Countries With Highest GDP Growth 2017

Nauru, Ethiopia, Turkmenistan, Qatar, China and Uzbekistan are the fastest growing economies in the world according to IMF data for the last ten years.

Nauru, a newly arrived country to the IMF datasets, tops the ranking with an average of 16 per cent GDP growth over the last ten years. That figure, though, is the result of enormous oscillations in its yearly growth rates. Except for Nauru, two-digit growth rates seem now something of the past, as even the fastest growing economy, Ethiopia, shows a ten-year average under 10 per cent. Developing Asian and African countries still sweep the board, with Panama in the first position among countries from the rest of the world, despite its economic slowdown.

The Gross Domestic Product of a country can be defined as the total monetary value of the goods and services produced within its borders in a year. GDP growth is expressed as a per cent. The average growth rate has been calculated using the geometric mean to obtain a ten-year equivalent rate.

The data show that Ethiopia, which maintained two-digit growth for years and throughout 2011, suffered a significant deceleration in 2012, and after recovering in the 2013-2015 period, lived a major slowdown in 2016 when growth estimates were of 6.5 per cent.

The IMF expects Ethiopia to recover some ground in 2017, with an expected rate of 7.5 per cent. Similarly, and excepting 2009 and 2010, Turkmenistan kept steadily growing above 10 per cent until 2014, right before it dipped to 6.5 per cent in 2015 and 6.2 per cent in 2016. IMF projections only anticipate a slight improvement of 0.3 points for 2017.

Qatar had also kept growing at double-digit rates, at some point nearing 20 per cent, until 2011, but the following year its growth rate collapsed reaching 4.9 per cent and kept degrading until 2016, when it reached 2.7 per cent. Qatar is expected to pick up some pace in 2017, reaching a 3.4 per cent growth.

As for the world’s second economy, China’s growth rates have kept slowly but steadily declining since 2010, the last time they topped 10 per cent. The big Asian engine is expected to stay on this path in 2017, with a projected growth rate of 6.6 per cent. 

Despite the worsening of the figures, the growth rates all these economies show are still outstanding. What some economists call secular stagnation — the persistence of low growth rates — and the tightening of access to credit after the 2008 crisis have both impacted emerging markets, but as Camilla Lund Andersen puts it in the March 2017’s editorial for “Finance & Development”, “younger populations and still-vibrant productivity in many of these countries are driving higher economic growth at home in the global economy”.

Take a look at the table below for more.