 pandemic has had a more negative impact on activity in the first half of 2020 than anticipated, global growth is projected at -4.9% in 2020, 1.9 percentage points below IMF’s previous forecast.

Major economies, including the US, China and Japan have all received a lower forecast in this update outlook, in which the US is predicted to shrink 8% (previously -5.9%), China with a positive growth of 1% (previously 1.2%), and Japan with -5.8% (previously -5.2%).

The outlook is even more gloomy for European countries, as Italy and Spain are subject to the deepest contraction of 12.8%, followed by France with -12.5% and Germany with -7.8%.

In 2021 global growth is projected at 5.4%. Overall, this would leave 2021 GDP some 6½ percentage points lower than in the pre-COVID-19 projections of January 2020. The adverse impact on low-income households is particularly acute, imperiling the significant progress made in reducing extreme poverty in the world since the 1990s, stated the IMF.