However, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank President David Malpass will likely find their discussions over the next two days consumed with more immediate problems, such as rising trade tensions that have sapped world growth.
The U.S.-China trade war has had ripple effects that have contributed to a significant, synchronized slowdown across 90% of the globe. But she said that result was not good enough and what was needed was for the United States and China to resolve all their trade issues and for all countries to work together to modernize the rules of global trade to lessen friction in the future.The IMF released an updated economic outlook Tuesday that projected global growth for this year at 3%. That would be the weakest showing since a negative 0.1% in 2009, in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.
"We have been reaching agreements on trade based primarily on the past," she said. She noted that global commerce has been transformed in recent years by advances in technology, and those advances need to be acknowledged in new trade rules. In his announcement last week, Trump said he was suspending a tariff increase on $250 billion of Chinese products that had been scheduled to take effect this week.