From Bloomberg
Liberia has entered a recession and the government needs to curb spending as the world’s deadliest Ebola outbreak in West Africa has hampered agriculture and business, Finance Minister Amara Konneh said.
The economy has fallen into “recession because of the deadly Ebola virus disease,” Konneh told reporters in the capital, Monrovia. “It means we have to tighten our belts by reducing expenditure to within our means.”
The International Monetary Fund cut its expansion forecast for Liberia’s economy to 2.5 percent this year from a previous estimate of 5.9 percent, spokesman Ismaila Dieng said yesterday. The other West African nations at the center of the outbreak also had their outlooks reduced. Sierra Leone was cut to 8 percent from 11.3 percent and Guinea to 2.4 percent from 3.5 percent, said Dieng.
Those countries each need as much as $130 million in fiscal and balance of payment support and the IMF is exploring ways it can help, IMF spokesman William Murray said. Expansion in Liberia, whose economy was gutted during a 1989-2003 civil war, was 8.7 percent last year, said Konneh.
Liberia has been the worst hit by the Ebola outbreak, recording 1,224 of the 2,288 deaths since the first case in December, according to the World Health Organization. Liberia’s Ministry of Health puts the country’s death toll at 1,263. There’s also been eight deaths in Nigeria, the WHO says.
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