The International Monetary Fund (IMF), has revised Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate for this year.
According to the multilateral institution’s updated World Economic Outlook (WEO) for 2021, Ghana is anticipated to grow by 4.6 percent from an earlier growth rate projection of 4.2 percent.
The new growth projection by the IMF representing an increase of 0.4 percentage points, is however, below the Finance Ministry’s projected growth rate of 5 percent for 2021.
Ghana’s revised growth rate is higher than Sub-Saharan Africa’s regional growth rate of 3.4 percent for this year. The country’s growth rate according to the IMF is further expected to increase to 6.1 percent in 2022.
The Central Bank has said Ghana’s economy is on a rebound with a sustained momentum in pick-up in economic activity. The Bank’s updated Composite Index of Economic Activity (CIEA) recorded an annual growth of 13.9 percent in January 2021, the highest since December 2019, compared to 3.4 percent in the corresponding period of 2020.
The key drivers of economic activity the Central Bank noted were construction, imports, industrial consumption of electricity, domestic VAT, passenger arrivals at the airport, and port activity.
On its outlook of the global economy, the Fund asserted that the world economy is projected to grow at 6 percent this year, moderating to 4.4 percent in 2022 after a contraction of –3.3 percent in 2020.
The revised 6 percent growth projection follows an earlier growth projection of 5.5 percent by the IMF.
