According to it, the slow rollout of vaccines was the main factor weighing on the recovery for Low-Income Developing Countries (LIDCs) which Nigeria is part of.
It also retained its 6% growth forecast for the global economy for 2021 and 4.9% in 2022, adding that though the global forecast was unchanged from the April 2021 WEO, there were offsetting revisions.
The IMF had at its 2021 Virtual Spring Meetings in April, projected a 2.5% growth for Nigeria’s economy in 2021, up from 1.5% it projected in January.
It said that in LIDCs, the overall fiscal deficit in 2021 was revised up by 0.3 percentage points from the April 2021 WEO, mainly because of the re-emergence of fuel subsidies as well as the additional COVID-19 and security related support in Nigeria.
In this opinion piece, I point out the global growth projections made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and lay bare the assumptions which underpin them. I then delve into a conversation around what these growth projections mean for Zambia, arguing that should the world economy recover as the projections suggest, swift and aggressive action is required by the Zambian Government, to seize the global economic turnaround as an opportunity to reinvigorate the Zambian economy which has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released an update in January 2021 of the World Economic Outlook which projects a global growth of 5.5.% in 2021 following a shrinkage of 3.5% in 2020. The latest update adds 0.3% to the projection numbers released in October 2020, demonstrating the rapidity of change as efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic take a positive turn, despite renewed waves and new variants of the coronavirus. Two key points underpin the