The global economic recovery that has started mid-2016 is gaining momentum with growth accelerating according to a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published with however a warning that this 2017 global recovery is incomplete with MENA’s share modest.
Growth in the MENA countries dropped from 5.1% to 2.2% so far in 2017 but is anticipated to get back to 3.2% in 2018.
Political unrest was found to be still hampering and / or delaying economic recovery generally, but more specifically in the MENA region where different tensions subsist in several of its countries. Geo-political risks continue to weigh on all investments whether domestic and / or international.
Nevertheless, Djibouti has the highest growth in 2017 with 7%, followed in this order by Morocco, Egypt, Mauritania, and Sudan and Kuwait.
Yemen, Syria, Iraq would obviously be going through recession because of either their on-going political tension or unrest. The effect of oil prices’ drop would be affecting all hydrocarbons exports related economies of the Gulf and North Africa with budgetary restrictions. With money oversupply in these latter countries, inflation is bound to reach unforeseen heights but is nonetheless forecast to generally reach an estimated 7.1%.
Excerpts of the IMF blog written by Maurice Obstfeld on October 10, 2017, follows;
Global Economic Upswing Creates a Window of Opportunity
The global recovery is continuing, and at a faster pace. The picture is very different from early last year, when the world economy faced faltering growth and financial market turbulence. We see an accelerating cyclical upswing boosting Europe, China, Japan, and the United States, as well as emerging Asia.
The latest World Economic Outlook has therefore upgraded its global growth projections to 3.6 percent for this year and 3.7 percent for next—in both cases 0.1 percentage point above our previous forecasts, and well above 2016’s global growth rate of 3.2 percent, which was the lowest since the global financial crisis.
For 2017, most of our upgrade owes to brighter prospects for the advanced economies, whereas for 2018’s positive revision, emerging market and developing economies play a relatively bigger role. Notably, we expect sub-Saharan Africa, where growth in per capita incomes has on average stalled for the past two years, to improve overall in 2018.
The current global acceleration is also notable because it is broad-based—more so than at any time since the start of this decade. This breadth offers a global environment of opportunity for ambitious policies that will support growth and raise economic resilience in the future. Policymakers should seize the moment: the recovery is still incomplete in important respects, and the window for action the current cyclical upswing offers will not be open forever.
Global recovery still incomplete
First, the recovery is incomplete within countries. Even as output nears potential in advanced economies, nominal and real wage growth have remained low. This wage sluggishness follows many years during which median real incomes grew much more slowly than incomes at the top, or even stagnated. Drivers of growth including technological advances and trade have had uneven effects, lifting some up but leaving others behind in the face of structural transformation. The resulting higher income and wealth inequalities have helped fuel political disenchantment and scepticism about the gains from globalization, putting recovery at risk.
Second, the recovery is incomplete across countries. While most of the world is sharing in the current upswing, emerging market and low-income commodity exporters, especially energy exporters, continue to face challenges, as do several countries experiencing civil or political unrest, mostly in the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Many small states have been struggling. About a quarter of all countries saw negative per capita income growth in 2016, and despite the current upswing, nearly a fifth of them are projected to do the same in 2017.
Finally, the recovery is incomplete over time. The cyclical upswing masks much more subdued longer-run trends of productivity and demographics, even correcting for the arithmetical effect of more slowly growing populations. For advanced economies, per capita output growth is now projected to average only 1.4 percent a year during 2017–22 compared with 2.2 percent a year during 1996–2005. Moreover, we project that fully 43 emerging market and developing economies will grow even less in per capita terms than the advanced economies over the coming five years. These economies are diverging rather than converging, going against the more benign trend of declining inequality between countries due to rapid growth in dynamic emerging markets such as China and India.
