World Bank places Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru above regional average in GDP growth in 2023

The World Bank (WB), in its latest report released on Tuesday, maintains Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru with a projection of gross domestic product (GDP) growth above the average in Latin America.

The multinational organization specialized in finance and assistance lowered this Tuesday the South American country’s economic growth projection for 2023 from 3.9 percent, granted in January, to 2.7 percent, compared to the average of 1.4 percent for the region.

The latest WB report, “The Potential of Integration, Opportunities in a Changing Global Economy”, states that Latin America will mark a “lower than anticipated” economic rise.

Affirming that “the economies of Latin America and the Caribbean have been relatively resilient in the face of growing pressure from indebtedness, inflation, and global uncertainty”, the WB report warns, on the other hand, that “new headwinds” caused by falling commodity prices and rising interest rates in developed countries could “cast a new shadow over the region’s prospects”.

Likewise, the WB forecasts that Bolivia will be among the three economies with the best growth in the region this 2023: Ecuador with 3 percent, Bolivia with 2.7 percent, and Peru with 2.4 percent.

As for other countries in the region, it forecasts a growth of 1.8 percent for Uruguay, 1.1 percent for Colombia, 0.8 percent for Brazil, and -0.7 percent for Chile.

In addition, the multilateral organization forecasts a GDP expansion of 2.1 percent for both 2024 and 2025 for the Bolivian state.

The Fiscal-Financial Program 2023, signed in January by the Ministry of Economy and Public Finance and the Central Bank of Bolivia (BCB), projects for this year a growth of the Bolivian economy of 4.86 percent, a fiscal deficit of 7.49 percent and an end-of-period inflation rate of around 3.28 percent.

According to the official report of the Bolivian Ministry of Planning published in February, Bolivia reduced the fiscal deficit from 12.7 percent in 2020 to 7.2 percent in 2022, reaching a GDP in the third quarter of last year of 4.3 percent and closing 2022 with controlled inflation of 3.12 percent, despite the adverse international context.

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