World merchandise exports reached $26.26 trillion in 2025, up 7% on the customs measure. Services exports hit $9.56 trillion, up 8%. On the balance-of-payments basis the WTO uses for its headline total — which values goods differently from customs data — combined trade came to $34.89 trillion, also up 8%: the largest nominal value ever recorded. Then, in October 2026, the WTO roughly doubled its forecast for 2026 merchandise trade volume growth to 3.9%, against projected world GDP growth of 2.6%. Trade, in other words, is growing faster than the world economy again.
None of this was supposed to happen. The Economist ran a "peak trade" cover in 2014 and returned in January 2019 with "slowbalisation." The Financial Times published its hyperglobalisation post-mortems in the same period. The WTO's own April 2019 forecast — trade volume and GDP both growing 2.6% — was read as confirmation that the era of trade-led growth was over. Each declaration leaned on the same statistic: the world's trade-to-GDP ratio, which stopped rising after the 2008 financial crisis.
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