GCC growth to slow by half in 2009: IMF

[Naveed Yaseen]

DUBAI (February 09 2009): Economic growth of Gulf Arab oil exporters is set to slow by almost half to 3.5 percent this year as the Middle East earns about $300 billion less from crude oil exports, the International Monetary Fund said on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia and five of its neighbours in the world's biggest oil-exporting region are likely to post fiscal deficits amounting to 3.1 percent of gross domestic product, compared with surpluses of 22.8 percent of GDP in 2008, the IMF said.

Real GDP growth in 2009 for the Gulf - including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain - would fall from 6.8 percent last year, Masood Ahmed, director of the IMF's Middle East and Central Asia Department, said.

"There has been an extraordinary collapse of confidence. Everybody is holding back in making decisions about spending," Ahmed told an economic conference of the IMF's worst global economic outlook since the organisation was created in 1944.

"The global slowdown will clearly have a significant impact on growth through lower exports, tourism, remittances and higher cost of credit." The UAE emirate of Dubai, which in boom years built itself as the Gulf's trade and commerce hub, is now facing a sharp property sector downturn that has led to scores of job cuts and concerns that banks' could suffer from defaults on home loans.

Dubai's economy, which relies on oil for about 3 to 4 percent of GDP, would still grow "slightly less" than 2.5 percent this year down from about 8 percent in 2009, the Dubai government's chief economist Raed Safadi told the IMF briefing.

Safadi called the forecast "conservative" and said it assumed average oil prices of about $48 a barrel this year. Economists have slashed their Gulf economic growth forecasts after the global financial crisis brought an end late last year to a regional economic boom that was fuelled by high oil prices.

Oil prices have tumbled by more than two thirds since hitting record levels above $147 a barrel last July. Other regional economists have been more pessimistic than Safadi, anticipating real GDP growth in Saudi and the UAE to slow to less than 1 percent this year after a rough first half.

"Throughout history, liquidity-fuelled booms end in tears," Marios Maratheftis, regional head of research at Standard Chartered Bank, said at the briefing.

"The entire GCC experienced a liquidity-fuelled boom in recent years. The problem was the central banks did not have enough tools to drain liquidity out of the system."

DOWNSIDE RISKS:

The IMF - which has revised its growth forecasts downward four times in the last eight months - did not provide country-specific growth forecasts on Sunday.

Middle East oil exporters - which also include Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Yemen - are likely to turn current account deficits amounting to $30 billion in 2009 after posting $400 billion in surpluses last year, it said.

Many regional countries are willing to turn fiscal deficits this year to help their economies weather the crisis. Ahmed said Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Algeria, Iraq and Iran would run budget deficits if oil prices average $50 a barrel.

"By continuing to spend, oil-exporting countries are contributing substantially to supporting global demand and are acting as stabilisers during the global downturn," Ahmed said. "For most countries, this deterioration is from a position of significant strength, and thus can comfortably be sustained by the large stock of reserves that these economies have built up."

But risks to the outlook "are tilted to the downside" as global growth slows to 0.5 percent this year, Ahmed warned.

Policymakers should focus on restoring "normal functioning" of financial markets, while monetary policy should be geared toward unlocking credit markets and fiscal policy should centre on implementing economic stimulus reforms, he said.

"A more prolonged global recession would imply even weaker exports, tourism, and remittances," he said. "If asset price corrections deepen and the impact of asset price corrections feed through to corporate and, ultimately, bank balance sheets, some financial institutions in the region may be under stress." Gulf inflation is set to fall to 6.3 percent in 2009 from 10.6 percent in 2008, while government revenues from oil could drop to $257 billion this year from $460 billion last, he added

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