When a Decade Is “Lost”: A Reflection on the World Bank’s 2026 Outlook

This week, I was conducting research for a paper when I pulled up the World Bank’s June 2026 Global Economic Prospects report. I was flabbergasted, to say the least, by the breathtaking candour of the World Bank Group Senior Vice President and Chief Economist Indermit Gill, in the Foreword: “The first half of the 2020s are now behind us, and it is possible that this decade might already be lost.” Elsewhere, Gill is blunter still: “Barring a miracle, the 2020s will prove to be what their ominous opening foreshadowed: a lost decade.” The report is clear about the scale of the losses. Global growth this year will slump to a meagre 2.5 per cent, its weakest outside of an outright global recession since the early 2000s. And by the end of 2026, one in four  developing economies, one in three low-income economies and half of all fragile and conflict-affected economies will be poorer than they were on the eve of the COVID-19 crisis.

“Barring a miracle, the 2020s will prove to be what their ominous opening foreshadowed: a lost decade.”
— Indermit Gill, World Bank, June 2026

I was perplexed reading this stark assessment from the World Bank, particularly as I had watched countries speak so enthusiastically about the World Bank Spring Meetings in April. At the WTO’s Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé in March, a “Yaoundé Package” was celebrated for adopting decisions to better integrate small and vulnerable economies into the global trading system, alongside a new phase of the Enhanced Integrated Framework for least-developed countries. And just this week, the Global Review of Aid for Trade marked its twentieth anniversary, celebrating close to USD 800 billion unlocked for trade development. Communiqués were signed, pledges announced and partnerships launched. Yet here was the World Bank, the institution at the centre of that global economic architecture,  conceding that this decade may already be lost, with hopeful eyes turned to the 2030s for redemption.

The phrase "the lost decade"  is not new. As a fresh-eyed political science student back in the day, I was intrigued to learn that Latin America and the Caribbean had  lived through a “lost decade” when the United States raised interest rates so sharply in 1979, that debts that had been cheap to take on in the 1970s became impossible to service. At the time, I wondered how an entire decade could simply be lost.  Now, more than four decades later, the World Bank is using the same language, and the remedy sounds remarkably familiar.

“Decades are not lost. They are spent and paid for, and the real question is by whom.”

Calling a decade “lost” pulls us quickly towards a familiar story: growth slipped away through repeated shocks, governments that took too many risks, too high a cost of doing business and poor investment climates. I walked away from trade more than a decade ago when I saw the futility of the system I was operating within. But across every sector I have worked in since, I have realised that the questions and the challenges are the same. 

And I now know of course, that decades are not lost. They are spent and paid for, and the real question is by whom. So when I read that the 2020s are lost, I ask: lost to whom? Who carried the cost of the pandemic, the inflation shock and now the energy shock? Who set the terms on which small states borrowed to survive each one? And why does the remedy, which is investment, a business-friendly environment and private capital, stay the same in every version of the story while the diagnosis keeps getting worse? Just earlier this year, the OECD and IDB’s Caribbean Development Dynamics report recommended the usual pathway to development for the Caribbean: deepen regional integration, attract foreign direct investment, build climate-resilient infrastructure and leverage green finance. In my response to that report, I argued that this was technocratic crisis management masquerading as development imperatives.

Gill pins his hope on the triad of AI, the clean energy transition and deeper regional integration. But each of these engines of growth is fractured, and along the same fault line. Africa and Latin America together hold just 3 per cent of global AI compute, and fewer than one in ten  AI governance frameworks originate in the Global South. For small island states like CARICOM, AI is a service to be rented rather than a capacity that is owned. When China's  Xi Jinping warned in July that unequal access to AI should produce “no new historical injustices,” I argued in No New Historical Injustices?  the was drawing a straight line from today’s AI divide to the Global South’s longer histories of colonialism and uneven development. 

That line is very real. Let's look at the clean energy transition. The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment 2026 finds that although emerging and developing economies are home to two-thirds of the world’s population, only 55 per cent of energy investment is expected to flow to them this year. Clean energy projects in developing economies face a cost of capital at least double that of advanced economies, and the transition is increasingly financed through debt, the very same burden that has already narrowed the fiscal space of small states this decade.

“For small island states, AI is aa service to be rented, not a capacity to be owned.”

That leaves regional integration, the one engine we in the Caribbean could steer ourselves. Yet in 2022, CARICOM’s own Secretary-General described intra-regional trade as stuck in the doldrums, at between eight and sixteen per cent of our total trade. This is not surprising; economies  built around tourism, commodities and imports, produce for markets outside the region, not for each other. The plantation economy school anticipated exactly this: integrating economies with similar export structures and little to trade with one another does not, on its own, create complementarity. And the CARICOM integration movement itself is unsettled as I explored in On Caribbean Math and the Limits of CARICOM Unity. Member states are contemplating moving at different speeds, and a more flexible approach in which groups of willing members cooperate more closely in selected areas. Whatever its merits, a CARICOM that integrates in parts is already a Community splintered.

Furthermore, much of CARICOM’s regional integration agenda is funded from external sources and, as Gill himself notes, “the world has seldom been in a less charitable mood than it is today.” So as CARICOM moves towards a Regional Youth Development Governance Structure and a CARICOM Youth Development Index, the numbers tell us that we must say to this generation of young people that the light is somewhere in the 2030s.

“Another world is possible only if some of us are willing to keep insisting that the system itself is open to question.”

As I write this, I wonder whether another world is really possible. I do not ask this as a criticism of the policymakers and negotiators who speak for our countries where the rules are made. Having sat among them, I know they are doing their best with systems they did not design and with time and resources that are rarely enough. But perhaps the role of scholars is becoming clearer. We are often criticised for not understanding the realities of the system, for theorising from a distance while others must navigate what is in front of them. 

Perhaps that distance is precisely what is needed. The system’s realities are not facts of nature. They are choices, rules and institutions, and someone must be free to say so plainly, and to say it more fiercely. The first lost decade produced a generation of Caribbean scholars who refused to accept the terms of their condition as given. If the 2020s are lost, the 2030s will not be handed to us either. Another world is possible only if some of us are willing to keep insisting that the system itself is open to question.

References

• World Bank (2026) Global Economic Prospects, June 2026: Highlights from Chapter 1, The Global Outlook. Washington, DC: World Bank. Link
• Lichtenberg, N. (2026) ‘World Bank warns the 2020s are becoming a “lost decade” for the global economy’, Fortune, 12 June. Link
• World Bank Group (2026) 2026 Spring Meetings, 13–18 April. Link
• Hilton, K. (2026) ‘WTO MC14: When Cameroon Took Global Centre Stage’, Cameroon Tribune, 31 March. Link
• World Trade Organization (2026) ‘Members discuss Aid for Trade, technical assistance and LDC priorities in Development Week’, 22 April. Link
• Enhanced Integrated Framework (2026) ‘EIF at Global Review 2026’, 29 October. Link
• Brookings Institution (2026) ‘How to bridge the global AI divide’, 8 June. Link
• International Energy Agency (2026) World Energy Investment 2026. Paris: IEA. Link
• Energy Monitor (2025) ‘IEA Cost of Capital Observatory: clean energy financing costs in EMDEs’. Link
• Barbados Today (2022) ‘CARICOM SG wants improved intra-regional trade by 2025’, 1 March. Link
• St Vincent Times (2026) ‘CARICOM seeks youth input for historic governance reform’, 30 September. Link

Related Saltwater Insights writing

• Hippolyte, D. (2026) ‘The One Where the Development Movie Plays on Repeat’. Link
• Hippolyte, D. (2026) ‘No New Historical Injustices? AI Governance, the Global South and the Caribbean’s Place in the Emerging Technological Order’. Link
• Hippolyte, D. (2026) ‘On Caribbean Math and the Limits of CARICOM Unity’. Link
• Hippolyte, D. (2026) ‘Integration Is a Delivery Problem’, Saltwater Insights Briefing No. 3. Link