South Africa’s economy has beaten that of Nigeria to become the continent’s largest in dollar terms. The ‘rainbow nation’ regains a title it lost more than two years to Africa’s most populous nation. The new estimates according to Bloomberg, were as a result of the national currency performance against the United States dollar. The Nigerian naira has been dropping whiles the South African rand keeps making gains against the dollar.
Bloomberg quotes the size of South Africa’s economy being $301 billion at the rand’s current exchange rate, while Nigeria’s being $296 billion, based on gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of 2015 published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Both nations face the risk of a recession after contracting in the first quarter of the year. The Nigerian economy shrank by 0.4 percent in the three months through March from a year earlier amid low oil prices and output and shortage of foreign currency. That curbed imports, including fuel. In South Africa, GDP contracted by 0.2 percent from a year earlier as farming and mining output declined. Read more here.