The World Trade Organization lowered its global merchandise trade growth forecast for 2026, blaming “the cooling global economy and new tariffs,” in a report released Tuesday.
The Geneva-based trade body expects goods trade volume to slow from 2.8% last year to 2.4% in 2025, a jump from 0.9% growth for the year it forecast back in August.
However, the picture sours looking ahead to 2026, with the WTO expecting international merchandise trade volume growth of just 0.5%. That’s a sharp drop from the 1.8% the organization previously forecast.
“Countries’ measured response to tariff changes in general, the growth potential of AI, as well as increased trade among the rest of the world—particularly among emerging economies—helped ease trade setbacks in 2025,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the WTO, said in a statement. Speaking with reporters in Geneva, Okonjo-Iweala said she was “very concerned” for 2026, noting “the outlook for next year is bleaker,” per Reuters.
In the first half of 2025, world merchandise trade volume, or the “average of exports and imports,” climbed 4.9% year over year. A surge of frontloaded imports in the US, as well as “favorable macroeconomic conditions such as disinflation, supportive fiscal policies, and strong growth in emerging markets,” were key drivers in this growth, the WTO noted.
However, “economists said the August trade data could show a marked slowdown in US imports, because of the steep tariffs Mr. Trump put on exports from dozens of nations on Aug. 7,” the New York Times reported.
Strong AI demand played a role as well, with “AI-related goods,” like semiconductors and servers, driving “nearly half of the overall trade expansion in the first half of the year, [and] rising 20% year-on-year in value terms,” the organization said.
Some of those bright spots might fade, the WTO noted, explaining that the frontloading seen earlier this year could be unwound by “higher tariff rates and elevated trade policy uncertainty.”
We would have known more about US imports and exports on Tuesday, but the data scheduled to be released was paused as a result of the ongoing government shutdown.
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