Annualized Global Real GDP Growth
Annualized Global Real GDP Growth
Experts expect advanced economies to grow 2% a year to 2030, picking up to 2.7% by mid-century.
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Our Analysis
How do we interpret these results
Advanced economies grew about 1.9% in 2025, and forecasters expect growth to be higher the faster AI progresses. Experts predict 2050 growth of 2% under slow progress, 3% under moderate progress, and 5% under the rapid AI progress scenario, and 2.7% unconditionally. The public tracks experts closely, but superforecasters stay lower throughout, reaching just 3% even under rapid progress. The groups therefore largely agree for the slower scenarios and separate only as assumed progress quickens. Within-group spread stays modest at the low end — for slow progress in 2050, half of experts predict growth between 1.4% and 3.2%.
Forecasts by scenario
Median forecasts from experts for each scenario
| scenario | 2030 | 2050 |
|---|---|---|
| Unconditional | 2% | 2.7% |
| Moderate Progress | 2.4% | 3% |
| Rapid Progress | 3.1% | 5% |
| Slow Progress | 2% | 2% |
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* Denotes non-overlapping bootstrapped confidence intervals between group aggregates.
Rationale analysis
The main lines of reasoning driving the spread in estimates
The 2030 time horizon
The majority of respondents point to the fact that the first resolution window (between the beginning of 2025 and the beginning of 2030) is already partially settled: “Growth for 2025-2027 is essentially locked in…so a five-year annualized number can only move as far as 2028-2029 can drag it.” The high-growth and low-growth poles referred to below, therefore, mainly apply to 2045–2050.
Pace of change
High-growth respondents often point to AI as a general purpose technology that is likely to “massively increase economic growth” by 2050. They frequently cite “automation, cheaper services, and faster R&D, especially in rapid progress,” and point to the potential for “larger gains through AI-driven productivity,” particularly if a rapid-progress scenario materializes. One writes, “with rapid progress, we can't even imagine the impact it will have, probably bigger than electrification and industrialization.” Low-growth respondents tend to counter that “productivity growth is not about capabilities. It is about diffusion and adoption, and both are slow.” Several note that growth and productivity gains have been limited to date: “AI has been around for 3 years and the long talked about productivity boost hasn’t happened yet.”
Demographics
Low-growth respondents often argue that low fertility rates and shrinking workforces will limit growth: “GDP growth is the sum of labor-force growth and productivity growth. The first…is now turning negative across the advanced world and much of the emerging world…That is why 2% is a large number, not a small one.” Some high-growth respondents acknowledge that argument, but reason that AI can substitute for scarce labor: “The world will probably need moderate AI progress to overcome basic demographic drag.”; “AI humanoids may be more important for economic growth by 2050.”
Emerging Markets and Developing Economies (EMDEs)
High-growth respondents typically expect EMDEs to be able to grow faster because they start from a lower base and have the potential to leapfrog legacy systems, with AI cutting the cost of doing so: “I put emerging markets higher because they can still catch up, build more, and copy what already works from richer countries.” Low-growth respondents often argue AI destroys the traditional path EMDEs have used to develop their economies: “AI progress will likely end one of the key drivers of growth of emerging economies: catch-up growth is currently enabled by the fact that lots of people are initially stuck with low-productivity jobs, but you can quickly transfer them to high-productivity jobs after technology transfer. If future jobs are made by AI, this no longer applies.”; “A combination of robotics and AI technology will directly undermine [EMDEs] current advantage and bring manufacturing back to advanced economies that no longer require cheap human labor.”
Explosive growth
Many high-growth respondents take historically unprecedented growth seriously enough to include in their 90% forecasts, particularly under a rapid-progress scenario: “I do think there is a >10% chance of unprecedented growth—30% seems plausible”; “If our AIs have robots building robot factories, they are limited by very little on the human scales…”; “Growth probably drastically accelerates after the singularity.” Low-growth respondents typically express skepticism that explosive growth is even possible, much less likely: “GDP growth is very ‘sticky’. The “economy” is a large aggregate, and its rate of growth is unlikely to change much even with the proliferation of AI.”; “AI may be our latest and greatest innovation, but such innovation has been the norm and already factored into expectations.”
Economic shocks
Low-growth respondents frequently invoke the potential for things like war, tariffs, general recessions, and the popping of an AI bubble to counteract AI-driven growth: “Strait of Hormuz will surely hurt a lot of economies for a while.”; “Predicting a market crash in the next 5 years, due to overinvestment in AI.” High-growth respondents generally point to AI investment as an engine of growth—“a historic capital expenditure surge”— that lifts growth even before productivity gains arrive, and imply that any other exogenous shocks will likely be small compared to the scale of the AI-driven transformation: “We will see a boom in GDP that will be similar to the prime years of the industrial revolution, but at a much faster pace.”
Rationale examples
High-quality rationales from forecasters across the range
High-growth respondents
After AGI is achieved around 2030, growth will be limited primarily by energy and natural resources rather than labor. EMDEs [will] grow faster due to catch-up and leap-frog effects. Rapid progress would drive near-exponential expansion in the second period.
My forecast distinguishes between superficial AI adoption and economically transformative AI adoption, namely with the degree of sophistication involved in the use of AI. A chatbot with RAG sitting next to an existing business process is not, by itself, a new production function. It may save some time, it may improve search, it may reduce some administrative friction, and it may give leadership a lovely slide that says ‘AI-enabled transformation,’ which is nice, I suppose, if one enjoys laminated theater. But that is not the thing that moves global GDP in a deep way. The larger effect comes if AI systems become embedded into the machinery of production and discovery: research automation, software generation, industrial optimization, supply-chain planning, scientific hypothesis generation, market analysis, robotics, design, simulation, drug discovery, materials science, energy systems, and automated experimentation loops that can compare plans against reality and improve from the measured result...Many firms will buy tools before they know what to do with them. Some will bolt AI onto broken workflows and then act shocked when the workflow remains broken, only faster and with better punctuation...[However,] by 2045–2050…if rapid AI progress continues and the technology becomes deeply integrated into real productive systems, advanced economies could see a substantial productivity boom. The biggest gains would likely accrue to firms and countries that already have strong digital infrastructure, capital markets, elite technical talent, high-quality institutions, abundant energy, and the managerial competence to redesign work around the new tools…
By 2050, we will likely have established the use of quantum computing, and even AGI...not only digitally but in the physical world. So the impact of AI will be far larger by 2050.
Low-growth respondents
GDP growth is the sum of labor-force growth and productivity growth. The first term is now turning negative across the advanced world and much of the emerging world. Japan is at the frontier of this, with Western Europe close behind, and the US will follow unless it reverses its current immigration policy — for the US the sign of the labor term is a policy choice, and current policy has chosen a negative sign. In the emerging world, China faces a shrinking labor force from the one-child policy, compounded by the property bust. When the labor term is negative, productivity has to run positive just to hold growth at zero. That is why 2% is a large number, not a small one, and why it will be hard to beat. A second force works against the top of the range. AI raises the capital share and lowers the labor share. The gains concentrate, and the resulting social fragmentation invites a political backlash that slows adoption. The fast scenario could partly eat itself: the faster the capability, the sharper the distributional shock, and the stronger the brake on diffusion. That bears hardest on the rapid case.
Historically we’ve seen some degree of catch up growth [in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies], due to technological diffusion and diminishing marginal returns to investment within the set of advanced nations. On the other [hand], a plausible driver of that catch up growth has been affordable labour, which may become less important if AI is able to substitute for human labour.
Most of the movement from 2025 to 2030 will be dependent on non-AI factors. These include the energy shock from the Iran war, ongoing tariff wars between major powers, China and India's economic maturation, and to the extent that AI is playing a role, a significant probability of an AI Capex unwind in the latter half of this period…I am skeptical that obstacles to adoption and diffusion can be overcome to realize the benefits of AI in even a rapid progress world…
Historical data show no clear correlation between GDP growth and technological progress in either advanced or emerging economies. While it’s tempting to assume that rapid technological improvement and adoption would automatically lead to a higher economic growth rate, GDP is largely a measure of consumption.