Fastest Growing Economies in the World: The Real GDP Growth Ranking, Explained

Real GDP growth rate is a percentage change: how much a country’s output of goods and services grew from one year to the next, measured at constant prices. The International Monetary Fund tracks the indicator precisely so it can compare economies of very different sizes on the same footing, with inflation stripped out. It’s a different yardstick from GDP in absolute terms, the one behind Biggest Economies in the World: The Ranking by GDP, Explained: that ranking asks who produces the most overall, this one asks who’s moving fastest compared with itself a year earlier.

According to the IMF, global real GDP grew 3.4% in 2024 (the World Bank, using its own methodology, puts the figure at 2.9%). Inside that average sit two very different speeds: advanced economies grew 1.8%, while the group the IMF labels “emerging market and developing economies” grew 4.5%, more than double. The countries topping the 2025 growth-rate ranking below — South Sudan, Guyana, Libya — all fall into that second, faster-moving group, and none of them rank among the world’s biggest economies by absolute GDP.

That’s why the growth-rate ranking and the absolute-GDP ranking almost never line up. In the IMF’s 2025 projections, first place goes to South Sudan, at an estimated 46.1%. It’s a huge figure, but it has to be read against the year before: in 2024 South Sudan’s real GDP had contracted 23.4%. Most of the jump projected for 2025 is a rebound from a badly depressed base, not evidence of a stable boom.

Rank	Country	2025 growth (IMF estimate)	2024 growth
1	South Sudan	46.1%	-23.4%
2	Guyana	19.3%	43.8%
3	Libya	15.9%	4.2%
4	Ireland	12.3%	2.6%
5	Kyrgyzstan	11.1%	11.5%
6	Ethiopia	9.2%	8.1%
7	Taiwan	8.7%	5.3%
8	Tajikistan	8.4%	8.4%
9	Vietnam	8%	7%
10	Senegal	7.9%	6.1%

The 2025 figures are IMF projections (World Economic Outlook Database); the 2024 figures are mostly final data.

Guyana, in second place, tells a more straightforward story. The country’s real GDP grew 43.8% in 2024 according to the IMF, matching the World Bank’s series (43.8% in 2024, 33.8% in 2023, 63.3% in 2022). Oil production drove the numbers: Our World in Data puts the increase at 860% between 2020 and 2025, and before drilling began the country’s GDP per capita sat well below the world average — today it sits more than triple above it. Oil doesn’t guarantee growth on this scale as a rule: Guyana combined sizeable reserves with a recent start to production, and that specific combination is what the data can support.

Practical example: Ireland shows how the same label, “GDP,” can tell opposite stories depending on how it’s read. According to Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO), the country’s official GDP fell 5.5% in 2023, the same year GNI* — the alternative indicator the CSO calculates by excluding the effects of foreign multinationals — rose 5%. The CSO attributes the gap to a €48.5 billion drop in multinationals’ outbound profits compared with 2022: that year, official Irish GDP stood at €510.0 billion, GNI* at just €290.9 billion. That’s why the IMF projects a jump to 12.3% for Ireland in 2025, up from 2.6% in 2024: an economy with a heavy concentration of multinational tax residencies can swing wildly from one year to the next without living standards moving anywhere near as much.

Large economies deserve the same scrutiny. China, the world’s second-biggest economy by absolute GDP, grew 5% in 2024, and the IMF projects another 5% for 2025, comfortably ahead of the 3.4% global average. Yet it doesn’t appear among the top ten in the growth-rate ranking: it carries enormous weight in absolute terms, less so once only pace is in view. India, the largest among the high-growth economies, posted 7.1% in 2024 with a 7.6% projection for 2025 — a high rate for an economy of its size, though still well short of the table’s top spots.

Comparing these figures with other macroeconomic indicators helps put them in context: a closer look at Microeconomics vs Macroeconomics: What’s the Difference shows where GDP growth fits among the tools economists use to read an economy as a whole.

Real GDP is calculated the way it is precisely to strip out the effect of rising prices, and the entry on Inflation: what it is, how it works and why prices rise walks through why.

Anyone who wants to start from the basics can also read GDP: what it is, how it’s calculated and what it really tells us.