Economic Briefing 2013: Mozambique, a story of growth
Under the theme “Mozambique, a story of growth”, Standard Bank held on 18 April at the Hotel Polana in Maputo, the usual Economic Briefing, to provide its clients and the national market with trends of the national and global economy in order to guide them in decision making, in addition to show the “expertise” of the Bank in various specialty areas.
During the briefing, Standard Bank economists, Fausio Mussa and Yvette Babb spoke about the expected evolution of the Mozambican, regional and international economy, while experts David Humphrey and Simon Ashby focused on “The importance of having functioning infrastructure in Mozambique “and” The effect of gas discoveries in Mozambique”, respectively.
In his presentation on the outlook for the Mozambican economy and that of the Southern African region, senior economist at Standard Bank Fausio Mussa said that “taking into account the negative impact of the floods, we have revised negatively our forecasts for economic growth for 2013 to a level of 6 percent, below the average of the last decade, which was 7.4 percent, and below the initial projections of the Government of 8.4 percent, but it is expected that annual inflation is kept to a single digit”.
As factors contributing to the slowdown in domestic economicgrowth Fausio Mussa indicated “the heavy rains that hit the country during the first months of this year, affecting about 479,000 people, with a negative impact on agricultural production and damage to infrastructure, which led to the interruption, for a period of about three weeks, of the export of coal from Moatize through the Beira Port.”
On the other hand, according to the Standard Bank senior economist, strong foreign direct investment continued to finance the current account deficit, which rose 29.5 percent in the first nine months of 2012 compared with the same period in 2011 to 1,251 million dollars.
“The prospects of continued flows of foreign investment and of increased exports point to the maintenance of a relatively stable exchange rate of the metical against the U.S. dollar, around 30.5 Meticais per dollar”, said Fausio Mussa.