DUBAI, UAE — The economies of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries will continue to remain resilient this year, but double-digit inflation is expected to slow growth in 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.
The IMF, in its latest forecast, has highlighted that GDP growth in the MENA region will be around 5% in 2022. For oil-exporting nations, growth was projected at 5.2%, mainly due to high oil prices and robust GDP growth in other countries, which offset the impact of high food prices.
The IMF estimates did nothing new but confirmed what the C-level executives and economic experts from the region had said during the TOP CEO Conference and Awards 2022 held in Dubai in May this year.
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“Inflation has a significant cost-push pressure on your cost of living and will impact the daily set of requirements of people in the region,” First Abu Dhabi Bank chief economist Simon Ballard had said.
M Abudawood Group Executive Chairman Mohammed H A Abudawood had separately highlighted that It’s not just oil “but the production of coal, natural gas and other raw materials will also drop and will remain affected by the inflation.”
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“The balance sheet of the Fed before the 2008 crisis was US$750 billion,” Vision 3 Chairman Khalid Abdulla Janahi had pointed out. “Today it is nearing US$40 trillion. Now look at rest of the world in terms of central banks, countries, individuals and companies, the debt has multiplied substantially since then. It includes Gulf countries and the Arab world as a whole.”
Sélim Chidiac Chief Executive Officer, L’azurde Company for Jewelry, had also suggested that inflation is an “an ongoing thing and it’s part of a long-term process to reinvent your company as you move forward”.
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The latest IMF report has suggested that higher energy prices sustained oil-producing nations, such as Saudi Arabia, where economic growth is expected to hit 7.6% this year.
Oil exporters are also benefitting from trade diversions caused by the war in Ukraine, as some European countries look to replace their oil purchases from Russia, the report added.
TRENDS recalls what some of the top experts had said about inflation during the during the TOP CEO Conference and Awards 2022 held in Dubai in May 2022: