Preliminary national accounts results released by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) Tuesday showed that the national economy recorded annual growth in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at a rate of 1.6% in the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to the last quarter of 2020.
Compared to the third quarter of the same year, real and seasonally adjusted GDP grew by 0.7%, as against a growth of 0.3% announced last November.
The INS said this apparent acceleration of activity remains to be confirmed, insofar as growth benefits essentially from a circumstantial recovery of production in the extraction sectors (mining 78.6%, oil and gas 20.6%), while activity remains sluggish in the manufacturing industries (apart from the branches of phosphate derivatives), moderate in market services and down in agriculture (-4.2%).
In total, and as a first estimate, the national economy posted a growth of 3.1% over the past year. This assessment incorporates the latest results of the annual national accounts and which include the usual revisions to the growth of the last three years: final accounts for 2018 (2.6% against 2.5% previously), semi-final accounts for 2019 (1.3% against 1.4%), provisional accounts for 2020 (-8.7% against -9.2%).
These results show that the fall in GDP in 2020 has only been partially absorbed, as the level of real GDP in the fourth quarter of 2021 is still 4.6 percentage points lower than in the last quarter of 2019.
Therefore, the catch-up dynamic and the recovery of activity in some sectors is proving to be relatively slow and could be spread out over time.
