The globe economy could deal by the size of the combined French and German economies, if there is a broad-based trade war between the globe’s major economies, the International Monetary fund (IMF) has told the BBC.

It comes as concerns are heightened ahead of the feasible re-election of Donald Trump.

Trump says he plans to introduce a universal levy or tariff of up to 20% on all imports into the US, while the European Union is already planning retaliation if Washington goes ahead with the recent levy.

Last week, Trump said “tariff is the most attractive word in the dictionary”, and global markets and finance ministers are now beginning to receive seriously the prospect of him enacting the ideas.

IMF first deputy managing director Gita Gopinath said the fund could not yet assess the specifics of Trump’s trade plans, but thinks that “if you have some very solemn decoupling and broad scale use of tariffs, you could complete up with a setback to globe GDP of close to 7%”.

“These are very large numbers, 7% is basically losing the French and German economies. That’s the size of the setback that would be,” she continued.

Ms Gopinath also said tariffs worth hundreds of billions of dollars “is very different from the globe we’ve lived in over the history two of three decades”.

The IMF’s deputy chief said another of the fund’s main messages at its Annual Meetings was to alert on ballooning levels of global government debt.

She said the current period of steady market advancement was a “instant to rebuild your budgetary buffers” as “this will not be the last crisis. There will be additional shocks. You will require the budgetary space to respond. And now is the period to do it”.

Ms Gopinath said it was also essential to “look at the luminous side” with a resilient globe economy after “some very tough knocks”.

She suggested the globe economy had seen a soft landing from the multiple crises.

“history experiences with bringing down expense boost have not been with a soft landing. It was a large, large increases in unemployment. So that was a large hit, and it has turned out to be much better than many feared”, she said.

Ms Gopinath added that it was a “excellent triumph” for central banks everywhere that expense boost has arrive down without high unemployment. But that now was the period to rebuild resilience in a fragile globe.