East Africa Economic Report

 T hese questions will be robustly answered come the end of this month when Tanzania re-bases her GDP accounting period to 2007. Tanzania will re-base her GDP accounting year to 2007 from 2001. The re-base will rope in new sectors and is expected announce a new larger GDP. Economists estimate that Tanzania's GDP  is between 20 and 25 per cent larger than current estimates.  According to Daily News , at the end of 2013, Tanzania’s GDP stood at US$33.26 billion. Economists therefore estimate the GDP to have been anywhere between US$39.5 billion and $42 billion by the end of 2013. This will be confirmed at the end of this month when a new base year and new GDP are announced. Re-basing of the national account series (which includes the GDP) is the process of replacing an old base year with a new and more recent base year. The base year provides the reference point to which future values of the GDP are compared. Re-basing is meant to reflect recent develo...

THE FAST PACED NEWS  of oil discovery -after -discovery is making Kenya the hottest oil scene in Africa. And investors are trooping in. Not even the specter of a spillover of Islamic extremism from Somalia can dampen the atmosphere in Kenya, where commercial oil production is expected to begin in 2016 . When it comes to new oil and gas frontiers, today it's all about Africa. And more specifically, it's all about the eastern coast, with Kenya the clear darling--not just because it's outpacing neighboring Uganda by leaps and bounds, but also because despite some political instability hiccups and the threat of militant al-Shabaab, it's still one of the safest venues in the region. Six of the last 10 biggest finds have been in Africa, where—all told--there are some 130 billion barrels of crude oil waiting to be tapped by more than 500 companies, according to a  recent report  by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Topping this list are Kenya's Anza and South Lokichar ...

  KENYA is now a middle-income country.   Its GDP is US$55.2 billion, 25 percent higher than the previous estimate of US$44.1 billion, says the national statistics office. The Office carried out a rebasing of the GDP accounting period from 2001 to 2009. The exercise established that the Kenya economy was larger than office data since 2006. Further, the rebase established, the economy more than doubled in the eight-year period to December 2013, rising from US$25 billion in 2006 to $55.2 billion in 2013- a 214 percent increase.   The previous estimates indicated that the economy grew by 196 percent over the same period from US$22.5 billion to US$44.1 billion.   Consequently, the rebasing found that GDP per capita has risen to US$1246, catapulting the country into a middle-income economy. The World’s bank entry into the middle-income economy is US$1035, meaning that Kenya has just passed the threshold.   Although t he findings of the rebasing vary f...