The Global South enters 2026 in a condition that standard economic models struggle to describe. By conventional metrics, crisis has been avoided. Growth has resumed across large parts of Asia. Inflation has eased from its peaks. Currency collapses have not cascaded. Debt stress remains contained in most cases. The dashboards show repair.

Yet confidence has not followed. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Indian Ocean, belief in institutions remains thin. Trust surveys remain below pre-pandemic levels. Youth frustration is widespread. Migration intent continues to rise, even in economies posting respectable growth. Public systems function, but feel slow, distant and transactional. Stability exists, but it does not feel secure.

This divergence is the starting point of the Mind Economy.

The Mind Economy: 2026 Outlook was not designed to forecast GDP, inflation or debt trajectories. Those projections already exist, and most are broadly optimistic. This report exists because something essential is missing from that optimism.

Economic growth no longer reliably produces social confidence. Rising output does not restore trust. Stabilising prices does not renew patience. Fiscal consolidation does not automatically rebuild legitimacy. Across the Global South, belief has become the binding constraint on stability.

This is not a moral argument. It is an empirical observation. Societies rarely fracture when numbers collapse. They fracture when belief erodes quietly during periods of apparent stability. History is consistent on this point. Social rupture tends to precede fiscal crisis, not follow it.

The Mind Economy framework exists to make that erosion visible before it becomes irreversible.

The Mind Economy treats belief, trust, time and opportunity as economic variables rather than cultural noise. These factors shape behaviour long before markets react. When belief weakens, citizens withdraw. They delay investment. They exit labour markets. They migrate. They disengage. None of this appears immediately in GDP data. All of it reshapes economies from within.

This Outlook therefore complements, rather than replaces, conventional macroeconomic analysis. It asks different questions. How does growth feel? Who experiences progress? How long are people willing to wait? Where does time become a tax rather than an investment?

The report is structured as a sequence of analytical essays, each examining a pressure point where growth and belief diverge. These include wages designed to remain low, education systems that credential without enabling, elections that recycle power without renewal, aid that sustains activity without building strength, and migration that functions as a vote of no confidence.

Each article can be read independently. Taken together, they form a single argument: that the next phase of instability in the Global South will not arrive first through markets or budgets, but through the exhaustion of belief.

This Outlook does not predict collapse. It identifies thresholds. In several economies, fiscal space remains technically adequate while social patience thins. These contexts are most vulnerable to sudden rupture when catalysing events occur, not because systems are weak, but because belief has already eroded beneath the surface.

The purpose of the Mind Economy: 2026 Outlook is therefore early warning. It exists to show where credibility is decaying faster than numbers suggest, and where corrective action is still possible before adjustment becomes forced rather than chosen.

Growth will continue in much of the Global South. The question this report poses is whether growth will continue to buy stability, or whether belief has already become too scarce for that bargain to hold.