The African Development Bank predicts the continent’s growth will be a stronger-than-expected 4% this year, with China’s ending of strict Covid-19 curbs one of the major contributory factors highlighted in its 2023 Africa’s Macroeconomic Performance and Outlook report.
“Despite the confluence of multiple shocks, growth across all five African regions was positive in 2022- and the outlook for 2023–24 is projected to be stable,” AfDB chief economist Kevin Chika Urama said at the report’s launch.
The report says that Africa’s GDP slowed to 3.8% in 2022 from 4.8% in 2021, and Urama predicts it will stabilise at 4% over 2023–24, with a risk of a continent-wide recession close to zero.
The bank is more positive than the IMF – which announced a 3.7% growth for the continent this year in its Regional Economic Outlook published in October – and has partly based its projections on the expected recovery of China as it begins to re-open after three years of strict Covid-19 policies. Last week, China’s new foreign minister Qin Gang embarked on a five-country African tour to boost ties with some of the continent’s biggest economies, including Egypt and Ethiopia.
“China’s anticipated reopening after three years of zero-Covid policy and the stable growth outlook for Asia could bolster Africa’s growth in the medium term. An important market for Africa’s commodities, Asia accounts for about 40% of the continent’s total merchandise exports,” the report says.
Speaking during the report’s launch event, US economist Jeffrey Sachs backed the AFDB’s optimistic outlook.
“I do strongly believe that Africa can and will rise to the growth of 7% or more per year consistently in the coming decades. Building on the resiliency that we see in this report, we are going to see in the next decade a real acceleration of Africa’s sustainable development so that it will be the fastest growing part of the world economy,” he says.
Africans anticipate Better days ahead as Banks Predict stronger economic growth for the continent in 2023
