The growth of the Portuguese economy will be stronger in 2026 than anticipated six months ago by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), having benefited from a very significant upward revision. Therefore, instead of slowing down, the pace of the economy should gain some strength, after all, growing almost twice as fast as the Euro Zone average.
According to the new study on the world economic outlook (World Economic Outlook), Portugal is expected to grow 1.9% this year (in April, the IMF predicted 2%), but to compensate for this slight downward revision, the Fund raised its forecast for next year, from 1.7% to 2.1%.
The Washington-based institution is, in any case, more conservative than the Government or the Bank of Portugal in the projection for next year.
The State Budget proposal for 2026, prepared by the Ministry of Finance, is based on the assumption that the Portuguese economy will grow 2.3% in real terms next year.
The Bank of Portugal said, last week, that activity should grow 2.2%.
The IMF does not specifically analyze the case of Portugal, but considers that the more open and exporting economies, such as Portugal, benefited from a more intense first half of the year in exports because there was a race against time on the part of companies in an attempt to avoid the high tariffs that were being decreed by the government of Donald Trump, in the United States.
But “looking beyond the apparent resilience resulting from trade-related distortions in some of the incoming data and sudden growth forecasts due to sharp swings in trade policies”, especially in the first half of this year, the IMF’s more global outlook “continues to point to gloomy scenarios, both in the short and long term”.