They come, they meet, they confer, they dash from television studio to television studio. Whether all of this to-do at the meetings here of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank signify anything very much in the world outside of policymakers’ conference rooms is unclear. The IMF did get attention when it lowered its forecast of world growth this year from 3.5 percent to 3.3 percent, a testimonial to the faith of the Fund’s economists in the precision of their forecasts. These forecasters now think that the U.S., UK and China will grow more slowly than they anticipated only a few months ago; that the eurozone will have a more pronounced slowdown; and that Japan will awaken from a decades-long slumber as the new head of the Bank of Japan cranks up the printing presses to speeds that make the Federal Reserve Board’s Ben Bernanke look like a hard-money advocate.

Here is a summary of the IMF’s 2013 revisions and its forecasts for 2014.