"As I speak to you, we have a debt to GDP ratio of less than 70 percent. We are in fact perceiving a downward trend and we hope to close the year at 61 percent, and our view is that it cannot be more than 60 percent, because the more the GDP grows, the lower this ratio is", said the Secretary of State for Finance and Treasury.
Ottoniel dos Santos, who was speaking at the closing ceremony of the presentation of the IMF Report on Regional Economic Perspectives for Sub-Saharan Africa, said that Angola's positive perspectives in the region result from a "rigorous and very hard" process.
"Which led us to the fact that, at the moment, we could have the signs positively inclined both upwards and downwards, generating a better perspective for our economy than that presented by the generality of Sub-Saharan Africa", he pointed out.
According to the official, the assistance programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to Angola, which worked as a "personal trainer", also contributed to the current positive indicators of the country.
"What is intended now is to stimulate the investment variable and this variable is based on this diversification of the economy, the participation of the private sector to allow the product to grow in a sustainable way", concluded the Secretary of State.
The representative of the IMF Angola, Marcos Souto, who presented the report, said, on the occasion, that the drop in the ratio of Angola's debt to GDP results "in large part to the dynamics of the exchange rate".
"More than 80 percent of the public debt is in foreign currency, but there is also an effort here to reduce the public debt and also its composition", he stressed.
Officials have estimated an inflation rate of 15 percent at the end of 2022, while the IMF has pegged a rate of 18 percent, largely due to the country's "flexible regime" exchange rate.
