In August 2025, the global economy displayed resilience, with growth reaching its strongest pace in 14 months. The global composite PMI climbed to 52.9, signalling the fourth consecutive month of acceleration. Services once again outpaced manufacturing, with financial services leading expansion and consumer services lagging. Manufacturing regained momentum, reversing the prior month's contraction across consumer, intermediate, and investment goods.

Regionally, India remained the growth frontrunner, while the US stayed ahead of other major developed economies despite a slight slowdown. The UK, Japan, and the eurozone showed modest improvements, and China's upturn gathered pace, with Russia and Brazil easing their downturns.

Despite stronger demand, new orders, and modest employment gains, business optimism continued to fade, reaching one of its lowest points since the pandemic. This contrast, strong current activity but weak confidence, suggests that firms remain wary of geopolitical tensions and trade policy uncertainty, particularly from the US.

Inflation pressures persisted, with input and output prices rising across all sectors, though service costs climbed faster than manufacturing. Overall, the global economy appears buoyant in the short term, but fragile expectations cast a shadow over its longer-term trajectory.

JP Morgan Global Services PMI gives an overview of the global services sector. It is based on monthly surveys of over 5,500 executives from 15 of the world’s strongest economies, including the U.S., Japan, Germany, France and China which together account for nearly 80 percent of global services sector’s gross value added (GWA). It reflects changes in global output, employment, new business, backlogs and prices. The Global Services PMI is seasonally adjusted at the national level to control for varying seasonal patterns in each country and is produced by J.P. Morgan and Markit in association with ISM and the International Federation of Purchasing and supply Management (IFPSM).

Investors need to keep their fingers on the pulse of the economy because it dictates how various types of investments will perform. The J.P. Morgan Global Services PMI provides advance insight into the global services sector, which gives investors a better understanding of business conditions and valuable information about the economic backdrop of global markets. The stock market likes to see healthy economic growth because that translates to higher corporate profits. The bond market prefers less rapid growth and is extremely sensitive to whether the economy is growing too quickly and causing potential inflationary pressures. The PMI data are also used by many Central Banks to help make interest rate decisions.

The JP Morgan Global Services PMI data give a detailed look at the manufacturing sector, how busy it is and where things are headed. Since the services sector accounts for the lion’s share of GDP of many advanced economies, this report has a big influence on the markets. In addition, its sub-indexes provide a picture of global output, employment, new business, backlogs and prices.