Egypt sole oil-importing Middle Eastern country to grow in positive in FY2020/2021: IMF

CAIRO – 19 October 2020: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) noted in a report that all oil-importing countries in the Middle East and East Asia will experience a negative growth in FY2020/2021, except for Egypt.

The growth of those countries combined is expected to be -1% down from 2.8% in 2019. The estimation of growth for Egypt in FY2020/2021 rose from 2% in June to 2.8% in October.

The contraction of the Moroccan and Jordanian economies is speculated to range from 5% to 7% driven by the decline in tourism and manufacturing.

In FY2019/2020, Egypt's GDP grew by 3.5% not hitting the 6% target because of COVID-19 outbreak.

Egypt had also targeted to reduce the budget deficit to 7.2% but it recorded 7.8%. By contrast, the debt-to-GDP-ratio declined exceeding the target, which was 89%, to 86.1% down from 90.4% in FY2018/2019.