The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has halved its forecast for Macau’s economic growth in 2025, according to its World Economic Outlook report published on Tuesday.
The institution now expects Macau’s gross domestic product (GDP) to expand by 3.6 percent this year, down from a previous estimate of 7.3 percent made in October.
Regarding 2026, the IMF expects Macau’s economic growth to reach 3.5 percent.
Macau’s GDP grew by 8.8 percent year-on-year in real terms in 2024, according to data from the city’s Statistics and Census Service.
The city’s overall economic output returned to 86.4 percent of the level in 2019, before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, said the statistics bureau.
In the latest World Economic Outlook report, the IMF also cut back its global growth forecast to 2.8 percent in 2025, down 0.5 percentage points from its previous estimate.
“The swift escalation of trade tensions has generated extremely high levels of policy ambiguity, making it more difficult than usual to establish a central global growth outlook,” stated the institution.
“The common denominator … is that tariffs are a negative supply shock for the economy imposing them,” said the IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, in a Tuesday press briefing.
Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump raised to a minimum of 145 percent the U.S. tariff on imports from China. Beijing raised its own tariffs on U.S. goods to 125 percent.
On Tuesday, Mr Trump said U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports would come down “substantially” from the current rate of 145 percent, but did not mention a figure.
In March, Fitch Ratings Inc forecast Macau’s GDP growth to slow to 6.9 percent this year, as the city’s gross gaming revenue (GGR) “is likely to rise more gradually to roughly 81 percent of its 2019 level, after a rebound in 2024”.
