Countries With Highest GDP Growth In 2017

Nauru, Ethiopia, Turkmenistan, Qatar, China and Uzbekistan are the fastest growing economies in the world in 2017 according to IMF data for the last ten years.

Nauru, a newly arrived country to the IMF datasets, tops the ranking with an average of 16 per cent GDP growth over the last ten years. That figure, though, is the result of enormous oscillations in its yearly growth rates. Except for Nauru, two-digit growth rates seem now something of the past, as even the fastest growing economy, Ethiopia, shows a ten-year average under 10 per cent. Developing Asian and African countries still sweep the board, with Panama in the first position among countries from the rest of the world, despite its economic slowdown.

The Gross Domestic Product of a country can be defined as the total monetary value of the goods and services produced within its borders in a year. GDP growth is expressed as a per cent. The average growth rate has been calculated using the geometric mean to obtain a ten-year equivalent rate.

The data show that Ethiopia, which maintained two-digit growth for years and throughout 2011, suffered a significant deceleration in 2012, and after recovering in the 2013-2015 period, lived a major slowdown in 2016 when growth estimates were of 6.5 per cent.

The IMF expects Ethiopia to recover some ground in 2017, with an expected rate of 7.5 per cent. Similarly, and excepting 2009 and 2010, Turkmenistan kept steadily growing above 10 per cent until 2014, right before it dipped to 6.5 per cent in 2015 and 6.2 per cent in 2016. IMF projections only anticipate a slight improvement of 0.3 points for 2017.

Qatar had also kept growing at double-digit rates, at some point nearing 20 per cent, until 2011, but the following year its growth rate collapsed reaching 4.9 per cent and kept degrading until 2016, when it reached 2.7 per cent. Qatar is expected to pick up some pace in 2017, reaching a 3.4 per cent growth.

As for the world’s second economy, China’s growth rates have kept slowly but steadily declining since 2010, the last time they topped 10 per cent. The big Asian engine is expected to stay on this path in 2017, with a projected growth rate of 6.6 per cent. 

Despite the worsening of the figures, the growth rates all these economies show are still outstanding. What some economists call secular stagnation — the persistence of low growth rates — and the tightening of access to credit after the 2008 crisis have both impacted emerging markets, but as Camilla Lund Andersen puts it in the March 2017’s editorial for “Finance & Development”, “younger populations and still-vibrant productivity in many of these countries are driving higher economic growth at home in the global economy”.

Take a look at the table below for more.

GDP Growth by Country (2008-2017, % and average)

World's fastest growing coutries by GDP in 2015

According to the IMF, in the decade between 2006 and 2015, the economies of Qatar, Turkmenistan, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan and China dominated the top-20 of countries by average GDP growth.

Overall, it is Developing Asia and Africa that comprise the lion’s share of the IMF list, with Panama, coming in at position 9, the highest-ranked country from the rest of the world beside Qatar.

Nevertheless, growth there is no longer what it once was. “Output growth has slowed in several emerging markets since 2011—a remarkable feature for a non-crisis period in EMs. Such synchronized slowdowns were largely unanticipated by scholars and forecasters alike,” says a report by the IMF published in September of 2014.

The CNN Debate on the Global Economy (2014 IMF meetings in Washington D.C.)

IMF data shows that Qatar, which had strong, sustained, double-digit growth from 2006 all the way through 2011, slowed down to between 6% and 6.5% in 2012, 2013 and 2014, though it is expected to pick up pace in 2015, with growth above 7%. With the exception of the 2009 and 2010, when it dipped to around 9%, growth in Turkmenistan has remained steadily above 10% and is predicted to stay strong next year, at 11.5%. After rapidly expanding between 2006 and 20011, the economy in Ethiopia has settled on still very high levels of between 8% and 9%. In 2015, it should grow another 8.5%. Azerbaijan, which had the second-highest GDP growth throughout the 2000s, almost came to a halt in 2011 -- barely expanding at all at a 0.1% pace -- and has been struggling since, with a projected 4.3% in 2015.

The economies of China and India, which many hoped would be the engine of global growth for decades to come, also slowed down in the last few years. After expanding, on average, more than 10% a year for a decade, China’s economy has been growing a rate of less than 8% since 2012. It is projected to stay on a similar course in 2015, with growth in the range of 7%, considered by many economists the absolute minimum the country needs to remain sustainable. Even more worryingly, India’s growth, which reached a high of 10.3% in 2010, dropped to 4.7% in 2012 and is estimated to expand only 5.6% this year, though things appear to be looking up for 2015, with growth expected at around 6.4%.

GDP Growth By Country
Sorted By Average %  GDP Growth