The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has just revised its growth forecasts downwards due to the trade war started by Donald Trump, who guarantees that tariffs will continue.

In the Outlook report published on Monday, the OECD calls on the US president to reduce trade tensions and the tariffs he has already imposed and to make his policies more predictable for the sake of the global economy.

Trade tensions and geopolitical uncertainties. These are two arguments that weigh heavily on the downward revision of world economic growth forecasts just made by the OECD.

Assuming the measures that Trump has already made official, Mexico will suffer the most, with a recession from 2025 and a contraction in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 1.3%, or 2.5 percentage points less than the OECD had predicted in December, according to Sic notiicias.

Canada will also fare very badly, with a weak increase in activity of 0.7% in both 2025 and 2026, which is the result of a correction in the outlook of 1.3 points in each year.

The reason for the steep decline of what have until now been the United States' main trading partners under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) lies in the strong ties with the United States.

The United States will not escape the shock and its GDP will suffer a notable slowdown, from growth of 2.8% in 2024 to 2.2% this year (two tenths of a percentage point less than estimated in December) and 1.6% in 2026 (five tenths of a percentage point less).

The OECD insists that these three economies would gain from a reversal of the tariff escalation and a return to the T-MEC rules, particularly Mexico.

Although it recognizes that for the United States, the improvement would be slight, namely a tenth of a percentage point more growth in 2026, to 1.7%.

In Europe, the direct effect of the tariffs that have already been made official will be smaller, but uncertainty will weigh on activity, which is why the authors of the report reduced the growth they expected in the eurozone by three tenths of a percentage point, both for this year (1%) and next (1.2%), against an acceleration of 0.7% in 2024.

While Germany, Italy and France will see their expectations corrected downwards, Spain will be the only one of the eurozone's main partners to buck this trend, with GDP growth twice that of these three countries in both 2025 (2.6%) and 2026 (2.1%).

As for the large emerging economies, growth in general will slow down both this year and next, and this movement is symbolized by the largest of them all, China, which will go from 5% in 2024 to 4.8% in 2025 (a tenth more than the OECD predicted in December) and to 4.4% in 2026 (the same as three months ago).

The OECD is aware of the unpredictability of Trump, who has threatened to impose more tariffs on various trading partners and, in particular, on Europeans and, even without naming him directly, stresses that "the current high level of geopolitical and political uncertainty poses significant risks to the projections".

To illustrate this, he ran a simulation in which bilateral tariffs would increase by another 10 percentage points.

The consequence would be a drop in world production of around 0.3% compared to the reference level after three years, which would again be particularly strong for Mexico (-1.3%), but also very significant for the United States (0.7%) and less significant for Japan (around -0.4%), the eurozone (less than -0.2%) and, above all, China (-0.1%), Washington's great rival. (Sic notícias)