The IMF said Tuesday that global public debt is expected to reach a record $100 trillion this year, warning that the fiscal outlook for many countries may be even “worse than expected.”
In its latest report on fiscal policy, the International Monetary Fund said it expects global public debt to hit 93 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) this year, and to approach 100 per cent of GDP by 2030 — 10 percentage points higher than in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
“Global public debt is very high,” Era Dabla-Norris, the deputy director of the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department, told reporters ahead of the report’s publication.
“There are very good reasons to believe that the debt burden — or the debt outlook — could be worse than expected,” she said, pointing to current spending pressures to address issues like climate change, overly optimistic debt projections, and the possibility of large amounts of unidentified debt.
