The International Monetary Fund has said that a global economic recovery has begun but has cautioned that the strength of the rebound depends on rebalancing of global growth.
The announcement came after a year in which the IMF's outlook had generally been negative.
The organisation's latest World Economic Forum has revised upwards its growth forecasts for this year and next.
'The recovery has started. Financial markets are healing and in most countries growth will be positive for the rest of the year as well as in 2010,' IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard told a news conference.
The IMF now expects world output to contract by 1.1% in 2009 before growing by 3.1% in 2010. This is more upbeat than its last outlook in July when the Fund projected the world economy would shrink 1.4 percent in 2009, before expanding 2.5 percent in 2010.
Mr Blanchard said that the strength of the world economy will depend on rebalancing global growth, an issue that was the focus of a summit of leaders from the Group of 20 in Pittsburgh last week.
He said: 'If you think about global rebalancing you realize it is going to have to come from a number of measures and from a number of adjustments. It is very hard to see how this could happen at the current exchange rates.'
