By Ahmed Mousa Jiyad.
Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News.
Recent Data Draws Bleak Prospect for Iraq Next Year
The Iraqi economy has been in a bad shape and, in the short term, it is going to get worse; nothing new about this and there is almost a consensus about it despite differences in the cited material’ verifiable evidence, manifestations and root-causes for such a degenerating situation.
A “multi-whammy” combination, or association, of effective impacting factors and circumstances played their part in what the country has been and is facing. These include political instability and divisions; fragile security conditions; vulnerability of high-dependency economic structure; bad and inefficient management and decision making; kleptocracy governance coupled with hyper corruption, particularly the formalized and institutionalized; and impacting external intrusion, among others.
Data and information on these factors and circumstances are massive, and hardly any day passes without adding new items to the long list of cases and examples reported by the media, formal entities, experts and legal authorities; the apparent outcome of all that is a severely deteriorated economy of Iraq.
Data I compiled from a recent IMF report regarding main macroeconomic indicators are presented in the table, which you can view in this pdf. The table provides the progression of 26 macroeconomic indicators over the last two decades using three different sets of data: the first is the average, of a long and rather up-normal period 2000-2016; the second, annual data for each of the last three years 2017:2019, and the third are projections for 2020 and 2021.
The focus in this brief contribution is on the prospects for the economy in this and next year, in comparison with the last three years.
Click here to download the full report in pdf format.
Mr Jiyad is an independent development consultant, scholar and Associate with the former Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES), London. He was formerly a senior economist with the Iraq National Oil Company and Iraq’s Ministry of Oil, Chief Expert for the Council of Ministers, Director at the Ministry of Trade, and International Specialist with UN organizations in Uganda, Sudan and Jordan. He is now based in Norway (Email: mou-jiya(at)online.no, Skype ID: Ahmed Mousa Jiyad). Read more of Mr Jiyad’s biography here.
The post Recent Data Draws Bleak Prospect for Iraq Next Year first appeared on Iraq Business News.