Global growth has been lower than it was in the “great stability” period, led by much weaker outcomes for the major advanced countries. Those outcomes were in substantial part a legacy of the financial crisis, of course, though other longer-run factors may also have been at work.
Global growth would have been weaker still were it not for two factors: emerging market economies as a group did not slow on average; and in addition, their weight in the global economy increased significantly. This change in weights alone added about one-third of a percentage point to the IMF's measure of global growth in GDP in the latest period.