The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has retained its projection for Nigeria’s economic growth prospect for this year at 2.5 per cent.
This is contained in the July World Economic Outlook (WEO) Update released yesterday. The 2021 forecast update is the same as its April forecast. The 2022 forecast was reviewed upward by 0.03 percentage points to 2.6 per cent.
Nigeria’s projection is 0.9 percentage points lower than sub-Saharan Africa’s estimated growth of 3.4 percent. It is also far less than the six per cent global average growth estimate.
The latest projections reflect the two-track recovery occasioned by uneven progress in the COVID-19 vaccination. Both the IMF and the World Bank had warned that developing countries, unable to afford the costs of vaccines, could lag as the global economy recovers from the ruins of the pandemic.
In the new document, the global institution marked down growth prospects of low-income developing countries (LIDCs) by 0.4 percentage points, citing “slow rollout of vaccines as the main factor weighing on the recovery.
