Ghana's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which measures economic growth, reached 6.6 percent during the first quarter, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) announced here on Wednesday.
For the same period of last year, GDP growth stood at 4.4 percent during a year that energy crisis and lower oil production from the Jubilee field conspired to dampen economic growth.
"The non-oil GDP growth for the period under review was 3.9 percent, relative to the 6.3 percent recorded for the corresponding period in 2016," Anthony Amuzu, Deputy Government Statistician, told the media here.
The value of the first quarter growth with oil was 44.73 billion Ghana cedis (10.13 billion U.S. dollars), relative to the 36.45 billion cedis (8.26 billion dollars) during the corresponding period in 2016. For the non-oil GDP, the value of growth in the first quarter was 42.96 billion cedis (9.73 billion dollars), compared with 36.04 billion cedis (8.16 billion dollars), said Amuzu.
"The industry sector recorded the highest GDP growth rate of 11.5 percent, followed by the agriculture sector with 7.6 percent, with the services sector coming third with 3.7 percent growth," the Deputy Government Statistician announced.
The fishing sub-sector recorded the highest year-on-year growth rate of 31.6 percent while the forestry and logging sub-sector recorded the lowest growth rate of 3.4 percent.
Amuzu explained: "The coming on stream of the TEN (Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme) oil field contributed greatly to the rise in the GDP growth since, for the same period last year, this field had not yet come on stream."
He stated further that the services sector declined due to the lower performance of Public Administration, with Defense and Social Security performing abysmally. Furthermore, the lower expenditure by government, with only 18 percent of the budgetary allocation for goods and services in the public sector during the first quarter had been utilized.
"So, since these key sub-sectors in the services industry are not performing, this has led to the lower performance of the services sector in general," he pointed out.
Latest comments