Economy Expands Slowly

A shutdown of the country’s oil and gas fields last year caused Ghana’s economy to grow at the slowest pace in 26 years.

Baah Wadieh, acting government statistician, told a news conference on Wednesday in Accra that from 3.9 percent in 2015, Ghana’s gross domestic product declined to 3.5 percent in 2016.

GDP in the period was GH¢36.0 billion, and this represents the lowest rate since 1990, data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.

According to tradingeconomics.com, the GDP value of Ghana represents 0.06 percent of the world economy. GDP in Ghana averaged $9.63 billion from 1960 until 2015, reaching an all time high of $47.80 billion in 2013.

While the oil and gas sector contracted 16.9 percent in 2016, agriculture expanded by 3 percent, with manufacturing growing at 2.7 percent.

Also, provisional GDP figures expanded 4.1 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the last three months of 2015.

Noting that the services sector recorded the highest growth of 6.3 percent, he said the industry sector followed with 3.0 percent while agriculture recorded 1.9 percent.

He said the oil GDP estimate at current prices at purchaser’s value for the 4th quarter of 2016 was GH¢47,512.9 million compared to GH¢38,815.8 million in the 4th quarter of 2015, while the non-oil GDP estimate was GH¢46,092.5 million in the 4th quarter of 2016 as compared to GH¢37,703.5 million in the 4th quarter of 2015.

Ex-factory prices inflation

Mr Baah Wadieh also announced that inflation for ex-factory prices for March 2017 stood at 6.0 percent.

The rate, which was provisional, represents a 0.6 percentage point increase in producer inflation relative to the 5.4 percent recorded in February 2017.

He added that the month-on month change in producer price index between February 2017 and March 2017 was 1.4 percent.

He said the mining and quarrying sub-sector recorded the highest year-on-year producer price inflation rate of 20.8 percent followed by the manufacturing subsector with 4.0 percent.

The utilities subsector recorded the lowest year-on-year producer inflation rate of 1.5 percent.

“With respect to the monthly changes, the mining and quarrying recorded the highest rate of 2.5 followed by manufacturing subsectors with 1.4 percent.

The utilities sub-sector recorded the lowest rate of 0.1 percent,” he enumerated.

He attributed this to increase in petroleum prices, increase in metal prices and the earlier depreciation of the cedi, but explained that the recent reduction in petroleum prices was not captured in this report but will feature in the April 2017 report.

Source: Daily Guide