Cairo – Mubasher: The Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) has forecast a fall in Egypt’s inflation for 2019 on the back of the country’s ongoing economic reform programme.
The fund put Egypt’s inflation at 18% in 2018 and projected that it would drop to 13.5% in 2019, according to its Arab Economy Horizons September 2018 released on Sunday.
In its monthly report for August, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) said that Egypt’s annual inflation had decreased to 13.6% in August from 33.2% in the same month in 2017.
Annual inflation for July was 13%, the agency added.
Egypt’s inflation had spiked after the government began implementing its economic reform programme on 3 November 2016. Reforms entailed liberalising the Egyptian pound and several rounds of subsidy cuts, the last of which was in August and involved a 75% hike in natural gas prices.
The National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) previously projected that Egypt’s average inflation would reach 10% in the fiscal year 2018/2019.
In the same report, the AMF expected Egypt’s economic growth to reach 5% in 2018 and 5.5% next year.
