A warning on the possible impact of a global trade war.

Live from the UK.

This is the Marketplace morning report from the BBC World Service.

I'm Stuart Clarkson in Fort Leanna Byrne.

Good morning.

Well, that warning comes from the International Monetary Fund, which has the the because of large scale use of tariffs. In an exclusive interview with the BBC's economics editor,

Faisal Islam, at the IMF annual meetings in Washington,

its deputy managing director Gita Gopinath

has warned of the impact Donald Trump's plan to put a 20% levy on all

imports if he gets back into the White House could have on global trade.

Well we've looked for instance that if you have small levels of fragmentation then

the effect on world GDP is small it's about 0.2%. But if you have some very serious decoupling and broad

scale use of tariffs, you could end up with a loss to world GDP of close to 7%. So these are very large numbers. I mean 7% is basically

you know losing the you know the French and German economies. That's the size of the loss that that would be.

So that would be a big trade wall between the US and the Europe and China and Japan all

joining in.

That would be a very severe fragmentation scenario.

We're not there yet. I think we have to look at the bright

side which is it's a world that has been resilient after some very tough knocks.

Inflation has come down. Growth is a 3.2 percent. We would love it to be higher, but it's not bad given

all the shocks the world has faced. But we have to prepare for what may come in the future

too. As Copenhagen also said the US and other countries with strong economies should be focusing

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