The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised Ghana’s growth rate marginally by 0.1% to 4.7% in 2021, representing 0.2% lower than the World Bank’s growth forecast of 4.9% for the year.
The Washington-based multilateral institution, which gave the latest prediction in its October 2021 World Economic Report, also projected that Ghana’s economy would expand by 6.2% in 2022.
According to the Fund, the higher growth rate indicates that businesses will be able to generate more revenue from sales and expand into the future as the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on a broad spectrum of the economy continues to reduce.
Also, IMF also revised Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) projection for last year to 0.4% even as it predicted that the country’s growth rate would will be higher than Sub Saharan Africa’s (SSA’s)regional average of 3.4% in 2021.
It stated: “The revisions in part reflect improved assessments for some commodity exporters outweighing drags from pandemic developments (Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa).”
Statistics from the Bank of Ghana (BoG) had indicated that the nation’s economy was on a strong recovery track with a sustained momentum in pick-up in economic activity.
For instance, the BoG’s September 2021 Monetary Policy Committee’s report indicated that developments continued to point to sustained recovery in economic activity following the downturn at the peak of the pandemic.
The report stated: “The Bank’s update of the Composite Index of Economic Activity (CIEA) for July 2021 reflected continued recovery in domestic economic activity. The real CIEA recorded a 20.0% year-on-year growth in July 2021, compared with 20.2% in June 2021, and 3.9%t growth in July 2020.
“The growth in the indicators was somewhat broad-based with port activity, imports, domestic VAT, and air-passenger arrivals accounting for the increase”, it added.
Also, data from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) indicated a stronger rebound in the annual GDP growth to 3.9% in Q2, from the 3.1% recorded in the first quarter, compared to a 5.7% contraction recorded in the same period of 2020.
The GSS report also reflected that non-oil GDP for the second quarter of this year grew by 5.2%, compared with a contraction of 5.8% recorded in the corresponding period of last year.
