‘2025 is the year our world collapsed,’ Pierre Wunsch, Governor of the National Bank, said as he opened the presentation of the 2025 annual report with Gallic flourish at the beginning of March. He was referring to the measures taken by the Trump administration in the US, with trade tariffs at the forefront of his mind. These are interventions that are turning the global world order upside down and creating uncertainty. The Iran War that started on 28 February, when Israel and the US launched strikes on the Islamic Republic came too late for consideration in the present report, but will of course not have improved Belgium’s economic outlook.
Strangely enough, all this drama contrasts with a remarkably stable world economy, thanks to the AI boom in the US and the continued growth of emerging economies such as China and India. Going by the figures, you could almost think that 2025 was a rather boring year.
In Belgium, too, there were hardly any major economic fluctuations in 2025, either positive or negative: rather modest growth of 1 per cent and an unemployment rate of 6.2 per cent, ‘which has risen slightly but remains historically low’.
The opportunities of AI and robotics
And yet. Wunsch and his colleagues at the National Bank are indeed concerned about Belgium’s competitive position i.e. the strength of the Belgian economy compared to other countries. ‘It has deteriorated structurally,’ Wunsch warned.
‘We have now had a trade deficit for four years in a row (i.e. we import more than we export), whereas previously we had a surplus. This gives the impression that something structural is going on.’
According to Wunsch, the sectors that have given Belgium an economic boost in recent years are now under pressure. ‘We know that industry is suffering from high energy prices and that we have higher climate ambitions here than in the US. We also traditionally exported a lot of pharmaceutical products to the US, but now the US wants to bring that production over there.’
What can Belgium do about this? ‘There is no magic solution, but you have to keep playing the game: look to the sectors of the future, not to those of the past,’ emphasises Wunsch. ‘Nowadays, these are increasingly AI and robotics, and we also have a number of strengths in these areas. Think, for example, of Imec in Leuven.’
But these are precisely the sectors in which we must dare to take more risks, he adds. ‘This is not traditional industry, where progress is relatively slow. Things are moving fast these days, and Belgian society must dare to adapt to that.