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NAIROBI: African economies are recovering from the global downturn faster than the International Monetary Fund's forecasts, director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Sunday.
Tighter fiscal policies in many African countries, South Africa's slow recession and a robust growth in Nigeria in the second half of 2009 have stoked the quick recovery, the IMF said.
South Africa and Nigeria are sub-Sahara Africa's biggest economies.
"We expected the Asian markets to recover quicker than the African countries but we are surprised even the African economies are recovering faster than we expected," Strauss-Kahn told reporters in Nairobi.
IMF's Africa division director Antoinette Monsio Sayeh said the continent would record around two percent growth against the predicted one percent.
"Our expectation was that this could be worse... So we think we would be a little less than two percent rather than the one percent," Sayeh said.
"It is still the case that 2009 was a very difficult year for the region. The less than two percent comes almost after a decade of some five to seven percent average growth for the region and significant increases as a result of the per capita income," she added. - AFP/de
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