Emerging market economic growth will fall to its weakest level since the height of the global financial crisis this year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a big cut to its forecasts, the Financial Times reported.

Full year emerging market-wide growth is projected to come in at 4.1%, a decade low and the second-weakest figure since the dotcom bust of 2002, rather than the 4.4% the IMF pencilled in as recently as April.The gloomy forecast is just the latest in a series of swingeing downgrades by the Washington-based body. In October last year it projected emerging market growth of 4.7% in 2019, while in April last year its forecast for the current 12 months was a rosy 5.1%.

The downward revisions in the IMF’s quarterly World Economic Outlook update are concentrated almost entirely in the developing world. Growth has been revised up a fraction in advanced countries, to 1.9%, but down a notch in the world as a whole, to 3.2%.

With the exception of emerging Europe, growth forecasts have been cut in every region of the developing world, led by a dramatic slump in Latin America and the Caribbean, where output is now expected to expand by just 0.6% this year, less than half the 1.4% pace projected three months ago and barely a fifth of the 2.8% rate forecast in April 2018. The IMF cited “uncertainty” about pension and other structural reforms in Brazil, “policy uncertainty, weakening confidence and rising borrowing costs” in Mexico and economic contraction in Argentina for its deepening pessimism.

Oxford Economics is pencilling in emerging market-wide growth expectations of 4.1-4.2% this year, while Capital Economics estimates that growth will slow to just 3.8%, in large part because it believes the Chinese economy will in reality expand by just 5%, rather than the 6% + figures regularly touted by Beijing. “It’s going to be a pretty disappointing year. Outside of the global financial crisis we have really only seen [growth this weak] during the 2015-16 slowdown and after the dotcom bust,” said William Jackson, senior emerging market economist at Capital Economics.