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Lameez Omarjee
The IMF on Tuesday released its latest World Economic Outlook update for July 2021. The global growth outlook is unchanged since the April revision, at 6percent
The IMF also kept the outlook for sub-Saharan Africa unchanged at 3.4 percent. However, it upgraded South Africa’s growth outlook on the back of the “strong positive surprise” in the first quarter. The economy had expanded 4.6 percent on a quarter-on-quarter seasonally adjusted basis.
This came off the back of a record contraction of 7 percent in 2020 due to the impact of the lockdown restrictions globally in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The SA Reserve Bank expects the SA economy to grow 4.2 percent this year.
The IMF still sees the worsening pandemic developments in sub-Saharan Africa to weigh on the region’s recovery.
IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath said that the global growth recovery was continuing – but there was still a divergent gap between advanced and emerging market and developing economies.
In its report, the IMF noted that vaccine access has resulted in two blocs of global recovery.
Most advanced economies are set to experience a normalisation of economic activity,, and other countries will face resurgence of Covid-19 infections and death tolls. — Fin24
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