The Tunisian economy grew 0.8% in 2015, against forecasts of 0.5% and a figure of 2.3% in 2014, according to data from the National Statistics Institute (NSI) published Wednesday.
Despite this slight increase, the growth rate of the Tunisian economy in 2015 is still far from the initial forecasts.
The government, which was predicting a growth of 3% in the Finance Law 2015 had to scale down the rate to 1%, initially, under the supplementary finance law in 2015 and this after the terrorist attacks in Bardo and Sousse in March and June 2015, respectively. It revised the rate downwards again to 0.5% in the 2016 Finance Law.
According to INS, the growth of the Tunisian economy was particularly driven in 2015 by the vitality of the agricultural sector whose growth has been revised upwards as well, rising from 6.2% to 9.2%. Thus, the production of olive oil has increased fivefold and the dates’ grew 12.5% compared to 2014.
It was also due to the growth of non-market services s (administrative) up 2.9% and transportation and financial services (3.2 and 2.3% respectively).
However, a decline was recorded in other economic sectors, especially manufacturing industry (-8.5%), non-manufacturing industry (-3.1%) and market services (-1.6%).
The growth of the Tunisian economy was around 0.3% in Q4 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.
