WB revises up Vietnam’s 2025 GDP growth forecast to 6.6%

Vietnam’s GDP growth can reach 6.6% in 2025, the World Bank said in the newly-released January edition of its “Global Economic Prospects” report.

The figure is 0.6 percentage points higher than the figure in the June 2024 edition. It is lower than the Vietnamese government’s target of at least 8% this year.

Many international organizations predicted that Vietnam’s economic growth in 2025 below the government’s target, such as Singaporean bank UOB with 7%, Oxford Economics with 6.5%, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) with 6.6%.

Vietnam’s 2025 GDP growth projection is among the highest in Asia, only behind Bhutan with 7.2% and India with 7.2%.

Vietnam’s economic growth can outpace many major nations, such as the Philippines with 6.1%, Cambodia with 5.5%, Indonesia with 5.1%, and Thailand with 2.9%, according to the WB.

For 2026, the WB anticipates Vietnam’s GDP growth at 6.3%, or 0.2 percentage point lower than that in the June 2024 edition.

On global scale, the bank said the global economy is projected to expand by 2.7% in both 2025 and 2026, the same pace as in 2024, as inflation and interest rates decline gradually.

This would be a weaker performance than before the pandemic and insufficient to foster the progress necessary to “alleviate poverty and achieve wider development goals,” it stressed.

“Developing economies, which fuel 60% of global growth, are projected to finish the first quarter of the 21st century with the weakest long-term growth outlook since 2000,” according to the bank.

Vietnam’s GDP growth reached 7.09% in 2024, the General Statistics Office (GSO) reported.