ECONOMIST Salomo says the recent increase in the Namibian population contributed to the country’s reclassification by the World Bank into a lower middle income country.
Speaking to Namibia Business Review on Thursday Hei said the reclassification is not a crisis but efforts must be made to achieve a society with equal distribution of income.
“What we want is to have a population working in the lower middle income segment with equal income as compared to the situation where only 10 percent control the economy. If you remember well when the national census was done we were only two million in population but now we are over three million. This translates into lesser Gross Domestic Product Per Capita,”Hei said.
The World Bank said Namibia was the only country whose classification moved downward this year, from the “upper-middle income” to the “lower-middle income” category.
In 2024, Namibia’s GDP grew 3.7%, a 0.7-point deceleration from 2023. Inflation (based on the GDP deflator) slowed from 6.6% in 2023 to 3.3% in 2024.
“One of the main factors behind the slower GDP growth was a sharp deceleration in mining and quarrying, for which growth went from +19.3% in 2023 to -1.2% in 2024 due to weak demand for diamonds. Population data was adjusted upwards by the United Nations Population Division (+13.8% for 2023), leading to a 12.9% decrease in the Atlas GNI per capita,” the report said.
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