Vietnam’s near-term economic outlook has dimmed slightly, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lowering its GDP growth forecast for 2025 and 2026 in its latest April 2025 World Economic Outlook. Real GDP is now projected to grow 5.2 percent in 2025 and 4.0 percent in 2026, compared to 6.1 percent for 2025 in the banks’s October 2024 forecast. This marks a downward revision of 0.9 percentage points.
Other key data:
- Inflation forecast: Reduced to 2.9% in 2025 with an estimated 2.5% in 2026.
- Current account surplus: Forecast reduced from 3.2% to 1.9% of GDP in 2025
- Unemployment: Steady at 2.0% through 2026
This downgrade comes on the back of US trade policy uncertainty and has impacted Vietnam’s regional neighbours too. The Philippines has seen its growth forecast cut from 5.8 to 5.5 percent and Indonesia has seen its 2025 growth projection lowered from 5.1 to 4.7 percent.
Notably this also presents a stark contrast to the 8 percent GDP growth target set by the government at the beginning of the year. Whereas there is optimism in Vietnam that US tariffs will not be as bad as they may have at first appeared, these IMF forecasts would suggest it still looks to be fairly bad.