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Ghana’s economy grows by 8.5% in 2017
GDP is the estimate of the total value of final goods and services produced in the country over a given period.
This is twice the figure recorded in 2016 where the economy grew by 3.7 percent.
According to a release issued, the Industry sector recorded the highest growth rate of 16.7 percent, followed by Agriculture (8.4%) and the Services (4.3%) sectors.
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Even though the Services sector remains the largest it recorded a dwindling share of the GDP. It decreased from 56.8 percent in 2016 to 56.2 percent in 2017.
Also, the sector’s growth rate decreased from 5.7 percent in 2016 to 4.3 percent in 2017. Two of the subsectors in this sector recorded double-digit growth rates. These are the Information and Communication (13.2%) and Health and Social Work (14.4%) sub-sectors.
The highest growing sector which is the Industry sector recorded a GDP share of 25.5 percent.Its growth rate increased from -0.5 percent in 2016 to 16.7 percent in 2017.
Of all the industrial activities, the Mining and Quarrying subsector recorded the highest growth of 46.7 percent in 2017.
The Agriculture sector expanded from a growth rate of 3.0 percent in 2016 to 8.4 percent in 2017. Its share of GDP, however, declined from 18.7 percent in 2016 to 18.3 percent in 2017. Crops remain the largest activity with a share of 14.2 percent of GDP.
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In an interview with Accra-based Citi FM, the Deputy Government Statistician in charge of operations, Anthony Amuzu attributed the growth to the gains in the Mining and Quarrying subsector.
“In 2017, the provisional annual estimates including oil grew by 8.5 percent but then the non-oil GDP grew at 4.9 percent, there was a lot of oil production in 2017, with the coming on board of the TEN oil fields and that has shot up the GDP for 2017”.
“And if you take the industry sector, for example, mining and quarrying which includes oil and gas contributed about 46% of which oil contributed about 80 %, so it has been driven largely by the mining and quarrying sub-sector which includes oil and gas”, he explained.
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