The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday forecast economic growth of 5.4 percent in 2013 and 5.7 percent in 2014 for the economies of sub-Saharan Africa on the back of rising investment and booming extractive industries.
“Sub-Saharan Africa will be among the fastest growing places in the world … second only to developing Asia”, Antoinette Sayeh, director of the IMF’s Africa department, told journalists at the report’s release in Ghana’s capital, Accra, reports Reuters.
In April, the IMF had forecast sub-Saharan Africa’s growth at 5.6 percent for this year and 6.1 percent for 2014 in its World Economic Outlook.
The regional outlook released on Tuesday explained that the discrepancy in growth figures was due to the exclusion of South Sudan’s volatile economy from the Fund’s latest calculations.
Despite a global economic slowdown in 2012, most African economies grew at around 5 percent, buoyed by strong internal demand and higher commodity prices.
