Developing economies’ limited access to Covid vaccines threatens to hinder the global economic recovery from the pandemic, the IMF has warned, as it upgraded its growth projections for advanced economies but lowered them for other parts of the world.

The Fund still expects overall global growth of 6 per cent this year — unchanged from its last projection in April — it said in its latest World Economic Outlook on Tuesday. But it warned that new waves of coronavirus infections since then, including the spread of the Delta variant, have made the outlook more uncertain and uneven.

“Vaccine access has emerged as the principal faultline along which the global recovery splits into two blocs,” the IMF said. Some countries “can look forward to further normalisation of activity later this year” but many others “still face resurgent infections and rising Covid death tolls”.