Ebun Francis || Nigeria’s economy is still vulnerable in spite of the country exiting recession, the International Monetary Fund has said.
IMF’s media and press officer, Raphael Ranspach in a statement on Friday said the organisation welcomed the federal government’s actions to improve the power sector and business environment under the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan. EGRP.
According to IMF, macroeconomic and structural reforms remained urgent to contain vulnerability and support sustainable private sector-led growth.The fund said, “Overall growth is slowly picking up but recovery remains challenging. Economic activity expanded by 1.4 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2017 – the second consecutive quarter of positive growth after five quarters of recession — driven by recovering oil production and agriculture.”
“However, growth in the non-oil-non-agricultural sector (representing about 65 percent of the economy) contracted in the first three quarters of 2017 relative to the same period last year.
“Difficulties in accessing financing and high inflation continued to weigh on companies’ performance and consumer demand.
“Headline inflation declined to 15.9 percent by end-November, from 18.5 percent at end of 2016, but remains sticky despite tight liquidity conditions.
“High fiscal deficits – driven by weak revenue mobilisation – generated large financing needs, which, when combined with tight monetary policy necessary to reduce inflationary pressures, increased pressure on bond yields and crowded out private sector credit.”
On the low growth environment and exposure to the oil and gas sector, IMF said the banking industry’s solvency ratio has declined from almost 15 to 10.5 percent between December 2016 and October 2017.
“In addition, non-performing loans have increased from 5 percent in June 2015 to 15 percent as of October 2017, although with provisioning coverage of about 82 percent,” it said.
IMF, however, said the authorities had begun addressing macroeconomic imbalances and structural impediments through the implementation of policies underpinning the ERGP.
It said recovering oil prices, the new investor and exporter foreign exchange window has increased investor confidence and provided impetus to portfolio inflows.
The fund added that these have helped to increase external buffers to a four-year high and contributed to reducing the parallel market premium.
It said important actions under the power sector recovery programme increased power supply generation and ensured government agencies paid their electricity bills.
It added that welcome steps were also taken to improve the business environment and to address longstanding corruption issues, including through the adoption of the National Anti-Corruption Strategy in August 2017.
The IMF said with these positive actions, growth is expected to continue to pick up in 2018 to 2.1 percent, helped by the full year impact of the greater availability of foreign exchange and higher oil production, but to stay relatively flat in the medium term.
“However, in the absence of new policies, the near-term outlook remains challenging. Risks to the outlook include lower oil prices, tighter external market conditions, heightened security issues and delayed policy responses,” it said.
With agency report