IMF’s growth forecast for Nigeria improves by 0.3%

The International Monetary Fund has raised the growth forecast of Nigeria’s economy for the 2019 financial year by 0.3 percent to 2.3 percent.

It disclosed this in its July update on the World Economic Outlook with the theme, ‘Sluggish global growth call for supportive policies’.

The Fund in its January report had revised the country’s Gross Domestic Product projection down to two percent from 2.3 percent projected in October 2018.

On the global outlook, the IMF stated, “We are revising downward our projection for global growth to 3.2 percent in 2019 and 3.5 percent in 2020. While this is a modest revision of 0.1 percentage points for both years relative to our projections in April, it comes on top of previous significant downward revisions.

“The revision for 2019 reflects negative surprises for growth in emerging market and developing economies that offset positive surprises in some advanced economies.”

It stated that growth was projected to improve between 2019 and 2020.

However, close to 70 percent of the increase relied on an improvement in the growth performance in stressed emerging market and developing economies and was therefore subject to high uncertainty.

Global growth was sluggish and precarious, but it did not have to be this way because some of this is self-inflicted, according to the report.

“Dynamism in the global economy is being weighed down by prolonged policy uncertainty as trade tensions remain heightened despite the recent US-China trade truce, technology tensions have erupted threatening global technology supply chains, and the prospects of a no-deal Brexit have increased,” it stated.

The IMF report said 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.