Dear President Tharman, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends: it is a delight to be back in Singapore, on my way to Thailand, this year’s host of the IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings. Singapore is a showcase of integration in regional and global value chains—and of the benefits it brings.
Next week, finance ministers and central bank governors of the IMF’s 191 member countries will come together to assess the direction of the world economy at a time of high uncertainty and rapid change.
It is vital that they do, and Thailand is just the right host to have—another open and dynamic country at the heart of a vibrant region. Since Thailand last hosted our Annual Meetings 35 years ago, in 1991, Asia-Pacific’s share of global GDP has gone up from 25 percent to 43 percent.
Asia and the world have steered through shock after shock with remarkable agility.
But whether this fortitude will be sustained and whether the world’s underwhelming growth rates this decade can be bettered will depend on our success in navigating three major crosscurrents: the rapid arrival of AI, persistently high energy prices, and record levels of public debt.
This will be the central focus of our discussions in Thailand next week.
Let me start from the context in which our Meetings will take place. To put it simply, the global economy is being pulled in two opposite directions: a negative energy supply shock and a positive demand shock from AI. The combined impact of these two forces is highly uneven across the world.
Our World Economic Outlook will show that steady global growth has continued since the Spring, but behind the averages there are significant variations. The largest hits to growth this year are in economies ravaged by war: a war on Ukraine in its fifth year, a war in the Gulf in its eighth month, and too many other raging conflicts, destroying lives and causing global economic damage.
Smaller and more scattered hits to growth are also seen in other vulnerable countries, those reliant on energy imports and lacking sufficient policy space to cushion shocks.
But we will also see higher growth in a few places—which takes me to the role of AI.
Love it, hate it, or fear it, AI is here, rapidly becoming a key driver of countries’ relative fortunes in the world economy.
Global investment-to-GDP in AI will reach and likely exceed the amounts that went into building the railroads, the electricity grid, or the telecommunication network. We estimate AI hardware and related tech products now account for more than one-tenth of world goods trade and rising.
read more: https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2026/10/07/sp100726-2026-annual-meetings-curtain-raiser
