by Peter Spence, Economics Correspondent
Telegraph.co.uk
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has slashed its forecasts for UK growth following the vote to leave the European Union, yet the British economy is still expected to grow faster than that of Germany, France and Italy next year.
UK GDP growth is now expected to slow to 1.3pc in 2017, some 0.9 percentage points below what had been pencilled in in the IMF’s previous round of forecasts. With the exception of Nigeria, the UK’s 2017 growth forecast received the sharpest downgrade of any of the 16 economies assessed by the IMF.
Maury Obstfeld, the IMF’s chief economist, said that the UK’s decision to withdraw from the EU had added “downward pressure to the world economy at a time when growth has been slow”.