Each autumn, the world’s economics teams come together for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Last week’s gathering in Bangkok included the launch of the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO). Led by IMF economists, the international economic community’s collective wisdom on the world’s economic prospects was made public.

Remarkably, they expect steady growth in a time of so much uncertainty and strife. “This steady growth is the net result of two big opposing forces: an energy shock, hurting growth, and an AI boom, lifting it,” IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said. In the fragile balance of this moment, it is easy to forget the series of major crises we have all gone through since the beginning of this decade: the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the fuel and affordability crisis, the Sudanese war, the violence in Gaza, the tariff disputes and the war in Iran earlier this year.

It is also easy to forget how often the collective economic wisdom about the world is announced each fall, only to quickly unravel by the following spring. In October 2019, for example, we expected the world economy to grow the following year by 3.4 per cent; instead, it shrank by 2.3 per cent.

In October 2021, we thought consumer prices worldwide would increase by 3.8 per cent in 2022; they surged by 8.6 per cent instead. In Ukraine, 3.6 per cent growth was expected in 2022; it plunged by nearly 29 per cent instead. In Sudan, 2.6 per cent growth was projected for 2023; instead, the economy crashed by 23.5 per cent.

How much of this year’s expected growth will endure and how much of it will be drastically revised next spring in this turbulent decade?

In our private lives, we might grieve following each devastating personal loss. We pause, find comfort and consolation among the people closest to us and take stock of what we have lost. What has been the equivalent of this grieving in the global economic community?

The release of new WEO data can tell us something about our immediate economic future. At the same time, comparing historic data with prior economic forecasts, the latest WEO data can also tell us something about this extraordinary decade we are in. The old forecasts were not “wrong”; instead, on the eve of multiple crises, they were our best collective guess as to what our economic future looked like. They were the “old normal” – the immediate likely economic pathway – and their distance from where we are now reflects our shared economic loss since 2020.

Combining two databases, the WEO Historical Forecast Database and the latest WEO Database, can quantify this loss. As an example, I can use the multi-year gross domestic product forecast data from the 2019 and 2021 fall announcements, just before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, respectively, and compare them with actual GDP corresponding to the forecast years.

Using the actual economic data for that fall (in billions of US dollars), I apply the projected real GDP growth and actual real GDP growth through subsequent years. The gap between the two series is an approximation of the economic loss, which has been staggering.

The foregone world economic growth from the pandemic amounted to more than US$5 trillion in the first year of the pandemic and about US$3 trillion a year in the years after through 2024. This is equivalent to more than all of the world’s foreign aid (US$214.6 billion), foreign direct investment (US$883 billion) and remittance flows (US$685 billion) to low- and middle-income countries combined that same year. It is also equivalent to more than a fifth of the US economy in 2020.

This loss has not been uniformly distributed around the world. Advanced economies have experienced much sharper recoveries relative to their pre-pandemic forecast than emerging markets and developing economies.

For example, the pre-pandemic forecast for advanced economies was 1.6 per cent growth in 2021; instead, actual GDP growth after the pandemic was 6.2 per cent, a difference of 4.6 percentage points. Among emerging markets and developing economies, the corresponding numbers were 4.8 and 7 per cent, also a sharp recovery from the pandemic but only a 2.2-percentage point difference.

In Ukraine, meanwhile, the war has meant an annual GDP loss of more than US$60 billion, equivalent to about a third of the country’s pre-war GDP. Because of the war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s economy alone is on track to lose the equivalent of US$32 billion this year.

We could argue and say the gap between the two GDP series is a measure of many things.

It is a measure of the world’s leading economists’ forecasting errors, showing the shortcomings of economic models in an uncertain period. It is a measure of policy errors and the ineffectiveness of the global community’s response to shocks and the failure to coordinate. It is a measure of data errors, drawing as they do from information collected by national agencies in the middle of lockdowns and crises.

We can also say this loss is severely underestimated as it fails to measure the lives lost from these crises and conflicts.

The gap is all these things. It is also arguably a measure of the economic future that we all anticipated but never came to pass. As we take stock of the latest economic wisdom and as the expected steady growth provides some measure of relief, a second of silence for the old normal and all that we lost might be fitting.