IMF projects Egypt’s economy will grow 4.4% in 2023

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised its growth forecast for Egypt’s economy to 4.4 percent for 2023 down from its previous July forecast of 4.8 percent, Petya Koeva Brooks, Deputy Director of the Research Department, said on Tuesday.

Brooks made her statements in response to a question from Amwal Al Ghad on the IMF’s expectations for the Egyptian economy during a virtual press briefing held on Tuesday for the release the fund’s update to its World Economic Outlook report.

The Egyptian economy, like that of most other countries worldwide, was acutely affected by global shocks amid tighter domestic monetary conditions and the exodus of funds and other bigger challenges arising from a deteriorating external environment, Brooks added.

Globally, IMF’s growth forecast for 2023 is the lowest for the year ahead that the Fund has published since 2001, apart from the years of the pandemic and following the global financial crisis. Economists at IMF judged that there was a greater than even chance that the world economy would perform worse than its central forecast and a 25 percent chance that growth would fall below 2 percent. This would reflect global economic weakness witnessed only one year in 10 and only in 1973, 1981, 1982, 2009, and 2020 over the past half a century.

In IMF’s revised projections, 93 percent of countries received downgrades to their growth outlook.

The 2022 global growth forecast has also dropped from 4.9 percent in the IMF’s report a year ago to 3.2 percent now. Its 2023 growth estimate was cut from 3.6 percent a year ago to 2.3 percent, with the downgrades concentrated in advanced economies rather than in the emerging world.