Updates to Praxcore MDB Consensus Inflation Forecasts: October 2025

Overview

Today we updated our MDB Consensus Inflation Forecasts to include data from the ADB’s September edition of the Asian Development Outlook (ADO) and the IMF’s October edition of the World Economic Outlook (WEO).

We provide these inflation forecasts as a starting point for your analysis of future project cost estimates. Following are the highlights:

Overall

The consensus inflation rate for our Asia-Pacific coverage universe (calculated on a simple average) is forecast to be 4.7% in 2025 and to decelerate to 4.5% in 2026, mainly due to lower food, energy, and administrative costs.

Over a longer time-scale, this represents a continued cooling in the rate of inflation from 2023 (8.9%) and 2024 (6.3%) as post-COVID-19 supply chain tightness and demand-driven cost pressures subside.

The overall inflation rate for Asia-Pacific masks significant regional and country-to-country variation in rates. Of the 47 countries in our universe, 26 showed increasing year-over-year inflation from 2025 to 2026; twenty showed a decrease; one remained neutral.

By ADB Cooperation Group

With the exception of regions that had Myanmar as a member (GMS and SASEC), ADB cooperation regions showed relatively tight variation in forecasted rates by country.

Further, overall (simple average) forecasted 2026 Rates for CAREC (5.2%) and SASEC (4.7% ex-Myanmar, 7.6% including) were consistently higher than other regions. Whereas BIMP-EAGA, GMS (ex-Myanmar), and IMT-GT are forecasted to have average inflation rates below three percent.

By Country

All consensus inflation rates, with the exceptions of Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh and new regional member Turkiye, are forecasted to be below double digits in 2025. For 2026, only Myanmar and Turkiye are expected in that range.

Conversely, Afghanistan, China, Sri Lanka, Brunei Darussalam, Thailand, and Fiji are all forecast to have less than one percent inflation in 2025, with Afghanistan showing deflation. For all of these countries, 2026 inflation is forecast to be higher than in 2025, but still hovering around one percent or less (except Sri Lanka).

Finally, the majority of countries in our Asia-Pacific coverage universe have forecasted inflation rates converging on the two percent to five percent range for 2026.

For full details by country see our MDB Consensus Inflation Forecasts.