According to the World Economic Forecasts, released this Tuesday as part of the Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, taking place this week, the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa will register the sixth consecutive year of recession.
Angola has been facing negative growth in Gross Domestic Product since 2016, following the drop in oil prices, which affected government revenue, and the slowdown in oil production due to lack of investment and the natural decline of reserves.
The new IMF forecasts come just days after the Luanda government updated the macroeconomic scenario, in which it estimated stagnation (zero growth) this year, despite the finance minister, in an interview with Bloomberg last week, admitted that recession was still a possibility.
The Minister of State for Economic Coordination, Manuel Nunes Júnior, said last Thursday that the reduction in oil activity, together with the effects of the pandemic, was one of the main reasons for the negative growth in recent years.
"Due to the great weight that the sector still has in our economy, the negative growth of this sector has negatively affected the country's global growth", he said, recalling that the Government's estimate points to zero growth this year, after five years of recession, but already with the non-oil economy growing significantly.
"For 2021, we forecast zero global growth, but we must emphasize that for this year the growth forecast for the non-oil sector is 5.9 percent, while the oil sector is expected to register a negative growth rate of 11.6 percent ", said the official, in a speech made at the seminar on the Angolan economy, promoted by the Royal Institute of International Studies of the United Kingdom (Chatham House).
For next year, the Government forecasts an economic expansion of 2.4 percent, sustained by a 3.1 percent growth in the non-oil sector, "which is of great importance because this is the sector that creates the most jobs and is in a better position to contribute to the well-being of Angolans," concluded the official.
The IMF, in the report, does not explain the reasons for having revised its growth forecast for this year downwards, considering only, in the tables with the forecasts, that inflation in Angola will grow from 22.3 percent in 2020 to 24, 4 percent this year, before slowing to 14.9 percent in 2022.
