South Korea: in April 2009 the IMF expected the economy to shrink 4.0%. The outcome: +0.8%
South Korea: GDP growth in 2009
A miss the other way: the same-year forecast proved far gloomier than reality. By October the IMF expected −1.0%.
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GDP growth is how much the volume of everything a country’s economy produced changed in a year, net of price rises. The April forecast is made with the year already under way, and can still miss by several percent.
Across: when each forecast was published. Blue, what the IMF expected for 2009 in each edition (April and October); orange, the outcome in the latest data. The shading is the error each edition still carried.
- 2009: forecast in April 2009 → latest data
−4.0% → +0.8%
IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2009 → IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2026
- IMF forecast for 2009, October 2009
−1.0%
The forecast is the April World Economic Outlook of the same year; the outcome, the IMF’s latest data (April 2026). Countries over 3 million people where the April forecast was below 0.5% and proved at least 4 pp gloomier than the outcome; for each country, the year with the largest such miss.
Such misses come in years of shocks: wars, sanctions, the pandemic, commodity crashes, when it is hard to judge how far an economy will adapt. The IMF will still revise recent outcomes.
A question for this picture
Why did the economy prove more resilient than expected at the start of the year?