Economy picking up strongly – Ofori-Atta
Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta has said after growing at 0.4 per cent in 2020, reflecting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy “picked up strongly in Q1-2021 reflecting the impact of the COVID-19 containment measures and recovery interventions the government has been implementing since COVID-19 broke out in March 2020”.
Presenting the mid-year budget review to parliament on Thursday, 29 July 2021, Mr Ofori-Atta said: “Mr. Speaker, provisional Q1-2021 National Accounts Statistics published by Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) in June 2021 shows that the overall real GDP growth for Q1-2021 was 3.1 per cent”.
This shows a continuous recovery momentum from the pandemic from Q4-2020 when the economy grew by 3.3 per cent after it contracted by 5.7 per cent in Q2-2020 and 3.2 per cent in Q3-2020, he explained.
Non-oil GDP, he added, “equally picked up strongly in Q1-2021 growing at 4.6 per cent up from the Q4-2020 growth of 4.0 per cent”.
The real sector recovery, he said, is supported by recent data on Bank of Ghana’s Composite Index of Economic Activity (CIEA), which registered strong annual growth of 33.1 per cent in May 2021, compared to a contraction of 10.2 per cent in the corresponding period of 2020.
The key drivers of economic activity during the period, according to Mr Ofori-Atta, “include a base drift effect, improvement in industrial production, domestic consumption, pick-up in import activities, steady rise in construction activities, and a rise in air-passenger arrivals”.
Mr Ofori-Atta noted that the agriculture sector continued its robust performance and recorded the highest growth of 4.3 per cent, followed by the Services Sector and the Industry sector, which expanded by 4.0 per cent and 1.3 per cent, respectively.
“For the same period in 2020, the Agriculture sector, services sector, and the Industry sector recorded growth rates of 10.2 per cent, 12.3 per cent, and 1.4 per cent, respectively”.
The main drivers of growth in the agriculture sector were the livestock and the crops sub-sectors, which expanded by 5.5 per cent and 4.9 per cent, respectively, he added.
The “fishing sub-sector, however, witnessed a contraction of 3.6 per cent for the period”, he pointed out.
The growth performance in the services sector, he said, was spearheaded by the Information and Communication sub-sector which recorded a healthy growth rate of 22.1 per cent while Industry sector growth was powered by the Construction and Manufacturing sub-sectors, which grew by 14.2 per cent and 6.1 per cent, respectively.
Source: Classfmonline.com
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