As the recession continues in the US, the world is not doing so well either.  The International Monetary Fund’s updated World Economic Outlook, released Wednesday, predicts world economic growth of negative 1.3 percent this year, marking “by far the deepest global recession since the Great Depression”. Not since the 1930s has the global economy undergone a collective contraction.The IMF predicts that the world economy will grow by 1.9 percent in 2010. Advanced economies will stagnate, with average GDP growth of exactly zero. These estimates may prove optimistic, especially given the Fund’s repeated revisions of the 2009 figures. In any case, IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard acknowledged that there would be no rapid recovery from the current economic crisis. He noted that, historically, wherever recessions are preceded by financial crises they are more severe and longer lasting.

The IMF is not the only source for doubt.

The global financial crisis could become “a human and development calamity” for many poor countries, the World Bank said, urging donor nations to speed delivery of money they have pledged and consider giving more.

Developing countries, its main constituency, face “especially serious consequences with the crisis driving more than 50 million people into extreme poverty, particularly women and children,” the bank said Sunday.

Ministers attending the IMF-World Bank meetings said they saw signs that the world economy is stabilizing, but it will take until mid-2010 for the world to emerge from the worst recession in decades. They said stimulus packages, bank recapitalization and other actions taken by governments and central banks to deal with the crisis are beginning to show results.