Nigeria will be the only African country that would be among the top 20 economies in the world by 2030, the United States of America Department of Agriculture has listed.
The department in its latest macro-economic projections for 2030, indicates that the U.S. would continue to lead the world economies with a GDP of about $24.8 trillion and expected to be closely followed by China with about $22.2 trillion, Daily Independent reports.
India was placed in the third position based on their projections with $6.6 trillion. Nigeria meanwhile was placed second from bottom at $1 trillion and the only African country in the list.
Nigeria overtook South Africa in 2013 as largest economy in Africa after it concluded its GDP rebasing.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers had earlier, based on forecast, named Nigeria would be the fastest growing economy on earth by 2050.
“Though we remain wary of oracles and fortune-tellers, a new report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers highlights some of the profound global economic shifts we at Quartz believe are well underway,” it said.
The sages at PwC forecast that between now and 2050 that the fastest growing economy would be Nigeria, followed by Vietnam, India, and Indonesia.
They said Chinese growth would slow down due to a rapidly aging population and rising labour costs.
In a similar vein, ratings agency Moody’s also published a report on Nigeria’s rebased GDP of $510 billion, which it estimated would surge to $4.5 trillion by 2050.
Moody’s said that the rebasing exercise was supportive of assessing the nation’s sovereign credit profile, although it does not change the government’s nominal stock of outstanding debt, nor its revenue generation capacity to service that debt.
“With a population of 170 million and oil reserves estimated at around 37.2 trillion barrels (or roughly 28 per cent of total African reserves), Nigeria is likely to number among the world’s 15 largest economies by 2050 when GDP is projected to exceed $4.5 trillion in purchasing power parity terms,” said Aurelien Mali, VP-Senior Analyst, Moody’s.
“From a credit standpoint, the revised GDP estimates allow a better understanding of the Nigerian economy and its underlying resilience.”
The rebasing of Nigeria’s GDP follows similar rebasing exercises by more than a dozen other African countries over the past decade, resulting in a range of revisions of national output.
Moody’s notes that in Nigeria’s case, the GDP revision is more spectacular as it means the country has now overtaken South Africa to become the largest economy in Africa, with its ranking among global economies jumping from 36th to 28th, with an economy almost as large as that of the Netherlands.
President-elect, General Buhari has been urged to save foreign reserves from falling if he is to save the failing economy which has been in crises since the turn of the year.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of April, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN announced that the foreign exchange reserves fell by 4.9 per cent to $29.79bn on March 30, from $31.35bn in February.
