GDP growth falls to 5.6% in 3rd quarter – GSS

• Posted on December 19, 2019December 19, 2019
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

REDUCTION in manganese and gold production as well as significant drop in value addition in gold industry have dragged down Ghana’s provisional Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the third quarter of 2019 to 5.6 per cent.

When seasonally adjusted, real GDP fell by 1.8 percentage points as against 7.4 per cent recorded in the same period in 2018, according to provisional data from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).
GDP growth for the first quarter of 2019 was 6.7 per cent while the economy grew by 5.7 per cent in second quarter.
Instructively, this is the lowest quarterly GDP to be recorded since the second quarter of 2018.
GDP is the total value of all goods and services produced in the country within a period.
Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, attributed the descent in GDP growth rate to the drop in production and value addition in Ghana’s gold industry.
“From our perspective, one of the things we want to put emphasis on is that consistently there has been a continuous drop in both the production and value addition of gold,” Annim said.
“Indeed, for the third quarter of 2019, we recorded a drop of 19 per cent and for the second quarter of 2019, we recorded a drop of 11 per cent, which further dropped from the first quarter,” he added.
He further explained that the slowdown in GDP growth rate was also due to a fall in manganese production.
“In the case of manganese, from a quarter on quarter basis, there was a jump between the first and second quarters of 2019, to over a 1,000 per cent increase.
“But this increase that was recorded for manganese for the second quarter of 2019 dropped about two percentage points in the third quarter of 2019,” the government statistician explained.
It is important to note that with the overall oil GDP growth for the quarter under review, the Mining & Quarrying sub sector grew by 8.5 per cent of which Oil and Gas grew by 18 per cent.
However, the Mining & Quarrying sub-sector excluding oil and gas activities contracted -7 per cent in 2019 third quarter compared with an expansion of 45 per cent in 2018 third quarter.
The non-oil GDP growth rate for 2019 third quarter was 4.6 per cent, which is also 3.9 percentage lower than the growth rate of 8.5 per cent recorded in third quarter of 2018.
The Services sector recorded a growth rate of 5.7 per cent which is as a result of a high growth in Information & Communication (26.4 per cent), Real Estate (22.1 per cent), Education (9.5 per cent), Public Administration, Defence & Social Security (6.1 per cent) and Transport & Storage (5.1 per cent) sub-sectors.

By Raju J. R. PARWANI, Accra