Our Growth Projections Contradict That Of Nigerian Government – IMF

It should be noted that there has been discrepancies twice this year alone, when the Nigerian Government placed its growth projection at 3.5 percent in the 2018 budget, while the IMF projected 2.5 percent. However after the Nigerian government effected a cut on its projection down to the IMF’s level of 2.1 percent, the IMF after its just concluded annual Meetings in Indonesia dropped the projection further to 1.9 percent.

IMF director in charge of Africa, Mr Abebe Selassie, who spoke to Financial Vanguard  on the sidelines of the Meetings, said the consistent discrepancies could be attributed to the gap in updating as the World Bank and IMF appears to be more current than Nigerian authorities.


"I think it is a matter of updating. We are always on the watch to update our projections following developments in the economy we watch. We are always current”.

However when reminded that Nigeria also updates just like in the 2018 projection, Selassie said that IMF’s update may be faster than Nigeria’s. But he also added that in the latest updates by the two entities the difference is not much. The latest update by IMF is 0.2 percentage point below Federal Government’s projection. But the 2019 projections of IMF at 2.3 percent is still widely below Federal Government’s figure of 3.01 percent, which was also a downward review from 4.5 percent contained in its Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) document.