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According to the National Accounts reports, the growth rate in the national economy in 2007 at current prices stood at 12.3 per cent compared to the year before.

"The growth in 2007 was higher than expected as it was estimated to stand at below 6 per cent," said DoS Director General Ghazi Shbeikat at a press conference yesterday.

He attributed the boost to a high growth the economy witnessed in the 4th quarter of last year, when GDP growth stood at 6.5 per cent, compared to the previous year.

"We expect the GDP growth in the current year to also amount to 6 per cent," Shbeikat told reporters.

In a report released earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave almost the same calculation of GDP increase last year, but said growth in 2008 "could ease slightly to 5.5 per cent".

Commenting on last year's economic growth, leading economist Fahed Fanek said: "The 6 per cent growth is excellent and it is a little bit more than expected, especially that the growth during the first three quarters of the year 2007 stood at about 5.3 per cent."

"This is an indicator that the growth in the last quarter of last year was really high that it pushed up the overall GDP growth," Fanek told The Jordan Times.

The finance, insurance, real estate and business services sectors contributed 1.5 percentage points to GDP growth last year, according to DoS report.

"The economy remains underpinned by local and Arab Gulf investments and a liberal business climate," the IMF report said.

The second largest contributor was the taxes on products sector with 0.9 percentage points, followed by the transport, communications, manufacturing and the government services sector by 0.8 percentage points each.

Then followed the wholesale and retail sector at 0.5 percentage points, and the construction and personal and social services sectors, which contributed 0.4 and 0.2 percentage points to the growth rate respectively.

The quarrying industries and the nonprofit services sectors continued to achieve negative growth rates in the previous quarters, which contributed to the drop in the overall growth rate of GDP.

Meanwhile, the report said the unemployment rate in 2007 stood at 13.1 per cent, the lowest in eight years, thanks to the economic growth and the 70,000 jobs created last year, almost double the figure in 2006.

The study indicated that the inflation rate stood at 5.4 per cent in 2007, compared to 6.2 in 2006.

The IMF report cited the government as forecasting inflation to almost double to 9 per cent this year.

Last year witnessed hikes in the prices of several commodities such as vegetables, whose average price rose by 19.9 per cent, dairy products by 13.8 per cent and meat by 10.8 per cent.

However, the study indicated that there was a drop in prices of some commodities such as communications that went down by 0.8 per cent due to competition in the sector.

The study indicated that foreign trade decreased in the year 2007 as the Kingdom's exports dropped from 21 per cent in 2006 to 9.5 in 2007, while imports rose from 10 per cent in 2006 to 17.2 per cent in 2007.

By Mohammad Ghazal

© Jordan Times 2008

 

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