Global goods trade will grow 1.9% in volume terms in 2026, down from 4.6% in 2025, according to the WTO's 2026 Global Trade Outlook and Statistics. The organisation expects a modest rebound to 2.6% in 2027. Services trade growth is forecast to slow from 5.3% to 4.8% this year before recovering to 5.1%.
The downgrade — the WTO had expected more — is attributed to geopolitical tension, high oil prices and trade-policy uncertainty. Those three are not independent. Conflict-driven energy costs raise freight and production costs, squeeze household purchasing power and cut demand; tariff measures do the rest.
The organisation counted more than 60 tariff measures recorded since the start of 2025, covering about 11% of world trade on 2024 flows — a mixture of restrictions and liberalisation, layered onto existing schedules and, in several cases, suspended rather than removed.
The multilateral share is shrinking
The quietest important number in the report is the share of trade conducted on most-favoured-nation terms: roughly 80% at the start of 2025, about 72% by the end of February 2026.
MFN is the plumbing of the system — the promise to treat all members alike unless a free-trade agreement says otherwise. Losing eight points in fourteen months has two stated drivers: the density of new tariff measures, and the growth of bilateral and regional agreements, which route trade around the MFN rate rather than through it. The clause still governs most trade. It no longer governs as much as it did, and the trend line is the part that matters.
The AI exception
Against that, one category is running hot. AI-related goods — semiconductors, processors, servers, data-centre hardware — rose from about 13% of world merchandise trade in 2022–23, to 14% in 2024, to nearly 17% at the end of 2025. Their trade value grew 21.9% to $4.18 trillion and accounted for 42% of total trade growth last year.
By region, North American AI-related trade grew 32.4% in 2025, Asia 24.3% and Europe 10.6%. Asia's figure reflects where components are made; North America's reflects where the data centres are.
Regional divergence
North America front-loaded imports into the first quarter of 2025 in anticipation of tariffs, then slowed through the year as the measures landed; higher prices and policy uncertainty are expected to keep 2026 weak. Europe turned positive in 2025 after a negative stretch but faces a setback from energy and transport costs. Asia remains the outperformer, though it is not immune to the slowdown.
How to read 1.9%
A 1.9% forecast is an average over a world that is not averaging. Strip out AI hardware and the picture for 2026 is closer to stagnation. For anyone with exposure, that composition matters more than the headline: a chip-equipment supplier and a container shipping line can read the same report and draw opposite conclusions, both correctly.
It is also worth holding the number loosely. The projection is conditional on tariff policy not escalating further and on energy prices not spiking again — two conditions that have been broken repeatedly over the past two years. The 2026 figure will be revised. The direction of the composition, less so. The WTO's own institutional readout is in the MFN share: a rules-based system can survive high tariffs, but it thins out when trade increasingly happens outside its core clause.