IMF Projects Nigeria’s Economic Growth At 2.3% In 2019
The International Monetary Fund has projected a 3.4% economic growth for Nigeria in 2019.
The projection is contained in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO) report published on its website on Wednesday.
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The IMF report is coming after the monetary policy committee (MPC) of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), on Tuesday, also projected that the country’s economy would grow by 2.27% while inflation the rate will remain at 11.37% at the end of 2019.
Wednesday makes it the third time the IMF reviewed Nigeria’s growth forecast for 2019. In 2018, it said the economy will grow at 2.3 percent in 2019 but reviewed it downwards to 2.0 per cent in January this year and again in April, the Fund effected an upward review of Nigeria’s economic growth rate projection to 2.1 per cent.
According to the report, the projected global growth stood at 3.2 percent for 2019, improving to 3.5 percent in 2020.
The projected global growth in 2020 as stated in the report relies highly on several factors: (1) financial market sentiment staying generally supportive; (2) continued fading of temporary drags, notably in the euro area; (3) stabilization in some stressed emerging market economies, such as Argentina and Turkey; and (4) avoiding even sharper collapses in others.
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Risks to the forecast are mainly to the downside. They include further trade and technology tensions that dent sentiment and slow investment; a protracted increase in risk aversion that exposes the financial vulnerabilities continuing to accumulate after years of low-interest rates; and mounting disinflationary pressures that increase debt service difficulties, constrain monetary policy space to counter downturns, and make adverse shocks more persistent than normal.
Meanwhile, the IMF said, in general, the “Global growth is sluggish and precarious,” adding that the negative consequences of policy uncertainty were visible in the diverging trends between the manufacturing and services sector, and the significant weakness in global trade.
