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Abebe Selassie

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to record a rebound in growth of 2,5 percent in 2017 that will be barely sufficient enough to deliver any per capita income gains.

The group recently reviewed upwards its economic projection for Zimbabwe to 2 percent prior to its earlier forecast of minus 2.5 percent made late last year.

Zimbabwe also revised its growth forecast to 3,7 percent last month from the initial growth projection of 1,7 percent, citing an anticipated bumper harvest owing to good rains.

Experts said last year was a difficult one for many countries with economic growth estimate only reached about one and a half percent, which was the “weakest” outcome in more than 20 years and well below the rate of population growth.

The IMF said while a number of countries continued to grow robustly, the slowdown in growth had been fairly broad based, affecting about two-thirds of the countries in the region and that accounted for about four-fifths of regional Growth Domestic Product.

However, this of course contrasted with the very robust growth rates the region was experiencing in recent years.

The Breton Woods Institution said it had also noticed that inflation had begun to “accelerate” in some countries, reflecting the widening of macroeconomic imbalances, some currency depreciation and in a few cases, drought related food price increases.

“Looking ahead we see a rebound in growth, but only a modest one, around two and a half percent in 2017,” IMF director of the African Department Abebe Selassie said recently during a press briefing in United States of America (Washington DC) about the macroeconomic situation in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The up-tick in growth is largely driven by one-off factors in the three largest economies, a recovery in oil production in Nigeria, higher public spending ahead of elections in Angola, and the fading of drought effects in South Africa.”

Selassie noted that this would fall short of the recent trends.

He said Sub-Saharan Africa was a very diverse region and this aggregate number hid the fact that there were quite a few countries that continued to grow fairly robustly at 5 percent, even up to 7 percent, particularly in West Africa and also some countries in East Africa.

“That said, going forward the outlook is subject to considerable downside risks from the external side,” he added. — New Ziana.