The International Monetary Fund predicts that Canada's economy is going to shrink by 6.2 per cent this year. (CBC)

No pleasant surprises included in IMF forecast for Canada and the world  

The International Monetary Fund delivered it’s latest World Economic Outlook report on Tuesday.

Colour it bleak. 

“It is very likely that this year the global economy will experience its worst recession since the Great Depression, surpassing that seen during the global financial crisis a decade ago,” IMF Economic Counsellor Gita Gopinath wrote in the report. “The Great Lockdown, as one might call it, is projected to shrink global growth dramatically.”

Here are some of the numbers:

The global economy, the outlook says, will shrink three per cent this year.

The outlook for Canada calls for a contraction of 6.2 per cent.

International Monetary Fund chief economist Gita Gopinath leads an IMF presentation July 23. On Tuesday, the IMF said the world economy is to shrink by three per cent, while Gopinath said global reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic have created ‘a crisis like no other.’ (Esteban Felix/The Associated Press)

For comparison: those figures are far worse than the global 0.1 per cent dip in the Great Recession year of 2009.

And they are also a long way from the IMF’s January forecast of 3.3 per cent global growth and a prediction that economic growth in Canada would rise by 1.8 per cent in 2020 and 2021, unchanged from projections made last October.

Those forecasts were delivered, of course, before the world-wide effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were being felt.

Tuesday’s IMF report predicts the global economy will grow by 5.8 per cent in 2012 and Canada’s will grow by 4.2 per cent in 2021.

But those figures and that growth, the IMF warns, are subject to a lot of unknowns, including the path COVID-19 takes and the measures taken to combat the virus.

With files from Associated Press (Paul Wiseman, Martin Crutsinger) via The Canadian Press

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