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WASHINGTON-In a bleaker assessment than those of most private forecasters, the World Bank predicted Sunday that the global economy would shrink in 2009 for the first time since World War II.The bank did not provide a specific estimate, but bank officials said its economists would be publishing one in the next several weeks.Until now, even extremely pessimistic forecasters have predicted that the global economy would eke out a tiny expansion but had warned that even a growth rate of 5 percent in China would be a disastrous slowdown, given the enormous pressure there to create jobs for the country's rural population.The World Bank also warned that global trade would contract for the first time since 1982, and that the decline would be the biggest since the 1930s.By Edmund L Andrews
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--Recession on track to be longest in postwar period... As in the days of Noah...
