A newly released International Monetary Fund forecast has bad news for Latin America: It will be the slowest growing region in the world this year. To put it another way, it will be the world champion of economic stagnation.
According to the new IMF forecasts, Latin America’s economies will grow by a combined average of only 0.6 percent in 2019. And that’s excluding Venezuela, which the IMF says will collapse by a whopping 35 percent this year. If you add Venezuela to the mix, Latin America’s economy looks even worse.
That should trigger alarm bells in the region, because it’s happening amid a growing world economy. The IMF is forecasting that the global economy will grow by 3.2 percent this year, including a 2.6 percent growth rate in the United States, a 6.2 percent average growth rate in Asia and a 3.4 percent growth in sub-Saharan Africa.
