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Uche Usim, Abuja
The African Development Bank (AfDB) has released its Economic Outlook for 2020, projecting that Nigeria, Ghana and other countries on the continent will collectively lose $236.7 billion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to the rampaging COVID-19 pestilence.
The report, unveiled on Tuesday, explained that Real GDP in Africa to contract by 1.7 per cent in 2020, dropping by 5.6 percentage points from the January 2020 pre-Covid–19 projection, if the virus has a substantial impact but of short duration.
It maintained that if the scourge and its concomitant health crisis were not curtailed by the first half of 2020, there would be a deeper GDP contraction in 2020 of 3.4 per cent, down by 7.3 percentage points from the growth projected before the outbreak of COVID-19.
Summarizing the development, AfDB inferred that GDP losses could range between $173.1 billion and $236.7 billion in 2020–2021.
With the projected contraction of growth, the bank in the report stated that Africa could suffer GDP losses in 2020 between $145.5bn (baseline) and $189.7bn (worst case), from the pre-coronavirus estimated GDP of $2.59 trillion for 2020.
