LatinNews Regional Monitor: Caribbean & Central America - 31 March 2017

PANAMA | IMF mission. On 17 March the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a concluding statement of its recent mission to Panama. The IMF statement projects that the country’s economic growth will reach 5.1% in 2017 and about 5.5% over the medium term, supported by the expanded Panama Canal and the wide range of investment projects currently in the pipeline. The 5.1% 2017 growth forecast is considerably less than the 5.9% forecast by the United Nations (UN) Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean (Eclac), which put Panama’s GDP growth in 2016 at 5.2%. In its statement, the IMF also projects that inflation will pick up to about 2% in 2017 from 0.7% in 2016 as fuel prices continue to normalise and economic activity strengthens somewhat.

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