Bangladesh’s economy will post a 5.0-percent growth in 2026 with easing inflation and remittance inflows helping households despite ongoing structural challenges, global agency Mastercard forecasts.
South Asia as a region continued to show solid momentum, says the Mastercard Economics Institute (MEI) 2026 Outlook released Wednesday.
The MEI assessment shows Asia-Pacific growth remained broadly stable even as the global economy adapted to rapid tariff changes, accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) investment and evolving consumer trends.
Globally, the economics institute expects real gross domestic product (GDP) growth to ease marginally to 3.1 per cent in 2026, compared to an estimated 3.2 per cent in 2025.
In its view, the 2026 global outlook is shaped by a “two-sided set of risks and opportunities”.
Fiscal stimulus and rapid technological progress, particularly the integration of AI into business operations, are expected to act as major tailwinds for growth, though the benefits would be uneven across regions, it says.
At the same time, ongoing geopolitical tensions and the reconfiguration of supply chains continued to create “pockets of fragmentation”, adding uncertainty to trade and production.
The uneven distribution of technological gains could create policy and growth hurdles for some markets, according to the outlook.
Despite these crosswinds, the MEI expects GDP growth across the Asia- Pacific realm to hold steady in 2026.
A combination of easing inflation, supportive monetary policy, and rising real incomes in several markets was improving household conditions and reinforcing the region’s overall stability.
“Given its centrality to global trade, the Asia Pacific has shown remarkable resilience at a time when tariff uncertainty and shifting supply chains have threatened to upend international commerce,” says David Mann, Mastercard’s chief economist, Asia Pacific.
The outlook shows global trade continued to reorganise following the 2025 tariff shifts-fuelled by the reciprocal Trump tariff regime–with the Chinese Mainland diversifying exports to new corridors as the US share of Chinese e-commerce sales fell from 28 per cent in 2024 to 24 per cent by August 2025.
The outlook covers 12 Asia and Oceania markets to draw the economic picture.
It draws on multiple public sources and Mastercard’s aggregated and anonymised transaction data, alongside the MEI models estimating economic activities.
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